7 - The Indonesian Party System after the 2009 Elections: Towards Stability?

Summary

When Indonesia' long-time ruler Suharto fell in 1998, very few observers expected that the country would be able to build a stable democracy. Most predictions for Indonesia at the time were gloomy, ranging from a quick return to military dictatorship and continued paralysis to the complete break-up of the state. Yet in 2009, just a little over 10 years later, Indonesia stood out as the most democratic country in Southeast Asia (Freedom House 2009). Despite the persistence of some severe democratic deficits—including widespread corruption and continuing limitations in the application of the rule of law (Davidson 2009)—the world' most populous Muslim state has reached a number of remarkable democratic milestones since 1998, especially with regard to what the World Bank calls ‘voice and accountability’.1 Perhaps most strikingly, elections have been widely accepted as the only legitimate means to distribute formal political power, even in those parts of the country that experienced separatist or communal violence in the early years of the transition (Tomsa 2009a; Palmer in this volume).

The successful entrenchment of elections, however, has somewhat distracted from the poor performance of the political parties that contest them. Not many scholarly analyses of Indonesian party politics have been published so far, but the few available works have been mostly unfavourable, to say the least. One of the first sustained critiques came from Vedi Hadiz (2004: 619), whose neo Marxist analysis of post-New Order Indonesia described political parties as little more than ‘expressions of shifting alliances of predatory interests’. Others have used institutionalisation theory to explore the weaknesses of the parties and the party system (Johnson Tan 2002, 2006; Tomsa 2008). The negative views of Indonesian parties were perhaps best summed up by Carothers (2006: 175), who asserted that:

Indonesia' main political parties remain almost archetypical embodiments of the standard lament about parties—they are intensely leader-centric organizations dominated by a small circle of elite politicians who hold onto their positions atop parties seemingly indefinitely, are immersed in patronage politics, and who are far more devoted to political intrigues in the capital than the prosaic work of trying to listen to and represent a base of constituents.

More recently, however, some scholars have sought to counter or at least modify the prevailing consensus on the poor state of Indonesia' political parties.