Jokowi embarks on ‘political safari’ to seek Indonesia coalition

April 16, 2014 Leave a comment

April 13, 2014 10:37 am

Jokowi embarks on ‘political safari’ to seek Indonesia coalition

By Ben Bland in Jakarta

Indonesian presidential favourite Joko Widodo embarked on a scramble to find coalition partners over the weekend after his Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle (PDI-P) failed to secure a decisive victory in Wednesday’s legislative elections.

The popular Jakarta governor met with the leaders of three other parties to discuss possible alliances, in what the local media called a “political safari”.

“We have to work quickly to get certainty on which parties the PDI-P will work with,” Mr Widodo told Metro TV.

PDI-P had hoped to win as much as 30 per cent of the vote in the five-yearly election for the 560-member House of Representatives, but initial counts put it at just 19 per cent, short of the 25 per cent of the vote it needs to officially nominate Mr Widodo as its candidate in July’s presidential election.

The results have dented investor hopes that Mr Widodo will be able to gather sufficient support in the powerful legislature to resurrect stalled reforms, from cutting the ballooning fuel subsidy bill to revamping the inefficient bureaucracy.

Infighting has broken out between Mr Widodo’s supporters and those close to Megawati Sukarnoputri, the former president who chairs the party, over who was to blame for the disappointing outcome.

On Saturday, the Jakarta governor launched a fightback, securing the endorsement of the newly formed National Democrat party, founded by media moghul Surya Paloh, which won about 7 per cent of the vote. That support is enough to get the PDI-P, which was still the best-performing party in the election, over the presidential nominating threshold.

Mr Widodo also met with Aburizal Bakrie, the tycoon who chairs the second-placed Golkar party, with about 15 per cent of the vote, and representatives from the National Awakening party (PKB), a moderate Islamic party backed by aviation magnate Rusdi Kirana.

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Golkar said it was not willing to enter a coalition with PDI-P now but PKB, which won about 9 per cent, said it was open to further talks.

Having risen rapidly from obscurity because of his down-to-earth style and his lack of connections to Indonesia’s tight-knit political elite, Mr Widodo said he did not want to engage in the “horse-trading” that hampered the second-term of the outgoing president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono

.

“In every meeting, we talked about building a strong government to ensure we have a strong country,” he said. “We don’t want transactional negotiations or talks about dividing up ministries or [Cabinet] seats.”

But analysts said it was not possible to build a coalition in Indonesia, where corruption and money politics are rife, without cutting deals.

“The raison d’être of Indonesian politics is bagi-bagi or dividing the spoils,” said Jeffrey Winters, an Indonesia-focused political scientist at Northwestern University.

“You basically have two choices during the coalition scramble following the legislative round. You buy partners with cabinet seats or with straight-up cash payments to parties and their leaders. Often deals involve both.”

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