Sahil Mahtani – In the parlor game of flavor-of-the-month economics, Indonesia is doing rather well. It offers, as usual, a heaving population on the cusp of mass consumption, and, more recently, impeccable economic stability amid distant European conflagrations.
Don't say it too loudly, but the out-performance has been mostly accidental. The consumer boom was the gift of an economy that could no longer delever – total banking system assets had been falling since 1999 and the credit cycle was bound by the laws of mathematics to turn. A commodity binge in East Asia is also trickling down to a tropicalized and satiated citizenry. But Indonesia tends to get credit for political stability.
"If anybody would have asked myself and many others in '98 or '99 whether or not Indonesia was going to Balkanize or disintegrate, it would have been tough to disagree," the country's investor relations chief, Gita Wirjawan, recently told US talk show host Charlie Rose. And it's true – the Indonesian elections in 1999 and 2004 were notable for their order, transparency and legitimacy.
How alarming then that the country's political stability is being re-evaluated, at least by one long-time observer. In a recent analysis of the 2009 elections, Adam Schmidt, the Indonesia head of the International Foundations for Electoral Systems, writes that the contest was marred by significant chaos and a lack of transparency, and that it would have triggered larger issues if President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's margin of victory had not been so convincing. The post-Yudhoyono era is likely to yield closer outcomes that will probably rock the boat sooner rather than later.
The most contentious issue in 2009 was voter registry. Wide-scale omission of eligible voters and misrecorded details disenfranchised anywhere from "hundreds of thousands of Indonesians to tens of millions," Schmidt says. The losing candidates filed a complaint with the Constitutional Court, which dismissed calls for a re-run because of Yudhoyono's wide margin of victory. A closer result would have exposed the judges to greater public scrutiny, politicizing the issue, paralyzing politics and calling into question the contest's legitimacy.
A second clue of 2009's chaos was the large number of invalid votes cast – around 14.4 percent of the total (compared with 8.8 percent in 2004.) Invalid votes exceeded those received by the third highest-ranking party (the 14 percent of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, PDI-P), and were only slightly below the votes cast for the second-place party (the Golkar Party's 14.5 percent).
Voters were flummoxed by the electoral commission's decree to mark the ballot paper with a pen rather than punching a hole in the ballot paper. Though a relatively minor change, the commission chose to maintain a rigid interpretation of voter intent that disqualified a large number of votes. This may happen again.
Finally, the vote-counting process was not as transparent as it should have been. At the polling station level, things worked fine, but the process by which the results reached the next administrative level were opaque. Schmidt noticed that many of the forms had been crossed out and re-entered at various stages and that this was not really explained. Manipulation? Certainly some candidates for the legislative elections thought so, and complained that the final tab did not reflect results reported by polling stations.
Many will dismiss these concerns as quibbles – most will never have even heard of them. And it's not wrong to say that the bigger story was the massive voter turnout in a peaceful poll marked by lively political exchanges. But to what extent were major flaws covered up by Yudhoyono's thumping victory? Surely it is worrying that, according to at least this one account, 2009 fell short of many of the same voting standards that had been achieved in 2004. A prolonged, disputed outcome in 2014 could turn procedural wobbles into a bigger political crisis.
[Sahil Mahtani is a management consultant and writer based in Jakarta.]