Page 136 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Chapter Seven

Scandal and Democratic

Consolidation

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove

that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
—H. L. Mencken, Minority Report

After over four decades of dictatorship, the unexpected election of Abdurrahman
Wahid to the presidency in October 1999 was a remarkable, albeit ambiguous, devel-
opment. Wahid’s win, if nothing else, allowed a new party to take control of the coun-
try’s powerful executive. It did not, however, undo the compromised outcome of the
June parliamentary elections. Compounding the symbolic damage to the democratic
process, systemic fraud had helped the old regime’s Golkar party capture enough leg-
islative seats to slow, if not stop, political reform and secure impunity for leaders of
the old regime.
In the face of this political paralysis, the mass media served as the most critical
force for moving the transition forward. Although the Baligate scandal was a spectacu-
lar controversy that had mesmerized the nation and discredited Suharto’s handpicked
successor, the use of press scandal as political weapon was not a one-time phenom-
enon. Just as Baligate broke Golkar’s lock on the presidency, so a succession of new
scandals would tar all the major parties and unleash cycles of retribution through
revelation.
These media clashes would pitch Indonesia into a maelstrom of factional infight-
ing that, perhaps paradoxically, helped put the transition back on track. The media’s
role at this juncture affirmed the importance of sober analysis and carefully researched
investigative journalism, but also demonstrated that media tendencies often faulted
for degrading public debate in advanced democracies can play an emergent function
in warding off the reversal of democratic transitions. The resulting confrontations
began to shatter collusive arrangements that continued to compromise the country’s
electoral, judicial, and economic contests. As intraelite conflict intensified from 2000
to 2004, the media would become the main arena for its mediation, launching an era
of politics by scandal that marked a turning point in Indonesia’s transition and made
the media central to the next phase of democratic consolidation.

Wahid’s Presidency
When President Wahid began his term in November 1999, little had changed in
Indonesia’s balance of political forces despite eighteen months of reform. Baligate had
ended President Habibie’s political career, but even without the executive, his Golkar
party remained in a strong position. Thanks to its solid showing in the June elections