The Financial Times
published an article called “Five Reasons to Love Jokowi” but the stinkers have
blocked access unless you pay, so I’m reprinting this Post blog article which is lots
better. [Highlights are mine.]
[Another good one is “Meet
Joko Widodo” by Liam Gammon, posted in Indonesia Votes, March 17. (tagline: “No, he’s not the Messiah, but a bit of
reformist populism was just what Indonesia needed in 2014.”]
Here he is, the man himself, meeting U.S. Ambassador Scot Marciel
in 13, 2013 at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta (http://www.flickr.com/photos/usembassyjakarta/8362692573/)
The key to understanding Indonesia’s upcoming elections? The Jokowi Effect
By Joshua Tucker
Indonesians are gearing up for the fourth round of
legislative elections since the fall of the authoritarian New Order regime in
1998. By any stretch of the matter, this is big news: After the United States
and India, Indonesia is the third most populous democracy in the world. It is
also one of the only consolidated democracies that is primarily Muslim — about
a fifth of the world’s Muslims are Indonesians. The course of democratization
there is one of the most interesting political stories of the past decade, yet
one that receives little attention in the United States media.
Right now the big news in
Indonesia is the long-anticipated announcement that Jakarta Governor Joko
Widodo will enter the race for president. Widodo — universally known as
“Jokowi” among Indonesians — is by some degree the most popular of the many
candidates for presidency this fall, which include a series of retired
generals, businesspeople, and party apparatchiks.
[see my handy candidate-at-a-glance list at the
end of this article]
Part of what makes Jokowi
so exciting to many Indonesiansis his political story: even though he is the
governor of Jakarta, he came to this position relatively recently, having made
his political career as mayor of Solo, a smaller city in Central Java. Before
that he was a local businessman. As mayor, Jokowi was widely credited for
overseeing a range of local governance reforms in Solo, resisting corruption
and streamlining the local business environment without alienating the masses
(he won reelection with 90 percent of the vote in 2010). His folksy demeanor
charms many IndonesNEWS.GNOM.ES and foreigners alike, and he can be credibly
portrayed as a relative outsider to national politics.
Yet rather than focus on his personal style, hands-on leadership, pragmatic
outlook, and populist appeal, it may be more profitable to think through Jokowi’s implications for party
politics in Indonesia. Here, Jokowi’s candidacy could be no less than
transformative. But to understand how, we need to take a detour to understand
party competition in this sprawling archipelago.
Political scientists have
long been wary of multiparty presidentialism in democratic systems.
Presidential systems feature a separation between legislative and executive
branches, which means separate elections for the two. When there are high
levels of party fractionalization in the legislature, this makes it difficult
to form stable coalitions within the legislature, and very unlikely that the
president will have a strong legislative ally in his or her own party. To get
things done, the legislature must assemble a large coalition of small parties,
and the president must almost certainly bring members of other parties into his
or her cabinet, diluting executive independence and effectiveness without
subjecting him or her to immediate partisan sanction, as in a parliamentary
system.
As can be seen in the figure below, all of the parliaments since 1998 have been
highly fractionalized. None of this makes for stable and coherent policymaking
at the national level.
Indonesian
Legislative Parties by Seats (Figure: Tom Pepinsky/The Monkey Cage)
True to form, democratic Indonesia is in some ways an ideal
illustration of what happens in a multiparty presidential democracy.
Indonesia’s president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has had to govern since 2004
with a large and unwieldy cabinet drawing from many parties. Legislative
coalitions are always oversized — meaning that they contain far more than a
simple majority of the lawmakers
— which is consistent with existing research that suggests that diverse, polarized,
multiparty legislatures ought to yield big and oversized coalitions.
