Page 156 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Media and Civil Society 141

engineered as any under Suharto, designed to give a symbolic victory to the opposi-
tion while keeping the old ruling party in power.
Critical media coverage might have restrained the ruling party’s manipulation,
but nearly all Indonesia’s news outlets downplayed reports of electoral fraud. Despite
the victory of an opposition party and the media’s liberation, the 1999 elections pro-
duced a partial reversal in the country’s democratic transition through a return to the
manipulated outcomes and restrained journalism typical of Suharto’s New Order. The
electoral manipulations, the media’s reticence in challenging them, and the failure of
reform in other arenas made it difficult to see where democratization, particularly the
institutionalization of uncertainty, had made significant headway.
The transition regained its foothold only after these elections were ratified in July
1999 and the media switched gears, exposing some of the fraud that had compro-
mised the voting and thereby derailing the old guard’s campaign to keep Suharto’s
hand-picked successor in office. It was at this sensitive point that the internal trans-
formation of the media began to have a significant external impact. Another Habibie
presidency, won via electoral subterfuge or collusive compromise, would have sub-
verted both the spirit and the logic of democratic reform, regardless of any progress
an opposition party’s lead in the June elections might represent.
But the subsequent exposure of campaign finance fraud in the Bank Bali scandal,
amplified by the media to become “Baligate,” halted this slide toward reversal. The
damage to Habibie’s candidacy blew the presidential race wide open for the first time
in over thirty years. The contest that then unfolded was anything but predictable, and
its outcome anything but predetermined. It was, instead, taut with uncertainty right
up to the final parliamentary tally that repudiated Habibie and selected a reformist
opposition leader, Abdurrahman Wahid. In short, Baligate, and the media’s relentless
coverage of it, helped set the democratic transition back on course, not by invalidat-
ing the June ballot and forcing new elections but by injecting uncertainty at the next
stage—the parliamentary selection of the president.
One could view the opposition’s upset victory more skeptically, as a fluke produc-
ing a mixed victory for democratic forces. While Golkar’s maneuvering to retain the
executive failed, the final result—Wahid’s win in the parliamentary vote for president—
was still little more than a backroom deal among the major Muslim parties designed
to keep both Habibie and the winner of the popular vote, Megawati Sukarnoputri,
out of the presidency. But whatever the election’s ultimate significance, the media’s
saturation coverage of Baligate was not an anomalous phenomenon yielding a one-
time impact. This controversy that upset the balance of elite bargaining was, instead,
the first in a long series of media-driven scandals, each of which rocked the country’s
political equilibrium and revealed deals and betrayals taking place in the highest cor-
ridors of power. From Baligate onward, these exposés launched an era of politics by
scandal that made the media a lead player within intraelite conflict, unleashing cycles
of revenge and making unpredictability a constant in Indonesian politics, while intro-
ducing new elements of transparency and circulation of leadership.
Over the next five years, from 2000 to 2004, there was a relentless cycle of attack
and counterattack mediated, and sometimes instigated, by the media. Media con-
troversy in itself was not new. Since the country’s independence in 1949, the news
media had often been used for political revenge. Indeed, Suharto’s last minister of
information, Alwi Dahlan, observed in 1999 that pitting people against each other
is the nature of the news media. Under Suharto, Dahlan added, this tendency was
overwhelmingly one-sided as the ruling regime used news outlets “to get” those in