T

he people have spoken: 2014 is not the end for Islamic parties. Despite all the doom and gloom, not only did they manage to survive the 2014 legislative election, they even succeeded in grabbing more support from the country'€™s traditionally abangan (less devout) religious voters.

According to several quick counts, nearly all political parties labeled as '€œIslamic'€ fared better than they did in the previous election, reversing the declining trend since 2004. They proved wrong all the pollsters and pundits who had sounded the death knell for them long before the election. The Beefgate scandal that hit the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) a year before the election might have dented the support for the tarbiyah party, but it left the other Islamic parties relatively unscratched.

The new trend begs a few questions: Does it indicate the rise of political Islam? Will pluralism face a far greater challenge in the next five years? Is Indonesia one step closer to emulating Saudi Arabia?

The answer to all those questions is no. Here is why.

Of the five Islamic parties contending the election, the PKS, the Crescent Star Party (PBB), the United Development Party (PPP), the National Awakening Party (PKB) and the National Mandate Party (PAN), only the first three officially declare themselves as Islamic and openly or secretly advance Islamic agendas. The PKB and PAN are basically nationalist parties whose constituents happen to be largely affiliated with the nation'€™s two largest Islamic organizations: Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah.

Terminological confusion aside, the last two parties fared better than their peers. If anything, their success should be seen as a triumph for moderate Islam.

The PKB, which nearly doubled its vote from 4.95 percent to 9.23 percent, is not exclusive to Muslims. Its deputy chairman, tycoon Rusdi Kirana, is a Christian of Chinese descent. During the campaign season, the party touted itself as the political legacy of pluralism icon Abdurrahman '€œGus Dur'€ Wahid, the party'€™s founder and Indonesia'€™s fourth president.

PAN, whose share of the vote rose from 6.3 percent to 7.5 percent, is a modern party founded by former Muhammadiyah chairman Amien Rais that has shied away from Islamic slogans and is now seen as championing pluralism. Members of the Indonesian Christian Church (GKI) Yasmin congregation in Bogor, West Java, who have been denied their right to worship in their own church, for instance, are now pinning their hopes on PAN'€™s young politician Bima Arya Sugiarto, the newly installed Bogor mayor.

The more ideological Islamic parties are still languishing. The PBB, the only party claiming to have preserved the ideals of the Masyumi Party, the largest Islamic party in the 1955 election, will have no representatives at the House of Representatives as it failed to pass the 3.5 percent legislative threshold.

The PPP and PKS survived by garnering 6.89 percent and 6.66 percent of the vote respectively, but neither of them are happy with their results.

The PKS '€” often compared to Egypt'€™s Islamist Muslim Brotherhood '€” had to pay the price of failing to contain the damage caused by a major corruption scandal involving its former leader, Luthfi Hasan Ishaaq. If not for its militant membership, who worked around the clock for the party, it could have met the same fate as that of the PBB.

The PPP claimed to represent the '€œhouse of Islam community'€ but it miserably failed to convince the Muslim voters that it did. The party, fully backed by the NU during the New Order, has lost out to the PKB in the battle for NU support.

If we limit the Islamic parties to the PPP, PKS and PBB, support for political Islam is at best stagnant. With a combined support of just around 14 percent, they can do little in national politics.

If we included the PKB and PAN in the basket, the combined support, 30 percent, would be a fairly significant. But we have every reason to doubt the possibility of a political alliance of all five Islamic parties in the government or the legislative body.

First, they may not share the same views regarding Islam'€™s role in politics. Regarding religious freedom, for instance, they are not on the same band wagon. While the PPP played up the anti-Shia and anti-Ahmadiyah sentiment to gain Muslim support, with party chairman and Religious Affairs Minister Suryadharma Ali often siding with the aggressors against the two minority groups, the PKB and PAN tried to present themselves
as pluralists.

If you wonder if they, for political reason, would create their own axis in the presidential race and field their own candidate the answer would also be a resounding no. They do not have a candidate strong enough to compete with the secular-nationalist candidates like Joko Widodo or Prabowo Subianto.

Their only worthy candidate is former Constitutional Court chief Mahfud MD, but surveys show his election chances to be far below Jokowi or Prabowo. The rational strategy would be to forge an alliance with the bigger nationalist parties.

But then, do all the figures mean anything?

Indonesians may be looking more pious with more women donning fashionable hijabs and Islamic symbols becoming more pervasive in public spaces. But saying that more Indonesians are now rooting for Islamic parties because they identify themselves as Muslims is still up for debate.

The PKB has possibly become more attractive to voters because the graft-tainted Democratic Party has become a voter repellent. Disillusioned voters punished the ruling party as they did to the PKS by rooting for the PKB and the Gerindra Party, which came third in the poll. So it was not that the support for Islamic parties grew but that voters were becoming more rational.

We were wrong to say that Islamic parties were going to hit rock bottom in 2014, but there is no reason to say that this is the year of revival for them, especially the PKS and PPP.