How Joko Widodo Lost His Mojo On The Way To The Polls

PRABOWO Subianto has won the campaign, thumpingly; Wednesday’s question is whether Joko Widodo has saved enough of what, three months ago, seemed an irresistible surge to win the actual election.

Prabowo, whom the polls had 25 points in arrears three months ago, has commanded a “ruthlessly organised and extremely scientific campaign”, in the words of the Australian National University’s Ed Aspinall, the likes of which Indonesians have not experienced before.

The former three-star general had been preparing his campaign since immediately after the 2009 election, says political scientist and polling expert Djayadi Hanan, while the Jokowi team was still building theirs at the official campaign opening on June 4.

The Jokowi campaign was a scramble all the way to the finish, officially tonight, badly lacking tactical direction and exacerbated by the Jakarta Governor’s conscientious refusal to grapple with Prabowo’s political character, even by means well short of the now notorious kampanye hitam (black campaigning).

But as Team Jokowi prepared for the final week, its massive earlier lead obliterated, reliable polls showing a gap of three to six points, Prabowo exposed a vulnerable flank.

For most Indonesians this is not the scary aura around his military career, now 16 years distant in a country where the median age is 29 years, but persistent doubts about his commitment to a fully democratic system.

At a “cultural dialogue on the 2014 presidential candidates” in Jakarta last Saturday, Prabowo contended direct elections were among the Western cultural imports that “go against our nation’s fundamental philosophy, laws and traditions, and against the 1945 founding constitution”.

“Like direct elections: we’ve already gone down that path. But it’s like someone addicted to smoking; if we ask them to stop, the process will be difficult,” he said.

That was the opening Joko refused to attack. Shouldn’t he be telling voters Prabowo had characterised direct elections as un-Indonesian, we asked after he broke his Ramadan fast in Cilegon, Banten, on Tuesday evening?

“No, no,” he replied. “You can ask the people, I think they know, especially the middle (class).” Was it not an opportunity to fight back against the waves of black propaganda that engulfed his campaign and for which he blames the astonishing contraction of his poll lead?

“No, no, no, that’s not my way, but I am very confident we are going to win in this election.” University of MelbourneIndonesia specialist Dave McRae was also at the Jakarta dialogue and wrote a tough piece for the university’s Indonesia election website. McRae asked why such rhetoric from Prabowo attracted so little domestic scrutiny.

One reason, he suggested, was that the candidate typically wove “statements of opposition to crucial parts of the democratic order together with general statements of commitment to democracy”.

Kompas, Indonesia’s biggest daily, did carry the story, though the rest ignored it. But not other Australian Indonesianists on the spot to study the campaign.

Aspinall and Marcus Mietzner wrote even sterner pieces for the ANU’s New Mandala website, suggesting Prabowo wanted one popular vote, “but just once”.

Against Prabowo’s claim he was taken out of context, they showed his comments were not a deviation from his earlier critiques but an elaboration.

They were consistent with the assertion in his Gerindra (Great Indonesia Movement) party’s manifesto that constitutional amendments since 2002 had failed and the nation should return to its foundation constitution.

A keystone feature of the 1945 constitution was the national parliament — stacked for most of the next 53 years with Sukarno and Suharto appointees — choosing the president.

That was the system under which Prabowo rose through the military wing of Suharto’s New Order regime. His army career outlasted it only by months before he was discharged, with full honours but in public disgrace, for his role in suppressing pro-democracy activists in 1997-98 and trying to bully the new president, BJ Habibie.

On Monday, at another forum, ANU’s Ross Tapsell asked Prabowo to clarify his intentions should he win the presidency.

And he did, at some length, describing the current democratic arrangements as hugely expensive, highly vulnerable to corruption and needing revision — democratic revision.

“I am not proposing going back to any form of undemocratic system,” he said. “It’s way past us. Our people are already comfortable with democracy. They like to scrutinise all their leaders.” By midweek a “Prabowo v democracy” themed debate was nonetheless running, but without the Jokowi campaign’s engagement. Which surprised many.

It’s true, many of the estimated 170 million voting next week are sorely disappointed by the only president they have elected — Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, twice — but they still consider electoral democracy as the highest Reformasi achievement.

