Page 265 - BUKU A CENTURY OF PARLIAMENTARY LIFE IN INDONESIA

A CENTURY OF PARLIAMENTARY LIFE
IN INDONESIA

The 2009 election had also given new nuances to
the candidates for members of the DPR who were
participating in the contest. The most prominent
thing was the increasingly long list of legislative
The idea of holding candidates from among celebrities.

elections with a Another thing that marked the 2009 election was
parliamentary the determination of the members of the DPR as

threshold system was the result of the election with a threshold or a
parliamentary threshold. A total of 560 members
an effort to strengthen of the DPR were elected from nine parties who

the party system by managed to pass the minimum threshold of 2.5
percent of the vote.
simplifying the number

of parties through This was the first time that Indonesia held a
general election with a voter threshold system,
democratic systems and so that parties that failed to reach the threshold

regulations. could not pass their members to Senayan as rep-
resentatives of the people, even though individu-
ally they were able to obtain sufficient votes in
their constituencies.

The idea of holding elections with a parliamen-
tary threshold system was an effort to strengthen
the party system by simplifying the number of parties through demo-
cratic systems and regulations. This regulation was contained in Law
Number 10 of 2008 concerning General Elections for Members of the
House of Representatives, Regional Representative Council, and Regio-
nal People’s Representative Council.

Regarding the parliamentary threshold, regulations in Indonesia pro-
vided equal opportunities in the political field for men and women. The
implementation of the regulations was guaranteed in the 1945 Constitu-
tion as stipulated in Article 27 paragraph 1.

Reflecting on the 2004 general election, which showed that of the 14 po-
litical parties that had more than 30 percent of women legislative can-
didates, only three political parties received more than 3 percent of the
votes, namely PKS, PKB, and PAN. For the other 11 political parties, they
were new parties with small votes, so they did not automatically become
participants in the 2009 General Election in relation to the electoral
threshold (ET) stipulation.

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