Page 122 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Chapter Six

Baligate and All the Gates

Everybody’s for democracy in principle. It’s only in practice that the thing gives
rise to stiff objections.
—Meg Greenfi eld, “The People’s Revenge”

At the close of Indonesia’s fi rst post-Suharto elections in July 1999, the top oppo-
sition party, PDIP, had won the popular vote, beating the ruling Golkar party by double
digits and leaving its supporters confi dent of capturing the presidency. Over the next
few weeks, however, the position of PDIP and its presidential candidate, Megawati
Sukarnoputri, only grew weaker as Golkar and its allies outmaneuvered them on
every front. “Now, as her political rivals dance rings around her, building coalitions in
rooms heavy with the stale smoke of kretek cigarettes,” wrote journalist David Jen-
kins, “Megawati may be in danger of losing the presidency, the greatest prize in Indo-
nesian politics.” Newspaper executive Sabam Siagam warned, “We could end up with
the party that has managed to win the largest number of seats in the house fi nding
itself outside the system. If that happens,” he added, “I don’t know what democracy is
about. Never mind that there will be riots outside. It will mean that the largest party
in the system is marginalised—not speaker of the house, not chairman of the MPR,
not president.”
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As observers noted these ironies for the transition, the government prepared for
anticipated riots, deploying tens of thousands of soldiers to contain demonstrations
and pushing a state security bill through parliament to give the executive emergency
powers to ban protests and seize control of the country’s communications. At this
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point in Indonesia, there was a palpable threat of authoritarian reversal manifest in
the massing of troops, passage of a bill that authorized repression, and continued
electoral maneuvering to block the rotation of power.
Apparently designed to ensure, if not impose, public acceptance of a second Habi-
bie presidency, these developments posed a serious challenge to Indonesia’s transi-
tion at several levels. Returning to Adam Przeworski’s conceptual framework, they
constituted a clear setback in the institutionalization of the uncertainty of open-
ended contestation central to democratization. Indonesia was confronting the pos-
3
sible emergence of at least two conditions, or “perverse elements,” that the theorist
Samuel Valenzuela identifies as incompatible with or subversive to democratization:
the existence of tutelary powers and the absence of “meaningful turnover in leader-
ship via elections.” As Chileans had done in their country’s earlier transition, Indo-
nesians faced maneuvering by the departing regime to “establish the institutional and
organizational basis” for the possible exercise of “military tutelarity over the demo-
cratic process.” Fear of military intervention gave the regime’s incumbents lever-
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age in advancing their own interests. Furthermore, the looming prospect of Golkar’s
continued control over both the legislature and executive threatened to reverse the