McRae pointed out from a Lowy Institute poll that a larger proportion of Indonesians than Australians (62 per cent as opposed to 60 per cent) believed democracy was the best form of government. Djayadi countered that Joko’s difficulty was that similar surveys showed fewer than 50 per cent of Indonesians satisfied with the existing democratic forms. They often don’t regard direct elections as integral to the democratic process, and those who do mostly cluster in the main cities of Java and Sumatra, where the Prabowo campaign has made its biggest inroads.

“So yes, I agree it could have been a negative issue going into the last days of the campaign,” says Djayadi. “But I think that besides having been trapped by unwillingness to go black, people on Jokowi’s side were also (worried) whether it would be effective.” This week in Cilegon, Joko seemed mildly impatient with it all. “I am from the people and so my campaign is from the people; we go to the ground level, to the markets, to the streets. We talk our vision, our mission, we talk about our programs, but the real programs.” The obvious problem with that is, rebutting smears has taken up the last fortnight of his campaign. Joko has devoted much of his stump time to rebuttals his supporters should make on the doorsteps of unpersuaded neighbours, who the polls suggest mostly peel off to Prabowo.

First thing, Joko told a near-ecstatic crowd at Cilegon’s Pesantren al-Khairiyah, “all of these are lies, so you must clarify them to your neighbours”: a Joko-Jusuf Kalla administration would not remove teacher certification (which brings higher salaries), not cut rice subsidies to the poor and not remove workers’ Idul Fitri bonuses, an extra month’s pay.

Those slurs are less base than what has swamped the social media: Joko is half-Chinese; he is also a secret Christian, or pretend-Muslim; he’s a puppet of his party leader Megawati Sukarnoputri or the Americans, or both.

That issue of Chinese-ness and Christian-ness is politically complex. Jokowi’s deputy Jakarta governor, Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, is genuinely both — and he comes from Gerindra.

Prabowo backed their ticket in 2012 far harder than the stolid, unimaginative Megawati, founder of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P). He reached out to ethnic Chinese voters, to whom 16 years ago he was a fearsome presence.

However, the smear also taps a genuine sense of economic and social anxiety among even middle-class pribumi (indigenous Indonesians), says Tempo magazine’s Bambang Harymurti.

“If you go to the church on Sunday you see the parking lot is full of cars; if you go to the mosque on Friday, the parking lot is full of motor­cycles. If Jokowi is going to be president, then Ahok is going to be governor (of Jakarta).

“Chinese-Indonesians are less than 4 per cent but they own more than 70 per cent of the economy — if they already control the economy, what happens when they control the politics?” Then there is genuine animosity in the Prabowo camp towards Joko’s sponsor, Megawati, over their so-called Batu Tulis agreement for the 2009 presidential election. Lacking numbers for his own candidacy, Prabowo agreed to run as Megawati’s deputy, on her undertaking their ticket order would reverse in 2014. Long before she put aside her own ambitions in favour of the vastly more popular Joko, Megawati reneged on the Batu Tulis deal, as she obviously always intended.

And even after endorsing Joko’s candidacy, Megawati, 67, has shown only distant commitment, as has her daughter Puan Maharani, PDI-P’s campaign manager, who shows little aptitude for election operations.

Whether or not Joko wins on Wednesday, PDI-P will have “lost” two national campaigns in four months, following the party’s disappointing 19 per cent showing in April’s parliamentary election, though Jokowi fervour was burning brightly at the time.

PDI-P — in aimless opposition for a decade, senior personnel clustered at Megawati’s feet — found one huge asset: Joko, the clean-handed, administratively skilled, “man of the little people”. And they might have wasted him.

On the other side, Gerindra is under Prabowo’s sole command, funded by brother Hashim Djojohadikusumo, whose net worth was recently estimated by Forbes at $US700 million. They have used all available techniques, from traditional religious and social networking to the latest American negative methods.Aspinall saw Joko’s operation in East Java overwhelmed and still somewhat uncomprehending of the power of Prabowo’s “ground and air warfare style of campaigning”. In the end, Aspinall and Djayadi agree: the Jokowi campaign’s hopes now hang on whether it can mobilise the greater grassroots fervour at its base into an immense turnout on Wednesday, and whether fewer of the wave of new supporters the polls say Prabowo has won in the past month actually join the voting queues.

The Australian