5 - Indonesia's 2009 Elections: Performance Challenges and Negative Precedents

Summary

In the run-up to Indonesia' 2009 legislative and presidential elections, very few international observers believed that the polls would pose a serious challenge to the country' continuing process of democratisation. Successful national elections had been held in 1999 and 2004, and Indonesia had conducted around 500 direct local ballots without significant problems since 2005. The expectation, therefore, was that the third postauthoritarian elections would be a routine affair.

But while the 2009 ballots did have a successful political outcome, they were in fact surprising chaotic. The conduct of the elections fell short of important basic standards of democratic electoral performance and they were organised in an ad hoc manner. The accessibility and quality of the electoral process varied widely across the country. A delayed and poorly crafted legal framework, a lack of resources and a dysfunctional voter registry all contributed to the difficulties experienced in 2009, demonstrating that Indonesia' election management processes had performed far less well than what could reasonably have been expected based on past performance. If it had not been for the convincing margin of victory achieved by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his Democratic Party (Partai Demokrat, PD) in both the legislative and presidential elections, the poor management of the elections could easily have become a catalyst for more serious political disagreements. As it was, the Constitutional Court played an extraordinary role in averting a last-minute boycott of the presidential election by the opposition candidates. Its transparent adjudication of results-related disputes after both the April and July elections was the main reason that a potentially damaging period of political paralysis was averted.

This chapter discusses the quality of management of the 2009 polls in four steps. The first section provides some background on the importance of elections for democratic consolidation, discusses Indonesia' electoral experience since 1998 and describes the main problems besetting the 2009 ballots. The second section looks at one of the chief reasons for the decline in the quality of election administration in 2009: the weakened capacity of the General Elections Commission (Komisi Pemilihan Umum, KPU) following considerable changes to Indonesia' electoral laws. The third part begins by assessing the areas of electoral organisation in which Indonesia performed satisfactorily in 2009: political parties were able to exercise freedom of expression; media reporting was balanced; the elections were conducted peacefully; and procedures for post-election dispute resolution were effective.