City gains a reformist governor, country gains an ominous potential
president
The strong electoral win by Joko
Widodo, the popular mayor of the central Java city of Solo, in the Jakarta
governor’s race is being regarded in Indonesia as having two important
consequences.
The first is that Jokowi, as he
is known, is widely regarded as a reformer who was named Indonesia’s best mayor
for cleaning up the city of Solo and who now has a chance – or the burden – of
taking on Jakarta itself, a sprawling, traffic-choked, polluted conurbation of
10.1 million people governed by a maze of conflicting jurisdictions. The city
is sinking toward sea level because of the wells that have drawn down for
groundwater. Its sewage system is nonexistent.
It is a city that Fauzi Bowo, the
ousted mayor by a vote of 54 percent for Jokowi to Fauzi’s 46 percent, was
largely unable to keep astride of. Whether Jokowi can or not remains to be
seen. But on the surface at least, he appears to be that rarity in Indonesian
politics, a relatively incorruptible figure.
The second consequence is a look
at the kingmaking abilities of Prabowo Subianto, the former general, Suharto
son-in-law and onetime head of an Indonesian Special Forces unit that is
suspected of fomenting the 1998 riots in Jakarta that took the lives of an
estimated 1,000 Chinese and resulted in the rapes of 160 women.
Prabowo was also accused of
attempting to crush the East Timorese independence movement in the late 1990s
by using hooded "ninja" gangs dressed in black and operating at night
to assassinate and intimidate the insurgents.
Allegedly rehabilitated and now a
prosperous businessman, Prabowo headed the Gerindra Party and became the vice
presidential candidate and running mate of Megawati Sukarnoputri, the head of
the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, in the 2009 presidential
race that was won easily by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
The Jakarta gubernatorial race
was described as a contest between surrogates lining up for the 2014
presidential race. Prabowo, who aligned with the PDI-P to back Jokowi, is
considered to have successfully brought the organizational skills and financing
to bear on what became a big-spending race.
Prabowo’s signal coup appears to
have been to bring the deputy gubernatorial candidate, Basuki “Ahok” Tjahja
Purnama, a Christian Chinese, into the race, thus mollifying the fears of the
Chinese community, who have not trusted Prabowo since the events of the 1990s.
At the moment, Prabowo appears to
be the odds-on favorite for the 2014 presidential race. He is well-funded.
Despite reports of his mercurial temper and sometimes irrational behavior he
appears to have gained the confidence of at least some of the Chinese because
he is thought to be philosophically aligned against the rising Islamic radicals
who have been given a relatively free hand by Yudhoyono. The president has
periodically issued stadtements about cracking down on the radicals after each
fresh new atrocity, only to take no action.
The rest of the presidential
field is slim indeed. Aburizal Bakrie, the billionaire pribumi businessman and
head of the vast –if troubled --Bakrie family empire and head of Golkar, the
country’s biggest political party, announced earlier that he intended to run.
However, he has reportedly suffered a stroke in recent weeks although whether he
was seriously incapacitated has been denied by company spokesmen.
Bakrie’s chances were always
slim, partly because of the huge mud volcano blowout that has inundated a big
area of Sidoarjo, East Java, as a result of negligence by a Bakrie company, PT
Lapindo Brantas, although the company has denied it. The foul-smelling mud has
swamped at least 12 villages since 2006 and is predicted to go on erupting for
20 to 80 years, displacing about 50,000 people.
In addition, a local brokerage
reported recently that Bakrie Coal, the corporate flagship, may be forced into
bankruptcy because of falling revenues and rising debt.
If Bakrie were forced to drop
out, Jusuf Kalla, who served as SBY’s running mate in his first term, has been
suggested as a possible Golkar candidate. But political observers give Kalla
little chance, partly because he is not from the island of Java, which
dominates Indonesian politics.
Golkar combined with the
Democratic Party, which Yudhoyono heads, to back Fauzi Bowo for the gubernatorial
seat. However, the party has been badly damaged by a long series of scandals,
the biggest over the multimillion dollar construction of an athlete’s village
for last year’s Southeast Asian Games. Party officials all the way up to party
leader Anas Urbaningrum and possibly SBY himself have been implicated.
The next question is how the
parties realign themselves as the 2014 races loom closer. Under Indonesia’s
political system, Prabowo’s Gerindra Party appears unlikely to gather the 20
percent of the votes necessary to win nomination as the presidential candidate.
Jakarta’s elites, growing increasingly uneasy over the possible inevitability
of a Prabowo presidency, reportedly have belatedly come to the conclusion that
they need to find a way to stop him.
The question is whether anyone
wants to align with Gerindra and Prabowo. Although he is reported to have
matured and mended his ways from the time he allowed his troops to run wild in
the riots, he is not trusted. The old guard of the PDI-P, despite the fact that
he was Megawati’s vice presidential candidate in the most recent presidential
race, doesn’t want to make common cause with Gerindra again, especially since
the party would like to see Megawati run for the presidency again.
Prabowo has also been organizing
dinners and meetings with wealthy Indonesians and rather remarkably has become
at least tolerable to the Chinese businessmen. He also has been crisscrossing
the country, meeting with regional groups in a well-coordinated plan to shore
up his rural base. The 1998 events are now 14 years behind him. In a country in
which more than 30 percent of the population is under the age of 15, those
events are slipping into history along with the rule of his onetime father in
law, Suharto, and his New Order government.
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