Page 155 - BUKU A CENTURY OF PARLIAMENTARY LIFE IN INDONESIA

A CENTURY OF PARLIAMENTARY LIFE
IN INDONESIA

In the Working Cabinet I’s composition, not a
single head of a major party was appointed as a
The members of the minister, making it a non-party cabinet. Further-
more, to ensure that the new government was
DPR-GR, appointed truly non-party, several ministers left their parties,

by President including Soebandrio from the PNI and Leimena
from the Indonesian Christian Party, marking a
Soekarno, were no decrease of party influence in the cabinet.

longer designated In addition to avoiding dependency on the DPR,

based on political Soekarno also attempted to implement a fully

party composition guided political system by issuing Presidential
Decree No. 7/1959 on Conditions and Simplifica-
or power according tion of Political Parties. The presidential decree

to the 1955 General revoked the Government’s Declaration of No-
vember 3, 1945 regarding the recommendation
Election but based to establish a political party. The government be-

on societal groups, lieved that many parties sprang up but failed to
create political stability.
namely nationalists,

Muslims, communists, Article 1 of Presidential Decree Number 7 of 1959
stated that a Party was an organization of peo-
Christian-Catholics, and ple’s groups with a shared desire to achieve their

functional groups. goals as structured in the form of a State. The par-
ties must accept and maintain the principles and
objectives of the Unitary State of the Republic of
Indonesia according to the 1945 Constitution.

One of the conditions for a party to be estab-
lished and acknowledged, as stated in Article 5, was to have branches
spread across at least a quarter of Level I Regions throughout Indonesia.
So, based on this understanding and conditions, some political parties
that had existed since the 1955 General Election might face a simplifica-
tion possibility.

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