The Constitutional Court has once again demonstrated visionary clarity when considering an issue of citizens' rights. The case concerned whether it was constitutional for parties to determine not only who their candidates would be, but more importantly to determine which of them would win regardless of the expressed preference of voters. The Court ruled in favor of the citizen as voter.

The immediate impact of this decision will be to remove one source of completely foreseeable but totally unnecessary internal party conflict after the elections. Following the passage of the election law a few months ago, parties and candidates have been falling over each other to sign various contracts declaring they will defer to their party candidate who receives the most popular votes.

The obvious problem with all this sudden concern for voter preference was that it was actually against the law. The foreseeable result of this ambiguity would have been court cases, mid-term-seat-swapping and other political trades and deals, at a level not seen since the 1999 elections. The Constitutional Court verdict removes this problem by stating that whatever contracts may or may not have been signed, voter preference shall rule.

On the downside, party conflict now moves from post-election to the campaign period. In many respects the key competitor for a candidate now will be from her/his own party. Candidates on each party list now have more or less the same chance of winning. There is no longer a list leader. As a result internal team discipline will be harder to maintain.

For example if the party is certain to win one but probably not two seats, one would expect most candidate energy to be directed to ensure they get more votes than any of their party compatriots. If the party is assured of two but probably not three, the same goes for candidates competing to ensure they are among the top two winning votes for their party.

We expect therefore that if the option is to secure one certain seat by knocking down your fellow party member or by working hard together to maybe win a second seat, most will choose the first option. The only exception will be in the case of a militant party -- by which I mean a party whose members actually have a commitment to the party which exceeds their own personal career ambitions. I think it is fair to say that most Indonesian parties are not militant. For candidates of most parties therefore the incentive will not always be to maximize the collective vote for their party. This is not in the obvious interests of their parties as such.

The implication here will be a shift from interparty election competition to intraparty election competition. If I am not mistaken, Indonesia generally aspires to being a country with a few strong, coherent, stable and effective political parties. If so, guaranteeing this kind of intraparty conflict on the campaign trail is unlikely to achieve this objective.

The core change to emerge from this Constitutional Court verdict is that parties have now lost control over their party lists. They still control the right to select their candidates, but they no longer control the order in which their candidates are elected. For the first time in the history of the Republic the parties have to seriously share power over candidate victory with the voters.

The natural response by the parties will be to seek a system that again provides them with a greater capacity to influence which of their candidates is most likely to win. They could try arguing for a return to a fully closed candidate list, but that is no longer likely to be feasible politically. It would be a very brave political party indeed that would argue to wind the clock back that far -- even after the election is over.

One interesting response might be that the parties conclude that offering multiple candidates is now simply too risky. The answer to this problem, surprisingly, would be to use one candidate electorate such as a district system or proportional based electorate which elects two or at the most three people. Historically Indonesian parties have almost always rejected district systems -- preferring proportional systems which lend themselves more easily to powerful central party board control.

The key advantage central party boards enjoyed in placing their preferred candidates in winnable positions on long party lists has now been lost. The new best choice they now confront will be to place their preferred candidates in their most winnable electorates without worrying that someone else from within the party might win instead.

Additionally in district systems, except perhaps the in the United States, intraparty competition over candidate selection occurs before the campaign period, thus minimizing damaging intraparty brawls that would lose a party votes on the campaign trail.

Beyond the political parties other groups will need to rethink their strategies. One such group will be women's rights activists. The Court verdict has just rendered irrelevant their strategy to lock women into the candidate lists both by increasing the proportion of women as candidates and more recently by ensuring that women candidates are placed high on party lists.

It is clear the verdict from the Constitutional Court was a major step forward in terms of empowering the voters. Equally interesting will be how this verdict affects the dynamics of future debates about the country's electoral system.

The writer is former Australian diplomat and an author of Sejarah Partai Politik dan Pemilihan Umum di Indonesia (The history of political parties and general election in Indonesia).

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