April 1, 2024
JAKARTA – When it comes to integrity, the February general election is billed as the worst Indonesia has held in the 25 years since the nation launched the Reform era to put us on the road to democracy. The path has not always been smooth, but what happened this year reinforces the notion that democracy is backsliding.
This is no reason to give up on democracy, however. In spite of the declining quality of our elections, we still see some positive signs that tell us that, by and large, the majority of the people in this country still have faith in democracy as the best mechanism to elect our national leaders. This faith is what keeps us going and ensures that we can still reverse the trend.
To borrow a phrase from Lady Gaga’s song, our democracy is “not broken, just bent.” The task at hand then, is how do we unbend this?
Put aside for now the results of the presidential and legislative elections as announced by the General Elections Commission (KPU) last week, and the final results in the coming two weeks by the Constitutional Court, which is still going through the appeals filed by aggrieved candidates and parties.
Going by history, we don’t think the court will alter the results very much. Other than in the unlikely event of the court calling for a re-vote, we can conclude that Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto has won the presidential race with 58 percent of the total vote. He is almost certain to take over from the incumbent President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo in October.
This overwhelming victory, however, has come with a big price tag: The election’s integrity.
The General Elections Commission (KPU) and the Constitutional Court, two institutions which should know better, have already been faulted for ethical breaches by their respective ethics councils. They combined to bend the minimum-age requirement for contesting the election, by allowing Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the son of President Jokowi, to run as Prabowo’s vice presidential candidate. At 36, he was four years short of the then-legal age.
Meanwhile, President Jokowi, whose office is supposed to be another guarantor of election integrity, openly endorsed the Prabowo-Gibran ticket, even insisting that it was his political right to take sides in the election. When he toured the nation handing out cash, rice and other forms of social assistance one month before the election, critics saw this as him campaigning for the pair. His popularity, with most surveys showing over 70 percent approval rating, inevitably rubbed off on them.
Given that it was the Constitutional Court that had given the green light for Gibran to run in the first place, don’t expect the same court, with the same nine justices, to order a revote after it goes through the appeals. The two losing presidential candidates, Anies Baswedan and Ganjar Pranowo, have asked for a new election without Gibran, arguing that his nomination was problematic to begin with.
So, the stage is now set for Prabowo and Gibran to officially claim victory. While they can claim to have constitutional and popular legitimacy, they can hardly claim to have ethical or moral legitimacy. They will have to live with this when they start governing the country in October.
One could easily feel dejected and accept that reform is dead, were it not for the fact that most people in the country still believe in democracy, as reflected by the voter turnouts in the presidential and legislative elections, at 80 and 72 percent, respectively. This high participation rate would be the envy of many democracies around the world where voting is voluntary. The fact that this many people voted on Feb. 14 indicates that they believe in the electoral system and that their votes matter.
Another positive sign is that in spite of controversies during the vote counting, to the point that the KPU even stopped announcing the day-to-day progress, there was no violence when the results came out last week. Police were deployed in full force outside the KPU office, but besides the burning of tires, the protests were largely peaceful on that day.
Yet, the specter of violence was real. We can recall the riots that greeted the election results in 2019 by supporters of Prabowo, who lost the race to Jokowi. This, and the insurgencies in Washington DC in 2021 and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, last year, have set the global trend that violence could be justified in rejecting election results. Nothing of the sort happened in Jakarta this time. Let’s keep it that way, for violence solves nothing.
It’s not clear whether this had something to do with the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, when people are supposed to contain their emotion, including their anger, besides their hunger. We’ll take peace anytime, for whatever reason.
To the credit of Anies and Ganjar, they took the legal approach in contesting the election results, filing their appeals with the Constitutional Court. As messed up as the court is today, these two candidates still turned to it in seeking justice, in the absence of any other alternative, bar violence.
Earlier there were calls for the House of Representatives to exercise its right of inquiry to look into allegations of elections fraud, although this initiative to challenge the election results through the political process appears to be losing steam.
There is nothing wrong with the institutions that were created to protect the election’s integrity. The KPU, the Constitutional Court and the presidency all have worked well in the past. But there is something terribly wrong with the people behind them. They have corrupted the institutions. The solution is clear. Replace them all.
The president is already due for change in October in anyway, but the entire membership of the KPU and the Constitutional Court must go. They have let the nation down. They need to go soon and allow new members to take charge in the nationwide local elections in September.
Only then can we keep the faith in democracy.