Page 152 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Scandal and Democratic Consolidation 137

a central role in precipitating a major turnover in executive leadership—this time,
defeating President Megawati, the former dictator’s daughter who had reimposed
restrictions on media freedom.

Looking back on the events of Indonesia’s second year of democratic transition,
Suharto’s old party remained a powerful force in parliament even after losing the
presidency. Despite strong evidence of its reliance on fraud, Golkar did not lose any
parliamentary seats to compensate for unfair gains. Instead, the party gained control
of more than a quarter of the DPR. It then used this dominance to obstruct investiga-
tion into scandals that damaged its reputation while pursuing those that furthered its
interests. Other parties, also vying for position, joined Golkar in using these scandals
to bring down the new president, Abdurrahman Wahid.
Behind these games of political survival lay a web of collusive arrangements
as pervasive in post-Suharto Indonesia as they had been under Suharto. The prev-
alence of such arrangements—implicating all three post–New Order presidents,
their families, and all but two of the forty-eight parties that contested the 1999
elections—threatened to stall, if not reverse, the democratic transition as Wahid’s
enemies collaborated to protect themselves and block reforms that threatened their
interests.
The media also played a key role in Wahid’s fall through both principled investiga-
tions of financial fraud and unprincipled insinuations of personal impropriety moti-
vated by profit and political bias. Wahid’s turn against news outlets was a logical
reaction to attack by and through the media and a larger campaign to force him from
power. Nevertheless, his attempted crackdown put the transition at risk as much as
any comparable government repression in a struggling democracy—whether perpe-
trated by Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, or most
recently Recep Erdogan in Turkey.
Though orchestrated by partisans defending the old guard, Wahid’s ouster
reflected a pivotal change in the country’s politics. For good or ill, the new presi-
dent’s fate demonstrated that, in post–New Order Indonesia, the executive no lon-
ger controlled the other branches of government. Of equal import was the media’s
new power, through negative coverage and National Press Council pressure, to block
Wahid’s plan to use emergency powers to control public speech.
On balance, however, the use of corruption scandals for political attack was the
more significant development in Indonesia’s democratic transition. During Suharto’s
long reign, as much as under Wahid’s short-lived presidency, intraelite conflict had
been a constant in the country’s politics. Under Suharto, however, such infighting was
resolved behind closed doors with outcomes fixed by executive fiat to avoid threaten-
ing the interests of the ruling regime. In the new era, conflicts now played out in pub-
lic, adding a much higher degree of uncertainty to their resolution and their impact on
the prevailing balance of power.
This increasingly public resolution of conflict reduced the viability of elite pacts,
breaking down collusive arrangements that had earned Indonesia its status as the
world’s most corrupt economy. Indeed, Golkar’s ability to block a serious probe
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of the Buloggate II scandal by threatening to expose similar crimes by other parties
demonstrated its continued influence. In the end, however, the party failed to negoti-
ate a resolution that could protect Akbar Tanjung, its chair and, before this scandal,
its best hope for winning the presidency in 2004. Nor could Golkar operatives find a
way to remove Tanjung from the party to contain the ensuing damage. The country