Week 13: 'Democrazy'

A few weeks ago I observed that 'organised chaos' could be used as a motif to sum up a great many things about Indonesia, including, I have learnt, the political system. Next Thursday (the 9th) is election day in Indonesia, a fact impossible ignore in Tebet where every spare inch of space is plastered with campaign posters.

There are a total of 44 political parties in Indonesia (no, that wasn't a typing error, I really do mean 44). The parties compete in each region to place a representative in the People's Representative Council. However, rather than putting forward one candidate and directing all of their resources at promoting them, each party nominates 11 (yes, ELEVEN) candidates. This means that each voter has literally hundreds of candidates to choose from and that the ballot paper is almost as tall as the average Indonesian citizen.

It seems to me that this system forces voters to make a partial and uninformed choice. Don't get me wrong - I'm all for democratic choice - but too much choice is inimical to true democracy. Voters cannot possibly be informed about the manifestos of 484 candidates, so for the most part people just seem to stick to what they know. One of my collegues, Dini, is running for elections and the polls place her second in terms of name recognition with 0.2% (even the leader just scraped 3%). At the risk of sounding culturally insensitive and - dare I say it? - ethnocentric, it sounds more like democrazy than democracy to me.

Indonesian politics seems to be above all else an exercise in PR. Now, to be fair, this might be said of politics in any democratic country (the recent fixation with Michelle Obama's wardrobe a case in point), but it seems particularly true of Indonesia. In a country where voters cannot possibly be knowledgeable about all the candidates, public image becomes paramount. For instance, it seems that some candidates even go to the effort to change their name to attract attention to their campaign (Astro Cinderella Isobella being my personal favourite). The other day when we were watching TV this advert came on that featured a crowd of attractive people dressed in blue dancing Bollywood-style down a street. It was only when we reached the end of the advert that we realised it was promoting a political party. No mention of political issues or policy debates; just pretty people dancing. It's democracy, for sure, but not as we know it . . . .