Page 132 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Baligate and All the Gates 117

The contrast could not have been more striking between this presidential election
and March 1998, when Suharto ran unopposed to win his seventh term in a unani-
mous vote by a Golkar-led legislature. In only eighteen months, the election of the
Indonesian president had swung from a ceremonial exercise yielding predetermined
outcomes to a highly competitive contest impossible to call right up to the moment
of the vote.
At the same time, as Wahid settled into the presidency, one could argue that the
bizarre frenzy of horse-trading that wrested the position from Megawati, a popu-
lar opposition leader and the daughter of a revered former president, was an even
greater distortion of the voters’ intent, as expressed in the June ballot, than a Habi-
bie win would have been. Golkar had at least placed second, in a forty-eight-party
contest, claiming 22 percent of the popular vote. Wahid’s PKB had earned only 10
percent.
From a populist perspective, the victory of a small minority party in a series of
backroom deals may seem a shallow triumph for Indonesia’s reformasi movement. Yet
whatever one might say about Wahid’s closed-door maneuvering, the process that
ended with his victory was not predetermined. If we return to Przeworski’s uncer-
tainty frame, this development becomes critical. More broadly, the substitution of
Golkar’s rigged outcomes with an open-ended parliamentary contest that led to the
election of a long-shot opposition leader represented, on balance, significant progress
in Indonesia’s transition.

Dynamics of Scandal
The key development that derailed Golkar’s manipulation and made this out-
come possible was public disclosure of the party’s campaign fi nance fraud. Yet rev-
elations of embezzlement alone were not what made the ensuing Baligate scandal
signifi cant. The country had already been alerted to widespread electoral malfeasance
by Tempo ’s June 1999 exposé of systematic fraud in Golkar’s campaign on the island
of Sulawesi.
80
In both cases, through disclosure of fraud, the media were playing the watch-
dog role arguably central to their function in supporting democratization, imposing
transparency on the electoral process and forcing accountability on the nation’s lead-
ers. Tempo ’s report, for example, pressured the Central Election Supervising Com-
mittee (Panwaspus) to recommend legal action against Golkar. But while some
81
outlets reported this development, none conducted their own follow-up investiga-
tions. Consequently, few reported the Sulawesi fraud, and little came of the case. In
82
short, Tempo ’s revelations, though authoritative, eye-opening, and damning, did not
garner the widening attention necessary to produce a “scandal,” a phenomenon that,
by definition, involves “causing general public outrage.” By contrast, the Baligate
83
revelations set in motion a media “feeding frenzy,” that is, a sudden barrage of non-
proprietary follow-up coverage whose sum was a grande scandale d’État that, in the end,
brought down the president.
Explanation for the different trajectories of the stories lies in key distinctions
between the potential of the two journalistic genres employed—the investiga-
tive report and the insider leak—to produce political scandal. Unlike Tempo ’s well-
researched probe into election fraud in Sulawesi, it was not investigative reporting
that launched Baligate, but instead documents leaked to a financial analyst, Pradjoto,
by an inside source—most likely Golkar’s own deputy chair.
84