T

he Golkar Party is striving to clean up its image by inviting the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and the National Police to monitor its congress next April, when party members will vote for a new party chairman.

Amid allegations that candidates for the party'€™s leadership race have resorted to vote-buying ahead of the congress, Golkar chairman Aburizal Bakrie said on Tuesday that the KPK and the police would prepare preventive measures to ensure that candidates did not resort to dirty practices to win votes.

'€œI previously announced that I would write a letter and we [with the KPK and police] will create a system. We can'€™t just do things the way we want,'€ he said following a Golkar central executive board meeting.

After a period of dual leadership, the country'€™s oldest party is set to hold a national congress in April, during which a new chairman will be elected.

Aburizal earlier said that to curb vote-buying he would drop the requirement for candidates to submit letters of endorsement from regional Golkar branches.

During Golkar'€™s previous 2014 Bali national congress, a candidate running for the party'€™s top post needed to get at least 30 percent of 529 votes from regional branch leaders nationwide in order to contest the election. A candidate also had to collect endorsement letters from provincial and regency branch leaders.

Aburizal won the vote by a landslide, prompting his rivals to claim that the vote had been rigged. Shortly thereafter, current deputy chairman Agung Laksono held another congress that ended with him being chosen as the party'€™s chairman, a development that set into motion a year-long leadership dispute that is expected to be resolved in the upcoming congress.

Meanwhile, seasoned Golkar politician Yorrys Raweyai, who was a member of Agung'€™s faction before he jumped ship, said on Wednesday that transactional politics had been a chronic problem for Golkar and the party'€™s central board had decided to do something about it.

Members of the central board agreed to write a letter to the KPK and the National Police'€™s detective department to seek counsel on the setting up of an election system that would be free of transactional
politics.

'€œBased on news reports, Golkar appears to be very vulnerable to transactional politics. [The letter to the KPK and the police force] is intended to prevent it and we hope we can lead the way to building a new political tradition and eventually become a model for the nation and other political parties,'€ he said.

Yorrys also said the KPK and police would also advise Golkar.

'€œThey have their own way of working, their own standard operational procedures. We just want to ask for their opinion on how to prevent [transactional politics],'€ he said.

Separately, Agung confirmed that the party central board would send a letter to the KPK and to the Financial and Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (PPATK) next week.

Rumors of transactional politics have swirled following a civil society group'€™s decision to report House of Representatives Speaker Ade Komarudin, a strong contender for the Golkar chairmanship, for allegedly accepting favors from a businessman in the form of flying on a private jet to help him campaign for the race.

Ade quickly rejected the allegation and claimed that he had not even declared his intention to run.

Earlier this month, seasoned Golkar politician Nurdin Halid, who is predicted to become the head of the party'€™s steering committee, also claimed he had received reports from an unnamed party branch leader from North Sulawesi that one of the candidates had promised the regional party executive S$10,000 (US$7,120) in exchange for an endorsement.
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