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House passes regional elections bill, scraps direct voting
Jakarta Globe - September 26, 2014
The House of Representatives voted in the early hours of Friday 226-135 in favor of passing a bill that takes away people's right to vote for mayors, district heads and governors, and gives it instead to regional legislatures.
The parties trying to retain direct elections had gone into Thursday afternoon's plenary session buoyed by statements of support from President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's Democratic Party, which, with 148 out of 560 House seats, held the balance of power.
The Democrats, though, tacked on a conditional 10-point list of measures for improving the administration of regional elections. These included a proposal to hold all regional elections concurrently, to save costs; and to make regional governments, rather than the central government, pay for them.
The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), the National Awakening Party (PKB) and the People's Conscience Party (Hanura) agreed to the terms after four hours of intense lobbying, believing the Democrats were serious about wanting to keep direct regional elections.
Their opponents, however, kept interrupting the plenary session and argued that the 10 conditions were not in line with two options agreed on during earlier lobbying: a simple choice between keeping direct elections or having regional leaders picked by legislatures.
Dropping the bomb
The session was adjourned close to midnight, and more lobbying ensued. But when the session resumed, the Democrats dropped their bomb: they refused to take part in the vote.
"With the 10 conditions being rejected, we have decided to remain neutral," Benny K. Harman, a Democrat legislator, told the House. "We're not taking part in the vote. The Democratic Party has decided to walk out of this plenary session."
With that, the biggest party in the House abandoned what was arguably one of the most important issues to come before the legislature, and leaving its erstwhile allies, in particular the PDI-P, deeply disappointed and completely outnumbered.
Yasona Laoly, a PDI-P legislator, told the House that he believed the Democrats had never been serious about supporting direct regional elections to begin with, and only pretended to do so in order as an image-building exercise.
That chimes with independent observers' views that Yudhoyono's party, knowing that its 10-point plan would never be accepted, put it forward anyway as an "exit strategy" to mask the fact that it was the president's own administration that drafted the bill in the first place.
Despite Laoly's impassioned remonstrations, the vote went ahead, with 226 legislators in favor of the bill and 135 against. Six of the latter were Democrat legislators who chose not to walk out, including Gede Pasek Suardika, who has fallen out of favor with Yudhoyono and the other top Democrats for his close ties to Anas Urbaningrum, the former Democrat chairman whom Yudhoyono ousted last year amid corruption allegations.
Anas was on Wednesday sentenced to eight years in the corruption case, in which witnesses have also implicated Yudhoyono, his son, Edhie Baskoro, and his wife, Ani.
Also voting in favor of direct elections were 11 members of the Golkar Party, which has for several months now been riven into camps loyal to the current chairman, Aburizal Bakrie, and those supporting his predecessor, Jusuf Kalla, the vice president-elect to Joko Widodo, the president-elect from the PDI-P.
Reforms for nothing
The vote, and subsequent passage of the bill, brings to an end an experiment with democracy that began with the passage in 2004 of a bill stipulating direct elections for regional heads.
It also throws the country back to a system of choosing local leaders that prevailed under the autocratic regime of the late dictator Suharto.
Before 1974, regional leaders were appointed by the central government. In 1974, Suharto enacted a law that gave him sole authority to appoint whoever he wanted as governor, district chief or mayor, with the local legislature simply serving as a rubber stamp assembly.
In Jakarta, for instance, governors in the pre-direct election era, were always chosen from among the former commanders of the Jakarta military command. In other provinces, the posts went to former generals and members of the political elite. The entire process, from setting the criteria for nomination to appointment, was far from transparent or accountable.
Despite their bruising loss in Friday's vote, the proponents of direct elections can still challenge the newly passed law at the Constitutional Court on the grounds that giving power to local legislatures to appoint regional leaders is unconstitutional.
Several pro-democracy and anti-corruption watchdogs have already said they will immediately seek a judicial review of the legislation if passed.
Joko had earlier on Thursday the day acknowledged that while direct elections could be costly, as those in favor of the bill argued, scrapping them would be a serious setback for Indonesia's flourishing democracy.
Joko said the cost issue could be tackled through proper planning and simplified procedures. "We can stage regional elections all at once. We can conduct an audit to determine costs that can be made more efficient," he said.
Joko added he believed that the benefits of direct elections outweighed the costs. "If [regional leaders] are elected directly, they will pay more attention to the people's [aspirations]. They must ensure people's needs are met," he said.
Some 81 percent of Indonesians are in favor of being allowed to vote directly for regional leaders, according to the results of a recent poll by the Indonesian Survey Circle (LSI).
Streamlining the process
Siti Zuhro, a senior political researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), conceded that giving local legislatures the power to appoint regional leaders was simpler and less costly than holding direct elections.
But she warned that the outcome would carry little legitimacy among the public and would open the floodgate for corruption and the establishment of a political oligarchy.
But Home Affairs Minister Gamawan Fauzi, whose ministry drafted the bill, argues that it is direct elections that paved the way to corruption, citing numerous cases of candidates being compelled to embezzle public funds to repay their campaign costs. Gamawan pointed out that a total of 318 regional leaders were currently behind bars, facing trial or else under investigation for corruption.
Siti agreed that direct elections may have done little to eliminate corruption in Indonesia, and even created more problems like high costs and conflicts between rival supporters, but said that they were nonetheless a step in the right direction for Indonesia's democracy. "What we need is to increase the quality of elections," she said.
Source: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/house-passes-regional-elections-bill-scraps-direct-voting/.
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