Letter: Threshold, for who?

Mon, 11/10/2008 11:09 AM  |  Reader's Forum

One principle of representative democracy is that elected parliamentarians must strive their utmost to recognize and implement the wishes of the people.

In Indonesia, however, we see a variant of democracy in which, conversely, the people must strive their utmost to recognize and implement the wishes of parliamentarians.

One recent example is the law on presidential elections, which stipulates that a candidate may only stand if he has the backing of parties with 20 percent of seats in the House.

The obvious motive of the rule is to benefit parliamentarians by making it difficult for a potential winner, in this case President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to stand for election, forcing him to grant prior concessions to political party bosses in order to seek permission to be a candidate.

Plainly, sovereignty is being robbed from the people by grasping political party leaders, whose main aim is to manipulate the democratic process for their own benefit, potentially barring the very candidate best able to win the support of a majority of voters.

Pretending that the rule aims to "benefit the nation" by ensuring that the president has enough support in parliament to govern effectively is sheer hypocrisy. It is an admission by parliamentarians that they are irresponsible and untrustworthy.

Their support for a popularly elected president is conditional not on whether his policies are good for the country, but on whether he grants them lucrative and powerful positions in the government. If he doesn't, they will conspire to drag him down, even if it means dragging the whole country down with him.

In theory, voters can respond to this theft of their right to choose the best possible president candidate by voting in the legislative elections for parties they know will support their preferred candidate.

But that is not a satisfactory solution at all. Voters should choose legislative candidates they see as best able to represent them as legislators, not as proxy delegates in selecting presidential candidates.

Indeed, the result is the worst of both worlds. The presidential election is flawed by the paucity of worthy candidates and the legislative election is degraded by the fact that many candidates advertise neither their own capabilities nor their party's legislative program, but rather the popularity of their party's likely candidate for president.

JOHN HARGREAVES
Jakarta

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