Campaign fever and the corruption crackdown make Indonesia sweat

Wednesday, 1st April 2009

President Yudhoyono may seem to be pandering to Islamists, but the grafters will be running scared if he wins another term, says Eric Ellis

As the corruption crackdown gathered force, SBY’s numbers began to rise again. And the Islamist parties fell. Now, SBY’s centrist and secularist Democratic party, founded just two days before 11 September 2001, leads opinion polls with 20 to 25 per cent support. Compare that with the 7.5 per cent it polled in the 2004 legislative election. The Democratic party seem to be taking votes away from its notional coalition partner, the Islamist PKS. SBY won office in 2004 with the support of Golkar and its plutocratic clients in Kadin, the national chamber of commerce littered with old Suharto cronies and their heirs, like the kingmaking mining tycoon Aburizal Bakrie. But such is the Democratic surge, SBY may not even need such allies. Golkar’s support has fallen to 14 per cent and Megawati’s PDI-P to 16 per cent, down from 22 per cent and 19 per cent in 2004 respectively, a collapse that has prompted slightly desperate plans between these two once-mortal enemies to team up and stare down the rising SBY juggernaut.

Opinion polls for the separate presidential poll on 8 July show SBY in even greater command, tracking at 40 to 45 per cent. That’s more than double the support for SBY’s closest opponent, ex- president Megawati, whose 2001-04 tenure in the Istana Merdeka, Jakarta’s Dutch colonial confection of a presidential palace, is mostly remembered for her shopping trips to Singapore. None of the other 16 or so potential candidates can raise more than 5 per cent support. Conventional wisdom has it that SBY will walk away with another term, and that the September run-off he needed to beat Megawati in 2004 will not be necessary this time around. That’s certainly the result Canberra and Washington want.

Once, the best one could say of SBY’s tenure in office was the simple democratic achievement that he looked likely to serve a full term, unlike his three post-Suharto predecessors. But, stronger now, if he does triumph as the polls suggest, SBY just might get a genuine mandate to conclusively fix Indonesia. Australia will have a functional and reliable neighbour, the dual horrors of Bali won’t be repeated and Indonesia’s victims of crime won’t need to pay bent police to investigate it. And our ‘security’ man will be out of a job.