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The Largest Direct Presidential Election in World History: Gen. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono Prevails in Indonesia
By Theodore Friend
*
The author discusses Indonesia's "astounding" election in the wake of a series of coups and overthrown governments since 1998 and the deposition of Dictator Suharto. He notes that the newly elected president will be "interesting to watch" and explains why. –Ed.
The largest direct, one-day presidential election in history is now over. The overwhelming choice of the Indonesian people, Lt. Gen. (ret.) Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has won 61 percent of the vote over incumbent president Megawati Sukarnoputri. He will be certified on October 5, after the National Election Commission completes careful count of voting, whose procedures have won the praise of international observers.
The Bush-Gore election in 2000 generated 105 million American votes. Even if Kerry-Bush 2004 were to generate 110 million, Indonesians will have surpassed that total. In the July run-up among five candidates, 141 million voters cast ballots. On that basis, Indonesia, with three quarters of the population of the USA, can produce a voting public one quarter larger than in the USA. This may be a sign of American democracy's torpor; or of our preoccupied sleepwalk with cults of brand-name products. At best, sluggish American turnouts could be condoned as a sign of satisfaction with engagement in civil society.
One does not have to strain, however, to enthuse about Indonesia's performance—remarkable so soon following its entry into democratic elections. In 1998, after thirty-two years of dictatorship, Indonesian citizens, with losses to gunfire and riot, wrested the power of the presidency out of General Suharto's hands. It then fell into the trembling fingers of Vice President Habibie. Who lost the hot potato to Abdurrahman Wahid in 1999. Who was in turn soberly impeached for incompetence in mid-2001. Whereupon the prize fell to his own VP, Megawati, daughter of Indonesia's only longtime leader prior to Suharto. She wore the presidency like a tiara, but never learned how to wield its power.
Now, after experiencing Mega for three years, the Indonesian people have found for the retired general and experienced cabinet member whom they like to call by his initials: "SBY." Among five candidates in July, they gave him a strong plurality. In the very recent run-off, he obtained as big a percentage as Johnson over Goldwater (1964), as large a gap as any honest democratic election is likely to generate. This was not only a decisive election, but a free, fair, and peaceful one. Much more so, in all dimensions, than April's affair in the neighboring Philippines, where the incumbent, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, was returned to office. Filipinos, in being colonized by the USA, began absorbing American electoral processes and ideals a full century ago. Now, however, cheating, intimidation, violent vengeance, and sore losership play overly prominent roles in Filipino ballotings.
Indonesian post-electoral bliss is all the more astounding given the short time—six year—since Suharto was overthrown. Recently the parliament amended the constitution to open presidential elections directly to the people. Wide open. A very narrow margin might in the future give rise to tension, bitterness, or worse. But for the present, Indonesia is moving smoothly into the ranks of large democratic nations; and is doing so with a system more direct than the American. Our electoral college beclouds world understanding of how we get to declaring a winner; and has, indeed, three times produced a president with a minority of popular votes.
What are the prospects when SBY takes office on October 20? Enduring key questions revolve around stability; economic growth sufficient to alleviate poverty; and transparency that will diminish the hesitation of foreign investors to put money back into Indonesia.
Of stability there now appears little doubt. The secessionist movements in Aceh and Papua, unlike that of East Timor earlier, do not have UN or international support. Mega has relied on the army to try to crush their operations. SBY comes from the army, yet has a conscientious component of human rights in his makeup. His career includes two American stints of officer training, 1976 and 1990, and UN service in Bosnia. He will not let Indonesia fall apart. But, unlike some of his colleagues in the past, trying to use blood as an adhesive will never be his first choice.
