In a year of big elections, tomorrow sees one of the biggest. Australia’s near neighbor, Indonesia, goes to the polls to elect both president and legislature, as well as provincial and local governments. Last time, in 2019, about 158 million people voted – at the time, the biggest single-day democratic election ever held. It was narrowly eclipsed the following year by the United States presidential election, but tomorrow Indonesia should reclaim the record.*
That’s the good news. The bad news is that democracy in Indonesia (and, for that matter, in the US) is not in a very healthy state.
This will be the fifth direct presidential election since the restoration of democracy in 1998. Only once in that time has a second round of voting been required: in 2004, when Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono defeated Megawati Sukarnoputri with 60.6% of the vote in the runoff. He was re-elected with 60.8% of the first round vote in 2009, and on his retirement due to term limits in 2014 he was replaced by Joko (“Jokowi”) Widodo.
In both 2014 and for his re-election five years later Jokowi had only a single opponent, General Prabowo Subianto. Both victories were closer than Yudhoyono’s had been, but still not very close: Jokowi won with 53.2% in 2014 and 55.5% in 2019. That did not stop Prabowo from claiming fraud both times; in each case, his claims were rejected by the courts.
You might think that would ensure plenty of bad blood between the two men, but shortly after the 2019 election they staged a reconciliation, and Jokowi appointed Prabowo to his cabinet as defence minister. Now, making his third attempt at the presidency, Prabowo is doing so with Jokowi’s support, and has chosen Jokowi’s son, Gibran Rakabuming, as his running mate (despite his apparent ineligibility for being under the required age).
This is problematic on any number of levels. Gibran was cleared to run on the casting vote of the then chief justice, who happened to be his uncle. Prabowo is a war criminal who was responsible for numerous human rights abuses as head of the special forces under the former dictator, General Suharto (who was also his father-in-law). And Jokowi hasn’t carried his party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), with him – it’s endorsed Ganjar Pranowo, former governor of Central Java.
With a third candidate also in the field – Anies Baswedan, representing the Coalition of Change, a grouping of mostly Islamist parties – there was initially a feeling that the election could be close and would probably go to the second round. But that hope has faded in the last month or two as Prabowo has drawn away in the polls. Recent polling all shows him above the 50% mark, even before factoring out the undecideds.
People do sometimes mellow with age, and it’s possible that Prabowo, who is 72, has no intention of governing as anything other than a genuine democrat. (General de Gaulle, before returning to power in 1958, famously asked “Is it credible that I am going to begin a career as a dictator at the age of 67?”) But the signs aren’t great, and it would seem a big risk to take in any case.
But Indonesia’s voters are looking for a strong and experienced hand at the top, and Prabowo has secured support from a broad swathe of the country’s complex political landscape. Anies and Ganjar are both polling in the low 20s, so even if a runoff is required (it would be held four months later, on 26 June) there seems little chance of either of them being able to overtake him.
There’s no chance, however, of that translating into a compliant majority in the legislature. Voting there is by proportional representation (Sainte-Laguë) in multi-member districts, with a 4% national threshold. Nine parties made it in 2019, led by the PDI-P with 19.3% and 128 of the 575 seats.
If the polls are right, seven of them look set to do so again, with the other two (plus the Indonesian Solidarity Party, which missed out last time) too close to call. The PDI-P and Prabowo’s party, Gerindra, are jostling for the lead, but the most either can hope for is about a quarter of the seats.
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* Elections in India and the European Union are bigger, but they are staggered over more than a single day.
The World is Not Enough 
Although the western left tries to browbeat us into not admitting it, few people (even Arabs in the PTs) identify as the “nation” formed by imaginary lines drawn by European colonisers on a map.
Zambia is one of the few functioning democracies in Africa and they deserve some recognition for that but anyone such as you and me will notice, however, the strong regional split between the UPND in the west and the Patriotic Front in the east. This is because the PF is overwhelmingly the party of the Bemba language group (we don’t say “tribe” anymore) and its allies, which have dominated Zambian politics for most of the time since independence – Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia’s long-ruling first president, was a Bemba. The UPND is an alliance of southern and western language groups that resent Bemba dominance, notably the Tonga in the south and the Totele and Kaonda in the west.
This is not to say that all people in the various ex-colonies vote along language/tribal lines all the time, otherwise there would never be changes of government, such as a Zambia election produced when the incumbent (Bemba) president was defeated. But most do so most of the time. Tragically you only have to look at Algeria, 1992, when the attempt at genuine democracy resulted in the people voting for the Islamic Salvation Front.
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Yes, the arbitrary boundaries that the colonial powers drew are by no means the least of imperialism’s sins. It put the newly-independent countries in a no-win position; their artificial nationalism was no match for ethnic loyalties, but to embark on a program of redrawing boundaries risked bringing on a war of all against all. Some years ago an NBER study in the US found a strong negative correlation between straight lines in a country’s borders and its political & economic success. (Here, if you’re interested: https://www.nber.org/papers/w12328 )
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