P

resident-elect Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo has thrown his support behind the effort to maintain direct elections for regional heads amid attempts from political parties affiliated with the Red-and-White Coalition to return the polls to regional legislative councils.

Jokowi said that had regional elections been returned to the councils, he would not have been able to advance beyond his first post as Surakarta mayor. '€œ[Only] if it'€™s up to the people to choose [their leaders] can those without money win [elections],'€ Jokowi said on Saturday as quoted by tribunnnews.com.

He added that a representative-based election system would undermine the country'€™s blossoming democracy.

Supported by just two political parties '€” the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) and Gerindra '€” in his campaign for governor of Jakarta in 2012, Jokowi was able to defeat then incumbent Fauzi Bowo, who was supported by a major coalition of political parties.

In an unprecedented move, a majority of House of Representatives members, all of whom belong to the Red-and-White Coalition led by losing presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto, have voiced support for a proposal that seeks to reinstate the regional-election system based on voting by members of the Regional Legislative Councils (DPRD). The proposal is part of the regional elections bill currently being debated in the House.

Prior to the presidential election on July 9, members of the Red-and-White coalition had agreed to maintain the direct election system in the bill. But after Jokowi was declared the winner of the presidential election, the Red-and-White Coalition reneged on its pledge and is now seeking to do away with direct elections, echoing reform policies floated by Prabowo during his campaign.

Red-and-White Coalition parties, however, have said the sudden change of heart stemmed from the recognition that direct elections are too expensive, encourage '€œmoney politics'€ and lead to the emergence of permanent conflicts.

Golkar Party lawmaker Bambang Soesatyo said his party had conducted a thorough study that concluded the direct-voting system had more downsides than upsides.

'€œWhoever wins will [usually] commit graft to reacquire his or her campaign funds,'€ he said on Saturday. '€œGood government will not be achieved because in every regional election, civil servants will be split into the campaign teams for each candidate, whether they are the incumbents or the newcomers.'€

The argument that direct elections trigger high-costs and result in inefficiency has been voiced for some time, particularly by government figures who criticize them for encouraging regional heads seeking re-election to fudge the numbers of regional budgets to illegally finance campaigns. The Constitutional Court, meanwhile, has been burdened in recent years with hundreds of election disputes at the regional level. Many of those disputes were adjudicated by disgraced former chief justice Akil Mochtar, who accepted billions of rupiah in bribes to rig the verdicts.

Akil has since been sentenced to life in prison for those crimes.

Constitutional law expert Refly Harun has said the problem of direct elections being too expensive could be managed better, thus eliminating the need for to implement an indirect-voting system to bring down the costs.

'€œIf the problem is high costs, then there are electoral management [solutions to consider], where we can bring down costs by having simultaneous elections,'€ he said.

Sri Budi Eko Wardani, director of the University of Indonesia'€™s (UI) Center for Political Studies (Puskapol), said the problem of high-costs actually did not come from the election system itself, but from the political system in which candidates felt the need to seek support from political parties in order to secure votes.

'€œThe key is not in changing the election system but in revolutionizing the internal system of political parties to prevent transactional politics,'€ he said.