TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Editorial: Is Kalla the real loser?
Political maneuvers – are perhaps the proper words to describe what have been going on here at home this whole week
Change Size
Political maneuvers – are perhaps the proper words to describe what have been going on here at home this whole week.
The April 9 legislative election is only a month away and the presidential election will not be held until July. However, the nation has been observing numerous surprises as a result of the maneuvers made by political party leaders although the results of the legislative election – a prerequisite for the presidential election – are not yet final.
This week saw “behind-the-scenes” meetings between President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Vice President Jusuf Kalla as well as intensive encounters between officials of Yudhoyono’s Democratic Party (PD) and Kalla’s Golkar Party following the PD’s magnificent achievement and Golkar’s tremendous loss in the legislative election.
There has not been much told about the results of those meetings, but Kalla’s abrupt decision to run on his own ticket in the July 8 presidential election and quit the current coalition with the PD following Golkar’s Special Leadership Meeting on Thursday, spoke clearly of both parties’ failure to reach a consensus on the presidential-vice presidential nomination. As Golkar has demanded a single vice presidential ticket for Kalla, the PD camp has insisted that Golkar provide alternative vice presidential candidates – beside Kalla – for Yudhoyono to choose.
Kalla’s presidential bid indeed only strengthened his previous stance in February of challenging Yudhoyono in this upcoming presidential election. What was really surprising was Golkar’s and/or Kalla’s willingness to secure the vice presidential seat on Yudhoyono’s ticket immediately after learning the quick count (temporary) results of the April 9 election.
Kalla’s initial stance to run for presidency came in the wake of a statement by a senior PD executive, Ahmad Mubarok, which underestimated Golkar’s legislative election achievement. Mubarok predicted in February that Golkar would perform badly – only securing 2.5 percent of popular votes – in the legislative election. Golkar obviously performed bad in the legislative election, but it was not really that bad as (temporarily) it came second after the PD in the April 9 election.
While Yudhoyono’s camp has been relatively passive regarding coalition issues due to its leading position in the legislative election, another camp of political parties – championed by the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), the Great Indonesia Movement (Gerindra) Party and the People’s Conscience Party (Hanura) – has been intensively holding meetings in anticipation of the July presidential election. After inviting leaders of a number of political parties to the residence of PDI-P chairwoman Megawati Soekarnoputri last week, it was the turn of retired Indonesian Military generals, who were invited to her Menteng residence on Wednesday.
Not all of the actual subjects of those meetings at Megawati’s residence have been revealed to the media, as only one, on Megawati’s camp’s plan to file a lawsuit against the alleged mismanagement and irregularities in the April 9 legislative election, has been made crystal clear. The rest have only led the media and the general public to speculate.
However, most of these meetings apparently could not be separated from Megawati’s camp’s efforts to ensure support from other political parties in order to meet the minimum 25 percent of the popular vote threshold or the minimum 20 percent parliamentary seat threshold prior to being able to nominate a presidential candidate.
As some experts say, “Politics is the art of the unpredictable,” the same principle is applicable to these party leaders, as could be seen from the maneuver made by Kalla. Besides strengthening his own camp in anticipating the presidential election, the Golkar chairman has been aggressively making contacts and holding extra-camp meetings with Megawati’s camp.
It remains to be seen, however, whether Kalla and/or Golkar will completely close their door to talks and negotiations with Yudhoyono’s camp. But again, as the universally accepted principle in politics says: “There is no permanent enemy or friend in politics, but interest”, it is very unlikely that Kalla and Golkar will completely do so. Moreover, if all the surveys on state leadership duets that put the Yudhoyono-Kalla duet as the strongest pair of state leaders really ring true, should the two reunite at the last minute, they may shake and defeat any other combination of state leadership duets from other parties.
However, no matter how interesting to observe the party leaders’ maneuvers, their movements have likely disrupted the continuity of service of the current government, which will officially end in October. It could be seen from the fact that Kalla skipped Thursday’s limited Cabinet meeting because at the same time he was chairing a Golkar party meeting. That excludes the performance of the House of Representatives, especially for its members who will not sit in the next parliament – practically, they have no interest in House proceedings anymore.
To sum up, all the party leaders’ maneuvers have increased the level of unpredictability of the presidential election. There is still one month for all the camps to finalize their coalition agreements prior to contesting the presidential election. In the meantime, it is interesting to monitor their maneuvers and observe “Indonesian-style” democracy developing and growing.
What we, nation members, can expect is that all those maneuvers will remain within the corridors of the Constitution and the existing laws and eventually pave the way to a peaceful and democratic presidential election.
