Muninggar Sri Saraswati – In the past few weeks, the media has reported a spate of stories concerning candidates in the upcoming legislative elections being suspected of involvement in various thefts.

Suspicions that the pressing need to fund political campaigns were behind the crimes arose after one of the arrested legislative candidates admitted that he wanted to use the money from his crime to fund his campaign.

In past elections, voters chose the political parties they wanted to be represented by and then the party filled seats at the legislative from its own list of priority candidates. Parties, therefore, helped with most of the candidate's campaign funding.

This year, candidates have to individually scramble to get the highest number of votes to get a seat in the legislative, forcing them to do whatever was necessary to raise money for their campaigns.

"Our electoral system has now become very liberal. It takes a lot of money to finance the campaign, which must be taken care of by the individual candidates," said Bima Arya Sugiarto, director of political consulting agency Charta Politika.

Based on his experiences as a political consultant, Bima explained that a candidate could spend up to Rp 2.5 billion ($207,500) to campaign in one electoral region.

"Some candidates may say they only spend Rp 40 million in one electoral region, but it takes billions to finance the whole campaign up until election day," he said.

The candidates could spend as much as they wanted because there was no legislation requiring them to report their account to the General Elections Commission, or KPU, a requirement imposed on political parties only, Bima said. "This is a fatal loophole that we must fix," he said.

Erlangga Pribadi, a political expert from the state Airlangga University in Surabaya, East Java Province, agreed, adding that with the lack of such a ruling, "we'll never know where the money they use came from."

He said that such crimes were the logical consequences of the high cost of political campaigning as competition was now more on an individual basis.

But Fahry Ali, a political researcher with the state Indonesian Institute of Sciences, dismissed the connection. "I think the crimes have nothing to do with having to get the most number of votes. I think, they commit crimes just because they are like that, like thieves."

He said the cases should be seen in the same light as legislative candidates being caught taking illicit narcotics or engaging in extra-marital affairs.