Page 101 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

86 Chapter 5

eliminate military representation. Parliament, led by Golkar, then spurned calls from
student demonstrators for a reform body and asserted its prerogative to finalize these
laws, including the new election rules.
Starting in January 1999, the new rules that parliament passed included recondite
regulations that advantaged Golkar, allowing the party to set the terms for a referendum
on its own rule. Facing little publicity, legislators debated on less dramatic but ultimately
critical procedural issues whose closed-door resolution would facilitate Golkar’s sub-
sequent systematic electoral manipulation. In sum, through sustained bargaining, key
institutional actors—the ruling party, the military, and some minor party politicians—
drafted a new electoral structure that reduced some endemic inequities of the past but
overall let current stakeholders protect their positions. Finally, in June 1999, rules con-
trolling the parliamentary elections allowed the Golkar machine to implement a coun-
terintuitive strategy of “winning by losing” that positioned it to retain the presidency.
In furthering democratization, a key challenge for the media, as well as other
actors, was to normalize and then institutionalize fair, open-ended, and inclusive
contestation. At each stage, the media’s performance was decidedly mixed—at times
aggressively insistent on promoting fairness and transparency, while at others self-
consciously compromised in the name of stability. In making these compromises, par-
ticularly during the long vote count of June and July, members of the media responded
to the ruling party’s machinations and the complicity of other actors in ways consti-
tuting a critical departure from democratization.
A broader challenge that Indonesia faced, common to pacted transitions, was the
need to rely on members of the ruling coalition to preside over reforms that could
reduce their power or remove them from office entirely. Thus, the first question
for reformers, and the media covering their demands, was not whether the Habibie
administration would attempt electoral reform, but whether current power holders
owing their positions to the patronage-based electoral process could be trusted to
eliminate biases serving their interests.
Indonesia’s transition was at its most tenuous during this tumultuous period of
electoral reform. While chapter 4 describes the ways in which members of the media
confronted threats to their own safety and freedom, what follows is an examination of
their contribution to democratization itself in covering the rule writing and the elec-
tions’ implementation. During this structural change, from the earliest rule writing in
September 1998 through the end of the ballot count in July 1999, the country oscil-
lated between progress and reversal, ending safely, albeit tentatively, on a path to con-
tinued reform. The oscillation reflected an inherent inclination toward reversal during
democratic transitions and showed that, in the absence of aggressive media scrutiny
and corresponding public pressure, there were few restraints on this inclination.

Reporting the Rule Writing
Indonesia’s democratic transition began in late summer 1998, when the Habibie
administration commissioned a group of political scientists, Team Seven, to draft new
bills replacing the New Order’s political laws. By shifting power away from the executive

and liberalizing the party system, the drafts offered limited structural changes to reduce
the incumbency advantages enjoyed by Golkar. This early stage of rule writing generated
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little criticism, and media coverage was largely stenographic. Nevertheless, this coverage

imposed transparency, and some accountability, on efforts to address past imbalances.
More critical reporting began in October when conflicts emerged over the bills
submitted to the DPR. Main points of contention included the number of legislative