Julia Suryakusuma, Jakarta – Vivienne, an old friend of mine from Singapore, came to visit last week. I had just watched a Chinese kung fu DVD and Viv noticed the cover. Her favorites, she said, were Chinese zombie movies.

An anthropologist researching Chinese religious traditions, she proceeded to tell me all about jiang shi, literally, "stiff corpses" – reanimated dead that hop around, killing creatures to absorb their life essence. They are created when a soul fails to leave the deceased body, because of suicide or some other form of "improper death" or just because it wants to make trouble.

Jiang shi stories derive from the folk practice of "Traveling a Corpse over a Thousand Li," so dead relatives could be properly buried in their hometown. Families who couldn't afford to hire wagons would instead hire Taoist priests to transport relatives or friends who had died far away. They believed these priests could resurrect the corpses and teach them to hop back home to be buried properly. No, really.

Sammo Hung, a Hong Kong movie producer, started the jiang shi (hopping vampire) movie genre in 1980. In his films, when the priest rested at night the zombies were immobilized by slapping on their foreheads a piece of yellow paper on which a spell had been written in red ink. A yellow Post-it-cum-parking ticket, I guess.

I was laughing till tears came to my eyes as Viv demonstrated how the living dead moved around by hopping with her arms outstretched, and then resting her head on the wall, just like a jiang shi with its yellow parking ticket.

But after I had recovered, Viv's story made me stop and ponder whether this really was all that weird. After all, so many candidates for the 2009 presidential elections in Indonesia are political living dead, aren't they? Ten years into Reformasi Indonesian politics is becoming a Chinese zombie movie. Don't we have any fresh blood?

Let's start with SBY – Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono: a former New Order army general who had been a platoon commander in the 305th Battalion in East Timor. He had several tours of duty there as with many other officers involved in the occupation of East Timor has fueled claims war crimes were committed on his watch. That's right: our "Mr Cleanskin" is a recycled New Order soldier.

And what about Megawati, who now seems to be rivaling SBY in popularity? She's another blast from the past: daughter of the first president, leader of the opposition under the second president and – eventually – our fourth president. Hello? Can someone please tell her we'll now be voting for the seventh president? Time to move on, sweetheart.

And then there's that other wannabe recycler: Abdurrahman Wahid, or Gus Dur as he's popularly known, the dynastic inheritor of a traditional Muslim movement, and in his own mind, of Indonesia as well. Let's skip over the fact that he's virtually blind and frequently bats; the bigger problem is that he could never really make up his mind whether he was a supporter or opponent of New Order authoritarianism. Anyway, he's already had a shot at being president, and blew it – badly.

But they're not the only New Order survivors who want to reclaim the Istana (palace). Don't forget Wiranto! He was Soeharto's adjutant (1989-1993), perfect training for being in charge when the East Timor atrocities happened in 1999. He was also Commander of ABRI in May 1998 when the four Trisakti students were shot dead. I don't suppose that had anything to do with him deploying the Military Police, Marines and Kostrad (Strategic Reserve) to take care of the situation in Jakarta, did it?

And while we're on the events of 1998, hard to believe, I know, but even Prabowo, the notorious former Commander of Kopassus (Special Forces), has thrown his helmet into the ring. Does he seriously think we're going to elect him? He's actually admitted to extra-legal operations involving torture, extortion, murder and the abduction of students, and for heaven's sake, he was the son-in-law of Soeharto! Even the army threw him out, but he wants us to vote him in.

Lieutenant General (ret) Sutiyoso is yet another New Order military man who thinks that being a soldier equips you to rule the country. Before he became governor of Jakarta, he served several years as the city military commander and had 25 years in Kopassus while it was involved in numerous black operations, including in East Timor and Aceh, and the Petrus killings.

True, not all the recycled candidates are ex-soldiers or former presidents. There is also Jusuf Kalla, whose main claim to fame (nice moustache aside) is that he has only been Vice President – and controls huge slabs of Golkar, which, don't forget, was Soeharto's electoral vehicle. Ah well, at least his controversial, foot-in-mouth statements will liven things up if he is resurrected by promotion to president.

The last name on the list is the Sultan of Yogyakarta, Hamengku Buwono X, yet another dynastic claimant. His father was a hero of the republic and a VP under Soeharto, so he wants to be just like daddy. In the meantime he has managed to become a Golkar apparatchik and has been accused of corruption (which some would say is part-and-parcel of being Golkar anyway) by the Yogyakarta ombudsman.

Is zombie politics really the best that we can manage in our nation of 240 million?

What on earth are the political parties up to? They've clearly failed to develop new talents, young leaders who can take over the reins of the republic. Our new democratic system may be in place, but we seem to have severe shortage of new democrats. Where's our version of Barack Obama?

It's all a bit of a worry, really: If our propensity for resurrecting zombies from the past keeps up, maybe someone will eventually dig up Soeharto, brush him down, hook him up to a car battery and put him in the running again!

But being an optimist at heart, I am hoping that good sense will prevail in the 2009 elections and these recycled presidential hopefuls will die quick political deaths.

If not, we're going to need an army of Taoist priests armed with mystical Post-it stickers to get all these dusty old has-beens to hop on home and finally get the New Order past out of our country's future, once and for all. And maybe then Reformasi can really get going!

[The writer is the author of Sex, Power and Nation. She can be contacted on jsuryakusuma@gmail.com.]