Carlos Paath – Election fever has gripped the political establishment as parties busy themselves with finding presidential candidates – but the bug has conspicuously not spread to the nation's Islamic parties.
The Democratic Party recently kicked off its much-ballyhooed convention to pick a candidate, while the Golkar Party and the People's Conscience Party (Hanura) have already named their respective chairmen as their candidates.
The opposition Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) appears increasingly certain to back Jakarta Governor Joko Widodo, the clear frontrunner according to most polls, and the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra) continues to try building support for its chief patron, Prabowo Subianto.
By contrast, none of the five Islamic parties eligible to contest the elections has put forward a serious candidate. The problem, analysts say, is multi-faceted and to a large extent of the parties' own making.
For a start, says Ray Rangkuti, director of the Indonesian Civic Network (Lima), the parties, though nominally sharing the same broad religious ideology, are fractured units with no unifying figure.
The United Development Party (PPP), for instance, is the country's oldest Islamic party, but shares little with the newer National Mandate Party (PAN), which espouses a more moderate platform.
"It's almost impossible to find a time when these parties were united or formed a coalition. And there's no one who can unify them now," Ray said on Monday.
In addition to their differences with each other, some of the parties are wracked by internal strife. The National Awakening Party (PKB), most notably, continues to be riven between those supporting its original founders and those loyal to the current chairman, Muhaimin Iskandar.
The Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), the biggest of the five, is also dealing with a similar rift while reeling from a massive corruption scandal that has seen its former president dragged into court, with more members looking set to follow.
Preaching to the choir
Even if they could muster the effort to unite or form a coalition, the Islamic parties would stand little chance against the nationalist party candidates, particularly Joko, if they stick to their stilted and increasingly old-fashioned voter engagement method of moralizing, Ray said.
"Taking on Joko will require more than just ideological slogans. He's already shown in the Jakarta gubernatorial election last year how he can defeat such jargon," he said.
He added that by continuing to tout their religious-based platform, the parties were quite literally preaching to the choir and not attracting more voters.
If anything, he warned, the moralizing would cost the parties valuable support, leaving them with a combined 20 percent of votes at the most in the legislative election next April.
The same five parties, including the Crescent Star Party (PBB), won just under 26 percent of votes in the 2009 election.
"Joko is already rating above [20 percent] in the polls. And that's just on his own. Obviously he'll get more votes if he teams up with a running mate who is popular in the Islamic community," Ray said.
Said Salahuddin, coordinator of the group Public Synergy for Indonesian Democracy (Sigma), agreed that even with a united effort, the Islamic parties would not be able to match Joko's popularity.
"Even if they formed a coalition and nominated one of their chairmen to be their candidate, I doubt he would be able to compete against Joko," he said.
Voters, he went on, had grown tired of the dichotomy between Islamic-based and nationalist parties, and would turn out to vote for the individual who best met their aspirations, regardless of the party nominating them.
"Voters are looking for a leader who is clean, honest, has a good track record and is down-to-earth," Said added. "For them, that's far more important in determining their decision than whether the candidate comes from an Islamic or a nationalist party."
Coalition of the faithful
Senior officials from Islamic parties say they are currently working toward building a coalition, calling it their only chance to be eligible for nominating a presidential candidate next year.
Only parties or coalitions that win a minimum of 20 percent of seats at the House of Representatives in April's legislative poll can go on to nominate a candidate for the presidential ballot in July.
"The plan for all the Islamic parties to get together has been around for a long time, but there hasn't been any lobbying yet to that effect," Hasrul Azwar, a legislator from the PPP, said last week.
"Now the plan is back on the table, but there's still nothing concrete. We need to see how each Islamic party fares in the legislative election [before deciding whether to form a coalition], because that's the basis for determining how we proceed in the presidential election."
He added he was confident that by presenting a united front, the Islamic parties could defeat the nationalist parties, and said the PPP would seek to be the driving force behind any future coalition.
B.M. Wibowo, the secretary general of the PBB, also praised the idea, which was first mooted by the PKS. "In 2014 and after, the requirements for nominating a presidential candidate will be quite stringent, and all parties are expected to go into coalitions to be able to comply, whether Islamic or not," he said.
Others, however, have shot down the idea of an Islamic coalition. Hatta Rajasa, the PAN chairman, argued that such a coalition did not fit with the notion of Indonesia as a pluralist state, while the PPP said there should be no distinction made between Islamic and nationalist parties.
Theoretically extraordinary
Siti Zuhro, a political analyst from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), said that while an Islamic-based coalition would in theory be a considerable force to contend with, in reality it would likely never materialize.
"They just don't have a history of joining forces and standing behind a common candidate," she said. "The question now is, are these parties at the point where they can form an effective coalition and unite behind a single candidate? If that were to happen, it would be extraordinary."
Jazuli Juwaini, a legislator from the PKS, conceded that the idea of bringing the Islamic parties together would be difficult to implement because each party would strive to wield control over the others.
"The key to making it easy is for all the parties to put their egos aside," he said. "The idea of uniting all Islamic parties is actually quite a good one. It would be the ideal solution and it must be carried out."
Ahmad Norma, an expert on political Islam at Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic University in Yogyakarta, said the parties needed to radically change how they engaged with voters if they were to remain relevant in 2014 and beyond.
He listed their three main problems as their inability to grow their support base, their pursuit of unpopular policies, and their reluctance to put forward respected Islamic figures for key posts.
He also said that because they clung to a moralistic and religious viewpoint, they often overlooked economic and development-based solutions to problems such as poverty and unemployment.