Ian Wilson – Grassroots legislative candidates in Jakarta face an uphill battle in their struggle to make electoral politics work for the poor, including changing perceptions of the value of a vote.
The odds of winning a regional parliamentary seat in Jakarta are objectively slim. On 14 February 2024, 2,216 candidates contested 106 seats in the Jakarta parliament (or Regional People's Representative Council, DPRD), 21 in the national Parliament (House of Representatives, DPR) and 4 in the Regional Representative Council (DPD).
Often unfamiliar if not unknown to voters, DPRD candidates must spend big on "facial recognition" campaigns via social media, banners, billboards and public events. The relative absence of programmatic or policy approaches in Indonesian electoral campaigns has served to increase the appeal to political parties of celebrity candidates with pre-established recognisability. For example, the dangdut singer Bebizie Sri Mulyati appears to have run a successful DPRD campaign for PAN and most likely will get a seat despite having no coherent platform.
With estimates that, on average, a DPRD campaign costs up to 1 billion rupiah (about US$64,000), those without ready-made profiles or wealth often borrow heavily to finance their campaigns, yoking them to their lenders or to unserviceable debts. An emphasis on candidate profiles over programmatic politics has increased the cost and transactional nature of campaigning. Parties effectively operate as electability agencies, which has produced a feedback loop with voters. Candidates are expected to fund and offer immediate material incentives to capture the interest of parties and voters alike.
Indonesia's recent general election (GE2024) saw some attempts to go against this electoral grain. The Urban Poor Network (Jaringan Rakyat Miskin Kota, JRMK) is a network of urban poor communities advocating for the tenure and socio-economic rights of Jakarta's kampung (read: poor neighbourhood) residents. Over the past decade, JRMK has honed a practice of forging political contracts where electoral candidates are presented with a list of demands in return for electoral support as one means of pursuing the urban poor's rights. After former Jakarta governor (2012-2014) Joko Widodo failed to deliver on his contract promises and the poor were faced with brutal forced evictions by his replacement, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama ("Ahok"), JRMK negotiated a more comprehensive and successful political contract with Anies Baswedan during the 2017 governor campaign, which Baswedan won.
However, Baswedan's replacement by interim governor Heru Budi Hartono, former staff of the Secretariat of the President and hand-picked by Jokowi, saw an abrupt end to JRMK's relationship with the city administration and this political contract. Unfinished projects remained so or were subject to backtracking. For instance, Heru's administration refused to allow residents of Kampung Bayam to occupy apartments purpose-built for them by Baswedan's administration. This exposed the limits and risks of signing ad hoc political contracts with individual politicians, which was heightened amidst the uncertainty around whether direct elections of Jakarta governors would continue.
After sustained internal debate early last year, JRMK reached a consensus that it needed to expand its struggle and contest elections directly. They aim to ultimately have genuine representation in Indonesia's national parliament and secure an opportunity to shape policy. One member soberly explained that conducting protests had limited impact. The relatively new Workers Party (Partai Buruh, PB) offered JRMK an opening to experiment with electoral politics. Considered ideologically similar to the JRMK, PB, unlike other parties, welcomes poor and working-class candidates. After a rigorous internal JRMK selection process, members voted for their preferred candidates – fielding one for the DPR and five for the Jakarta DPRD.
Committing not to participate in transactional or money politics, these self-proclaimed "marginal candidates" (caleg pinggiran) approached GE2024 campaigning as an opportunity to engage in an intensive dialogue with kampung residents on what they wanted from representatives while sharing their programmes. A primary concern was tenure insecurity and rights to housing. Kampung residents were invited to forge a political contract with the candidates. While PB did not formally endorse a presidential candidate beyond ruling out Anies Baswedan (by one account it disagreed with Anies' choice of running mate), the caleg pinggiran actively campaigned for Baswedan, formalising a political contract with him in late January 2024, with an emphasis on land reform.
On the ground, however, lack of logistical resources, time pressures, and the need to self-fund raise on top of the candidates' own daily struggles of making ends meet limited their campaign reach. Responses from residents were mixed: some welcomed the caleg pinggiran's intent while others were disinterested in the lack of giveaways or questioned the capacity of fellow urban poor to work effectively within the formal political system.
In JRMK strongholds in Penjaringan, North Jakarta, rival candidates from mainstream parties were less ethically or fiscally constrained. The director of a successful fishing company running for Partai Demokrat (Democrat Party) flooded neighbourhoods with handouts of cooking oil and rice, while a PKB candidate made significant donations for improvements to local prayer houses. A Golkar contender was alleged to have used connections with local officials to boost their campaign and the final days before the GE saw Prabowo Subianto's Gerindra canvassers engaging in a so-called "dawn raid", that is, directly distributing cash to constituents, as privately alleged by local competitors.
Despite, as one survey-based study suggests, an apparent unmet public desire for greater egalitarian representation in Indonesia's legislatures, including of diverse class interests, the election outcomes suggest this was not a key driver of voting choices. Current real count results indicate that PB fell well below the 4 per cent national parliamentary voting threshold. None of the caleg pinggiran are on course to win DPRD seats. An initial election post-mortem involving the JRMK and candidates suggested some small-scale successes in neighbourhoods where there was intensive campaigning but also showed how this was offset by disappointing results in areas where JRMK has had a sustained organisational presence over several years, even with communities that had benefitted directly from its advocacy.
The results show that these urban poor voters were arguably casting less of a judgment on the JRMK than reflects contrasting political logics. The voters' experience of continual disappointment at and neglect from elected officials has undermined their perceptions of the efficacy and use value of voting. A common refrain was, "Whoever you vote for, you won't see them again for five years, so take what you can now". One's vote, seen as something "free", has a more tangible exchange value for goods or cash that may serve to address one's immediate needs. It is perhaps unsurprising in this context that among the centrepiece policies of presumptive president-elect Prabowo Subianto is literally a free lunch.
For the caleg pinggiran, the outcome of their electoral experiment underscored the importance of the JRMK's long-term grassroots work. As their DPR candidate Gugun Muhammad said, "(A) victory for us was never limited to whether we were elected but the extent to which we were able to shift the consciousness of even a few kampung residents about how the political system could and should work for them".
[Ian Wilson was a Visiting Fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. He is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics and Security Studies, Academic Chair of the Global Security Program and Co-Director of the Indo-Pacific Research Centre at Murdoch University, Western Australia.]
Source: https://fulcrum.sg/jakarta-in-indonesias-2024-election-going-against-the-electoral-grain