Poll positions
before they get better,” he noted, adding that “fundamental change and reform may have to come from another major political crisis”.
THE EXCLUSIVE ELECTION?
Results from local elections in Indonesia late last month indicated that candidates backed by the current ruling coalition could win in West and Central Java, key battlegrounds for the 2019 presidential campaign with nearly 40% of all eligible voters.
Polls were held on June 27 in 171 regions that are home to 152 million voters. Exit polls from Java seemed to show President Joko Widodo in a stronger position to win in 2019 but some observers say he would still face a tough re-election fight as the slim margins of victory will be a concern.
The West Java result “suggests that the opponents of the Widodo administration in the province remain fairly strong”, Bastiaan Scherpen, an analyst at Jakarta-based Concord Consulting, told Nikkei Asian Review last month.
“I suspect that last-minute activism by Islamist-oriented voters, especially on social media, played a role.”
In West Java, Gerindra-backed Sudrajat took almost 30% of the votes when earlier polls estimated his support at just 5-10%. The Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra), led by former army general Prabowo Subianto, is the main opposition to President Widodo’s Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P).
With strong votes for opposition candidates in Java, Mr Widodo is expected to “put more emphasis on increasing his Muslim credentials in order to be better accepted among the public, especially the public in western parts of Indonesia”, said Adam Kamil, research director at the pollster Indikator Politik Indonesia.
Dr Thitinan pointed out that inclusiveness is one of the weaknesses in Indonesia’s democratic system. “As a democratic system, Indonesia’s seems to be consolidating, without prospects of a military coup or irregular change of government other than elections,” he said.
“But as a democracy, there has been an erosion of democratic values and political openness and tolerance in view of the threat of Islamisation.”
One of the challenges Mr Widodo has faced is the ethno-religious intolerance that usually becomes more pronounced before an election. Suicide bomb attacks targeting three churches and the police headquarters in Surabaya in May highlighted longstanding concerns about the threat of Islamist militancy.
Following the Surabaya attacks, Mr Widodo called for a rededication to the Pancasila ideology which stresses national unity through religious and ethnic diversity to be made part of the Indonesian way of life. For this to happen, intolerance needs to be confronted, something Indonesia’s politicians seem reluctant to do, for fear of offending the Muslim majority.
There is also intolerance against the Chinese minority. Mr Subianto, who will seek the presidency again in 2019, has been accused of human rights abuses in East Timor as well as peddling anti-Chinese conspiracy theories before race riots in 1998, when some 1,000 ethnic Chinese Indonesians were killed.
Dr Thitinan said that if Indonesia can stay firmly in the secular realm, thwart extremism, continue with political reforms and move further away from old faces and families that used to run the country, then it will be “on a good track”.
“As an outsider, President Jokowi has done well to keep corruption low. His government has provided political stability and overall security and his leadership is essential for the next presidential term.”