That said, the Indonesian
case does not quite match the standard description of the dangers of multiparty
presidentialism. Given the challenges of democratic consolidation, extreme inequality,
weak rule of law, and the sheer human and physical diversity of Indonesia,
national politics has actually been remarkably stable, with little room
for immoderate parties. Indeed, rather than spinning out of control, party
politics has tended in the opposite direction, toward “promiscuous powersharing,” where too much
cooperation among too many parties erodes the ability of any one party to
represent its supporters. On the whole, Yudhoyono remains fairly popular, but
his second term especially is viewed as somewhat disappointing from the
policymaking perspective. Many Americans may know Yudhoyono best from the
report on his album of pop ballads from National Public Radio.
Here’s where Jokowi comes
in. His meteoric rise does not have to signify that he’s a new kind of
politician, untainted by corruption or backroom deal-making. (Back in 2004,
that was the hope for Yudhoyono, too. Observers also note that Jokowi could never have risen to
his position without getting involved in the messy business of money politics.)
Instead, it could help to inject some more competition into Indonesian politics
by threatening the status
quo of party competition and forcing a reorganization of the party landscape.
On this note, the most
important thing is that unlike Yudhoyono before him, and unlike most other
politicians with national aspirations, Jokowi did not form a new party to contest the
election. Instead, he is joining the established Indonesian Democratic
Party of Struggle (PDI-P), one of the only parties to have remained in
opposition under Yudhoyono. PDI-P’s programmatic focus has been weakened in the
past decade, but Jokowi’s
populist appeal — which is consistent with PDI-P’s nationalist and populist
heritage — could help to revitalize it. By joining PDI-P, Jokowi also
does not have to build a party organization from scratch, or invent some kind
of ideology or platform for his “movement.”
This makes the Jokowi-PDI-P
alliance a strong one. In turn, because legislative elections precede presidential elections,
PDI-P can use the Jokowi candidacy to build its legislative strength. If the
PDI-P manages to get 25 percent of the vote in legislative elections, or 20
percent of the seats in parliament, then under Indonesia’s electoral laws PDI-P
can nominate Jokowi for the presidency without seeking a coalition from other
parties. That could in turn incentivize a reorganization of the remaining
parties to create something less fractious as an opposition. One can start to
discern the roots of a more coherent and competitive party system under these
circumstances, one less amenable to multipartism and more to effective
presidential leadership.
There are lots of “ifs” in
this scenario. It is a long shot, simply because the structural constraints are
really strong — in a country with lax party discipline and fluid partisan
attachments, it is
unlikely that power-seeking retired generals and businessmen will give up the
parties that they have spent so much money to create. Yet if there is a
Jokowi effect, it may have little to do with what Jokowi himself does as
candidate or president, and more about how his candidacy threatens the existing political
landscape.
*****
Summary
Details of Parties Registered for 2014 Elections (Nation-wide; excluding
Aceh-only parties)
Main
nationalist parties
As of 3/17/2014
Presidential Candidate: Joko Jokowi Widodo, current Governor
of Jakarta
Party: Golkar, Partai
Golongan Karya
Presidential Candidate: Aburizal Bakrie
Party: PD, Partai
Demokrat/Democratic Party
Presidential Candidate:
None announced Leading figures: Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), Edhie Baskoro Yudhoyono
Party: Gerinda, Partai
Gerakan Indonesia Raya, Great Indonesia Movement Party
Presidential Candidate: Prabowo Subianto
Party:Hanura, Partai Hati
Nurani Rakyat, People’s Conscience Party
Presidential Candidate: Wiranto
Party: NasDem, National
Democratic Party
Presidential Candidate: none
announced yet; leading figure: Surya
Paloh
Party: PKPI, Partai
Keadilan dan Persatuan Indonesia, Indonesian Justice and Unity Party
Presidential Candidate:
none announced yet; leading figure: Sutiyoso
Party: Partai
Amanat Nasional, National Awakening Party
Presidential Candidate: none announced yet;
leading figure: Hatta Rajasa (Coordinating Minister for Economic
Affairs in the SBY cabinet)
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