Megawati Wijaya, Jakarta – After weeks of raucous rallies and colorful campaigns, an estimated 170 million Indonesians are eligible to cast their votes at Thursday's legislative polls.
With three front-running parties expected to garner well over 50% of the vote combined, the election results will likely spur intense political horse trading in the lead up to July presidential elections, and if held without incident consolidate further the country's recent democratic gains.
Indonesia's democratic exercise, spread out over a 5,000 kilometer wide archipelago, is enormous in scale and complexity. Over 11,000 aspirants are set to compete for 560 positions on the People's Representative Council; another 1,100 plus will run for the 128 seats on the Regional Representatives Council; 112,000 more are scheduled to contest 1,998 total seats at the provincial level People's Representative Council; and no less than 1.5 million will seek election to the 15,750 seats available at the municipality level People's Representative Council.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's (SBY) Democratic Party, Vice President Jusuf Kalla's Golkar Party, and ex-president Megawati Sukarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) are expected to lead the polls. While surveys and opinion polls anticipate a tight race, Yudhoyono's Democratic Party is predicted to slightly outpace its two main rivals.
A recent voter survey conducted by the Indonesian Research Institute across 33 different provinces from March 27 to April 1 showed that the Democratic Party led the polls with 20.9% of the expected vote, followed by Golkar with 18% and PDI-P with 16.3%. The Islamic Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) placed in fourth with 9.5% and the newcomer Gerindra party, led by former soldier Prabowo Subianto, ran next with 5.8%, according to the same survey.
Other polls, including those held by the Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI) and the Economic and Social Research, Education and Information Body, also showed the Democratic Party in the lead and expected the party to garner over 20% of the vote. If accurate, it will represent a huge boost from the 7.5% the party received at the 2004 elections, which catapulted Yudhoyono to power at the head of a coalition government that included top vote-getter Golkar.
The Democratic Party's apparent growing popularity, political analysts say, can be attributed to Yudhoyono's solid governing performance. Nearly 39% of the LSI survey's respondents felt that the Yudhoyono-Kalla leadership team had governed well during its five year term. Over 24% of those surveyed said they would vote for the Democratic Party, while 14% indicated they would opt for Kalla's Golkar, the military-linked party of former authoritarian president Suharto who governed for 32 consecutive years.
Since Suharto's fall from power in 1998, Yudhoyono will be the only elected president to serve his or her full five-year term. That underscores the relative political stability he has accomplished and is expected to leverage for votes at the presidential polls in July. His government has earned widespread kudos for its handling of terrorism threats, witnessed in the falling number of big bang incidents since his election. Domestically his recent decision to cut fuel prices to cushion the economic downturn is expected to win some votes at the ballot box, though others feel his administration hasn't done enough to bring down stubbornly high unemployment rates.
At the same time, some contend the Democratic Party has failed to consolidate its political successes at the grass roots level, where both Golkar and PDI-P have fanatical support bases and could win more votes than pollsters predict. Analysts say that's largely because the Democratic Party has grown over-reliant on the president's personality. J Kristiadi, a senior fellow at the Jakarta-based Center for Strategic International Studies, was quoted in the local press saying that the Democratic Party is more a "SBY fan club rather than a political party".
Democratic stigmas
In comparison, Golkar was first established in 1964 and has strong grassroots machinery to get out the vote. The party is known to have strong support in parts of Java, Indonesia's most populated island, as well as the large central and eastern islands of Kalimantan, Sulawesi and Papua. Golkar has suffered from internal party conflicts, which explained why it failed to win the presidency despite garnering the most votes at the 2004 legislative polls.
This time the party has united behind Kalla's presidential candidacy, though his chances are considered slim because he hails from Sulawesi rather than Java, where all past Indonesian presidents have had their roots. Golkar spokespeople stand firm that the party targets 30% of the legislative vote, even though most surveys project it will garner less than 20%.
PDI-P is expected to win strong support in West and Central Java, according to surveys and past election results. Party leader and former president Megawati seems determined to avoid a repeat of her 2004 presidential election defeat and is known to be lobbying various parties to form a possible coalition led by her PDI-P. Her party stalwarts have been most vocal in criticizing the incumbent government's policies, including the barb that Yudhoyono's policy of cash handouts to poor segments of society has encouraged a national "beggar's mentality".
