No Change Election In Indonesia

Yesterday was election day here in Indonesia. It was quiet and there never seemed much doubt that President Bambang would be re-elected. I even managed to forget that it was election day until Anwar, our driver, showed up with an ink-stained thumb showing he had voted. In a three-way contest, he wound up with 61% of the vote-- very impressive. Bali, though, is Megawati territory and she surprised everyone by coming in second (26.6%) nationally, beating out current Vice President Jusuf Kalla, who tried-- a bit-- to play on a little fundamentalism, something most Indonesians completely reject as out of place in politics. Megawati, daughter of Indonesia's George Washington (Sukarno) had been a VP who became president when President Abdurrahman Wahid was impeached in 2001. She stands for poorer working people.

In any case, Bambang-- President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono-- was elected to a second 5-year term yesterday, clearly the favored candidate of the moderate conservative Establishment. He has consistently favored the business establishment and foreign investors over the tens of millions of poor Indonesian farmers. But they voted for him-- or for his recent cuts in domestic energy costs-- anyway. According to Bloomberg, "leveraging that victory into achieving his goal of growth rates on par with China and India will hinge on the ability to build roads, ports and power plants and lure foreign investment. To do so, he’ll have to overcome a bureaucracy where power is decentralized down to the district level across 17,500 islands." The stock market reacted very well to his victory but, as the Christian Science Monitor points out, he's got plenty of challenges ahead if he's going to really do Indonesia any good. A big question is about his "ability to attract foreign investors to an economy that is rich in natural resources but plagued by corruption, threadbare infrastructure, and inept governance."

"There's not necessarily much ground for optimism in faster reforms or significant improvements [during a second term]. He still seems to be accommodating multiple interests," says Kevin O'Rourke, an independent political analyst in Jakarta.
Yudhoyono has a strong image as a clean pair of hands in a country awash in corruption. But critics say his probity doesn't extend to his Democrat Party, the largest in Parliament. The party recently proposed legislation that would hobble an independent anticorruption agency that had begun to make headway against rampant graft among politicians and bureaucrats.

As I mentioned on my travel blog the other day, we saw the rampant corruption first hand when one of our friends was shaken down at the airport for a million rupiah bribe by a venal airport official who said he didn't have enough empty pages in his passport and threatened to deport him on the spot.