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 Reformasi rears its unlikely head
With weeks of horse-trading since Indonesia’s April national legislative elections now over, three major coalitions are set for the presidential election on July 8. Despite the fact that there is not a single new face in the lineup of top candidates and that two of the major participants are accused murderers, the island nation seems to be increasingly on the road to the reformasi process that began with the fall of the strongman Suharto in 1998.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono Friday confirmed what had widely been expected, that he had selected as his running mate Boediono, the governor of Bank Indonesia, the country’s central bank, over the objections of three of Yudhoyono’s Islamist coalition members, the Prosperous Justice Party, the National Mandate Party and the United Development Party, who argued that Yudhoyono’s No. 2 should come from one of their Muslim ranks.
Yudhoyono’s selection of Boediono vaults a technocrat into position to replace the outgoing Vice President Jusuf Kalla, who, having been spurned by Yudhoyono for a second term, is running on his own for the presidency with retired Gen. Wiranto of the People’s Conscience Party, who was accused of allowing mass killings, torture and a panoply of other crimes in attempting to prevent East Timor from breaking away from Indonesia in 1999.
The 66-year-old Boediono is somewhat a reluctant candidate, having left politics to move to the central bank, and is widely regarded as honest and incorruptible in a country where those adjectives are rarely used. However, Yudhoyono is making a calculated choice in selecting him because in doing so he has forsworn the formidable political base that Kalla, a businessman, commanded through the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, or Kadin.
Kalla’s demise is considerable. He is the head of the once-dominant Golkar Party, through which Suharto threw the thinnest of veils of what he called “guided democracy” across Indonesia during his 32-year reign. In Yudhoyono’s initial run in 2004, the Democratic party was so small that he needed Golkar and Kalla to head the coalition that would give him the combined strength to fulfill electoral mandates so that he could run.
In the recent April legislative elections, however, Golkar’s voter numbers fell to 14.5 percent, with both leader and party widely regarded across the nation as far more beholden to the business community than to the electorate at large. Although Yudhoyono is hardly regarded as decisive, his coalition’s ties to Golkar and Kalla during his first term meant that real reform of the government, which is too often used as a cash register for businessmen, would be problematic from the first.
In particular, Golkar's demise and the rise of the technocrats raises the question of what happens with Aburizal Bakrie, whose companies provide 40 percent of Indonesia's stock market capitalization and who played a major role, through Kadin, in funding the Yudhoyono-Kalla ticket in 2004. Twice the government bailed Bakrie companies out of financial disaster although that didn't happen in the current global financial crisis when they melted down the stock market in October last year. Bakrie is now the Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare. He has already said he would step out of a formal government position. What role he takes, formal or informal, will be a signal of what direction the new government -- should Yudhoyono and Boediono win -- will take
The third coalition is headed by former President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who lost to Yudhoyono in 2004 after a largely listless term in office. Megawati, who heads the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, chose as her vice president former Gen. Prabowo Subianto about an hour before midnight Friday after the terminally ambitious and hugely well funded Prabowo finally gave up his own aspirations to run for president. Prabowo’s Gerindra Party, despite vast amounts of money for advertising, managed only 4.46 percent of the seats in the April election.
Like Wiranto, Prabowo, the former head of the controversial special forces unit Kopassus, has been accused of fomenting a wide range of murders, rapes, riots and other crimes in the effort to abort East Timor rule. Over recent days, the families of murdered students and ethnic Chinese Indonesians who were raped, murdered and brutalized in 1998 riots that left Jakarta’s Chinatown in flames and hundreds dead have held press conferences to denounce the two. But there seems little impetus to ever bring the two before the bar of justice. Prabowo is divorced from to Suharto’s daughter Titiek, who has continued to wield a certain amount of sway and continues to control a considerable amount of the country’s wealth despite the family’s disgrace after her father fell from power.
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