Two remarkably different visions for the
country await the voters
Indonesia
goes into its third presidential election tomorrow since it became a
fully-fledged democracy in 1998 with something akin to apprehension over the
results. Some 186 million people, 70 million of them first-time voters, are
expected to cast their ballots.
Both
candidates are governed by the same set of economic and social challenges.
Growth is softening and the current account is widening. At a time when the
Asian Development Bank is calling for structural reforms, the country is
rapidly building barriers to foreign investment.
The
apprehension is caused by the presence on the ballot of Prabowo Subianto, the
volatile former Special Forces commander who, in a recent interview with the
Straits Times, said that “losing is not an option.” Nobody is quite sure what
that means. But Prabowo is responsible for at least some of the concerns,
making no secret of the fact that he thinks Indonesia’s social ethos is more
collaborative than democratic, and that if elected, he would make largely
unspecified changes in the electoral process. In a 2001 interview with American
journalist Allan Nairn, winner of the prestigious George Polk award, he
reportedly said Indonesians weren’t ready for democracy.
He
repeated those thoughts two weeks ago in a voter symposium, saying that “I
believe much of our current political and economic systems go against our
nation’s fundamental philosophy, laws and traditions, and against the 1945
Constitution. Many of these ideas that we have applied are disadvantageous to
us, they do not suit our culture.”
There
appear to be genuine fears that if Prabowo doesn’t win, he might rally
followers in the streets. Nairn has reported there is documentary evidence of
meetings at the headquarters of the special forces unit that Prabowo once
commanded that military intelligence units and the state intelligence agency
“are involved in a covert operation to influence the presidential election.”
Others
say those fears are overblown, that Prabowo has matured from the years when he
was accused of a long list of transgressions including kidnapping activists,
fomenting riots in the Chinatown section of Jakarta during the 1998 Asian
Financial Crisis and coming close to engineering a coup against then-President
BJ Habibie. He was fired from his post as Special Forces commander for
insubordination.
However,
there are widespread reports of a mercurial temper that had him once hit
another politician in the head with a cellphone and that he beat up a hotel
waiter, according to an analysis – largely positive – of his behavior by John
McBeth in the Straits Times.
He has
exhibited considerable impatience during the string of televised debates prior
to the election, lending substance to concerns about his temper. But the most
recent poll, by the Indonesia Survey Circle shows that Prabowo’s opposition,
Joko Widodo and his vice presidential candidate, Jusuf Kalla, have rebounded
after being pounded relentlessly by a sophisticated and – critics say –
unprincipled campaign that has labeled Joko a Chinese, a pawn of both foreign
powers and his party leader Megawati Sukarnoputri, and other offenses.
Indonesia
Survey Circle is considered the most reliable of the country’s myriad polling
organizations, which often play for those who pay them the best. The Survey
Circle poll was conducted with 2,400 respondents between July 2 and 5. It
claims a 2 percent margin of error. According to the pollsters, electability
for Joko and Kalla now stands at 47.8 percent and trending upwards against that
for Prabowo and his running mate, Hatta Rajasa, at 44.2 percent, largely on the
strength of the last televised debate between the rivals on Saturday.
“For
the first time, the margin is widening with the rising [electability] of Joko
and Kalla,” researcher Fitri Hadi told the state-run Antara news agency during
a press conference on Monday.
The
collapse of what had been thought a walk in the sun for Jokowi, as he is known,
has been remarkable. He had held a 39.2 percent margin over Prabowo as late as
last September when an onslaught of sophisticated mudslinging cut the
difference to a statistical dead heat.
Even if
the Survey Circle poll is relatively accurate, it is still too close to call.
There are concerns that if Prabowo challenges the result, the election commission
and the constitutional court could declare a failure of election in certain
areas, leading to a period of instability and a possible revote in some
provinces in September. The country
could be in for a prolonged bout of political jousting that isn’t going to do
anybody any good.
The
Indonesia Democratic Party of Struggle, which picked Joko Widodo as its
standard-bearer, has been hamstrung by political infighting and spent almost
nothing prior to April legislative elections. After seemingly being stunned by
the level of attack by the Prabowo camp, Jokowi has driven up spending with a
massive ad campaign of his own.
Prabowo’s
appeal isn’t just because his campaign has saddled Jokowi with a long string of
insults and insinuations, including that he was a closet Communist. From the start
as long as two years ago, the candidate, head of the Great Indonesia Movement
Party, or Gerindra, has put on an energetic campaign of economic nationalism,
saying he would wrest resource development from foreign powers, drive up
agricultural productivity, provide the poor with social security services and
stem corruption.
Jokowi
has countered during debates that while Prabowo, whose net worth is about
US$150 million, has promised a wide range of programs, Jokowi, as governor of
Jakarta, has put many programs of his own into place, making a substantial
improvement to living conditions.
In
addition to relatively strong showings in the debate, Jokowi has finally begun
to line out specific programs for his presidency including promotion of health
plans and other programs in a “‘First 100 Days” series of plans immediately
after the election.
The
number of undecided voters remains very big, according to the Survey Circle
report. Younger voters appear to be leaning toward Prabowo for his continuing
call for a muscular domestic and foreign policy and economic nationalism.
But the
business and investing community is solidly in Jokowi’s camp. As an example of
the apprehensions about Prabowo, Jokowi’s strong performance in the last debate
drove the value of the rupiah, the country’s currency, up by 1.35 percent in a
single night.
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