Central Sulawesi administration secretary Mohammad Hidayat Lamakarate has said he is optimistic about being able to minimize his outlay in his quest to win the gubernatorial race in November next year.

His optimism, he said, stemmed from the fact the two parties backing him — the Golkar Party and the NasDem Party — have eschewed the infamous endorsement fee often required by political parties. 

“For a province like Central Sulawesi, I’ll have to prepare Rp 15 billion [US$1.06 million] to Rp 20 billion,” he told The Jakarta Post on Monday, explaining that the funds would be spent on expenses such as polling and campaigning. 

Timbas Tarigan, the two-term deputy mayor of Binjai, North Sumatra, said he spent around Rp 2.5 billion of his personal money over the course of two campaign periods. 

“Of course the funds that I disbursed were not as much as the mayoral candidate; maybe that’s also why I did not play a major role as deputy mayor,” he told the Post on Sunday. 

The lack of influence he wielded is one of the reasons Timbas is determined to run for mayor next year. “I have prepared the necessary materials. Of course, I will need more funds [than before] because I need to get the support of a political party to run as a Binjai mayoral candidate,” he said, declining to mention how much money he had raised so far.

Despite the potentially high costs, Timbas said he did not agree with the suggestion — recently put forward by Home Minister Tito Karnavian and a number of political parties — that direct regional elections be abolished. 

Timbas did state, however, that the income received by regional heads should be audited.

He said the total income he received as Binjai deputy mayor was only Rp 2.2 million per month. 

“That is a very small amount, not comparable with the billions of rupiah that regional head candidates spend when they contest regional elections,” Timbas said. 

The high cost is one of the main reasons that Tito and others cited when suggesting that direct regional elections be scrapped. 

In the run-up to the 2008 regional elections, Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) commissioner Basaria Panjaitan said that according to the antigraft body’s analysis, regional head candidates spent on average Rp 7 billion to Rp 9 billion, with some gubernatorial candidates spending hundreds of billions of rupiah on their campaigns.

A study by election watchdog Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem) in 2010 identified four main aspects that caused regional election candidates to spend so much: the aforementioned endorsement fees, political consultancy and polling fees, vote-buying and, of course, the actual cost of campaigning.

The money spent by the candidates is hard to justify given that governors earn a monthly base salary of Rp 3 million per month, a position allowance of Rp 5.4 million, plus operational allowances based on a small percentage of the province’s locally generated income. 

Based on Finance Ministry and General Elections Commission (KPU) data, the median combined income of governors and deputy governors in the country’s 34 provinces over a five-year term was Rp 14.8 billion, while the median spending limit on gubernatorial campaigns in the last election was about Rp 75 billion. The figures suggest that few, if any, winning candidates could hope to break-even with the official, legal income resulting from their positions. 

But while direct regional elections have proven to be expensive, experts and observers have said that indirect regional elections would not necessarily be better in that regard. 

In their recent book Democracy for Sale, political scientists Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot likened the indirect regional elections during the 1999-2004 period — in which regional heads were picked by regional legislative councils (DPRD) — to a cattle market. They wrote “party bosses and legislators who at the national level looked for Cabinet seats in exchange for their support at the regional level often wanted cash.

But while vote-buying has been rampant in both regional and legislative elections, it has not proven to be particularly effective.

Data collected by Aspinall and Berenschot from 19 district DPRD candidates in Central Java in 2014 who distributed cash payments, showed that, on average, only 23 percent of the recipients actually voted for the candidate who gave them money. Aspinall further estimated that only 10 to 12 percent of recipients had changed their votes due to such payments.

Given the questionable effects of returning to indirect elections, Regional Autonomy Watch (KPPOD) executive director Robert Endi Jaweng has suggested that other methods be considered to cut the high political costs of direct regional elections, such as increased public financing of campaigns.

Following a week’s worth of criticism from civil society organizations over the proposal to abolish direct elections, on Monday, Tito and the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) appeared to be leaning toward similar ideas.

“What’s needed is an evaluation of all public policies that concern many people, including the electoral system,” Tito said at the House of Representatives on Monday. “It’s possible that the findings show that the public agrees to continue with direct regional elections, and why not when this is the voice of the people, but there should also be a solution on how to reduce the potential for conflict and the costs for candidates.”

PDI-P lawmaker Arief Wibowo echoed Tito’s statement, saying the party still supported direct regional elections.

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