To economic growth SBY has given more serious thought than any president since Suharto. How generate jobs for Indonesia's ten million unemployed and thirty million underemployed? The president-elect campaigned with an accent on the rural economy, and attention to farmers and fishermen. In August he specified ambitious targets for his five-year term: boosting economic growth from the current 4% to 7.6% (a rate like China's); cutting unemployment to 5.1% (an American rate); and increasing per capita income from $968 to $1731 (which could be conceived of as bounding ahead of a Philippine level and reaching the present Thai standard, while still falling well short of the Malaysian). Achieving such economic goals will require legislative action, which is not easy, and social change, which may be very hard. As the head of the small, new Partai Demokrat, a personal vehicle, SBY will need to craft coalitions in order to obtain majorities. Significant parts of Golkar, the old Suharto machine; of PDI-P, the weakened Mega banner; of PKB, Wahid's party of syncretist Islam; and small Islamist-clean government parties will all be candidates to help steer Indonesia's politico-administrative momentum.
Is there truly a momentum? Bureaucracy is by definition a drag. But SBY's margin of victory is the first decisive electoral mandate in Indonesian history. He has a chance actually to govern, as distinct from Suharto's long oppressive rule and Mega's short depressing reign. As a sign that SBY knew that this opportunity might open up, he refrained from naming a cabinet in advance of the balloting, contrary to the advice of those who thought that doing so would be an election tactic necessary to win. SBY has now won big. He owes little. Let him change Indonesia.
But changing Indonesia may be like ordering a jungle to become the Tuileries Gardens. How to change Indonesia? One word may suggest the deeper problems that hold this nation back from becoming a South Korea or a Taiwan, where electoral and economic phenomena have fused since 1988 to make for strong modern societies. The word is transparency. Its opposites—the devious, the obscure, the opaque—are all resistant parts of a refined Javanese culture which has affected other and smaller segments that help make up the national political culture. An insane Javanese insistence on seemly harmony and non-embarrassment actually results in a mad gallop of behavior that is clumsy, obtuse and corrupt. (Indonesia, the fourth largest population in the world, is fourth worst in the world in Transparency International's global index of perceived corruption.) Can SBY illuminate this black hole by personal example and direction? He is no Ataturk- neither a white horse leader nor a charismatic agent of cultural change. His horse is gray. His goals will be modest.
But he won big. He should be interesting to watch. The viewer should not peer at his coming administration through the spectacles of anti-terrorism, which would distort the prime focus of his nation's needs. Indonesia indeed has some native-born and Afghanistan-inspired terrorists, who have in the last two years set off bombs against three Western targets (while killing chiefly Indonesians). SBY understands this vastly better than his predecessors in six years of "Reformasi," and he will contend with it professionally. In the Indonesian election, however, terrorism was not an issue. Indonesians were concerned over employment, price levels, and pay levels; and the candidates responded. SBY understands current American strategic priorities, and maybe even our international political rhetoric, with its numbing monomania on some subjects. But he also knew that he could not get in the international game unless he were nationally elected by Indonesians. He now arrives better equipped to play intelligently on both fields than any president since the nation state was formed.
SBY must attract foreign direct investment, which has been negative for six years. He must try to reform courts that are poisonously indifferent to justice. (There are billions in anti-corruption cases on file in the Attorney General's office, a well-positioned friend tells me, but too often they wait for million-dollar ignitions to get them moving. Attorneys and judges then collude in checkbook justice.) He must cope with an army which he knows well, whose intelligence apparatus brought about the expulsion from Indonesia of Sydney Jones of the International Crisis Group, despite or because of the fact that she has done the world's best research on the terroristic Jemaah Islamiyah. The same army has produced other retired generals like Tomy Winata, an entrepreneurial operator whose thugs attacked the offices of TEMPO, the leading weekly magazine, and whose informal array of influences apparently pressured a court into sentencing TEMPO's editor to a year in jail on alleged slander of Winata, treated as a criminal charge. In a society bedeviled by phenomena like these, religious terrorism is a minor concern.
Indonesia is a very large country. To become a great nation, it must reduce its serious deficits in transparency. SBY has the credentials to improve life in Indonesia by the standard measures of political economy. His most profound challenge, nevertheless, is to change this more subtle index. Where there is darkness, he must let in light.
September 27, 2004
Endnotes
Note *: Theodore Friend is a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and author of Indonesian Destinies (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003). Back