At the same time, the party faces intensifying internal divisions. Disillusioned by Megawati's 2004 defeat, some PDI-P heavy hitters, such as Laksamana Sukardi and Roy BB Janis, broke away in 2005 to create a new party, Partai Demokrasi Pembaruan (PDP), that some political analysts believe could poach votes from the PDI-P in its traditional strongholds. The PDI-P has agreed to support Megawati as its presidential candidate again, but many believe if she stumbles PDI-P elders will look to change the party's leadership and shift away from a structure centered on her patronage.
Both Golkar and PDI-P are arguably tainted by the stigma that they have their roots in Suharto's authoritarian New Order era and have not genuinely caught the wave of Indonesia's dynamic democratic transition. That perception gained some currency after news circulated of an informal meeting between the two with fellow New Order era party, the United Development Party (PPP), to build a so-called "golden triangle" coalition that would exclude Yudhoyono's Democratic Party.
Those three parties combined, some analysts predict, could capture 50% of the total legislative vote and combine forces to back one heavyweight candidate to challenge Yudhoyono. For his part, the incumbent president is expected to team up with smaller parties to get over the 25% electoral threshold required for a party or coalition to field a presidential candidate.
"A Golkar-PPP-PDI-P coalition may only result in providing presidential nominees, not winning it," asserted Indonesia University's Eep Saefulloh Fatah, a political analyst. "Publicly committing to such coalition, albeit an informal one, may prove to be a liability instead of an asset."
The most recent surveys and polls indicate that around 20% of voters were still undecided days before the polls. These voters could prove decisive in elevating a dark horse candidate, with the PKS and Gerindra Party seen as the mostly likely to pull a ballot box upset. Many analysts have discounted the PKS's chances, but others feel it could still pull an electoral surprise.
While other Islamic-oriented parties have appealed to religion to win votes among devout Muslims, PKS has for this election bid to overhaul its image towards a more inclusive, secular party. In its simply worded campaign advertisements, the party uses slogans such as PKS = Partai Kita Semua ("Party of All of Us"); its recent television spots say that regardless of who is nominated as president, PKS should be a party of choice.
Meanwhile, the Gerindra Party has leveraged party leader Prabowo's oratory skills and populist touch at the rural grass roots level to effectively position the new party as a deep-pocketed electoral underdog. Ratings agency AC Nielsen recently estimated the party had spent Rp8 billion (US$700,000) per month – much higher than Golkar's Rp5 billion, PKS's Rp2 billion, or PDI-P's Rp 1.5 billion – on mass media advertisements on TV and print.
Gerindra's nationally televised ads have set the party apart by specifically outlining its proposed policies. The party is also expected to get a big lift from the endorsement of former president and leader of Indonesia's largest Muslim organization, Abdurrahman Wahid; he recently called on his Nahdlatul Ulama's 30 million plus followers to vote for Gerindra candidates.
Whether the two smaller parties can catch the big three still seems unlikely, but they could place stronger than many anticipate. Academics Dwight King, Anies Baswedan and Nicolaus Harjanto in 2005 published research which found distinct continuities in voting trends in the post-Suharto era, with certain districts choosing similar types of parties from one election to the next. The research found that in the 1999 and 2004 elections, 60% of the electorate voted for secular-pluralistic parties, 38% for Islamic parties and 2% for minority-oriented parties.
Indonesians are traditionally not "border crossers", asserts political analyst Fatah. "The biggest pie still belongs to secular-plural oriented parties, and many parties have realized that they have to market themselves to appeal to this group." Those who fail to make that adjustment will likely be left out in the electoral cold.
Surveys show that apart from the five major parties, only four others are expected to cross the 2.5% of the popular vote threshold required for their representatives to take seats at the House of Representatives in Jakarta. That streamlining provision, Fatah and others say, could cost several qualified and locally popular candidates their chairs at the national parliament and leave millions of voters feeling underrepresented in Indonesia's fast evolving democracy.
[Megawati Wijaya is a Singapore-based journalist. She may be contacted at megawati.wijaya@gmail.com.]