Do you remember the
smear campaign against Barack Obama when he ran for the presidency? The claim
that he was Kenyan, not American? That he was a Muslim? That he was a
communist? As one comedian summed up: “A Communist, a Muslim and an illegal
alien went into a bar. And the barkeeper said, ‘What will it be Mr Obama?”
So the presidential
election campaign in Indonesia had a familiar tone as the frontrunner, Joko
Widodo, known universally by his nickname Jokowi, was attacked by his enemies.
Jokowi’s purported
marriage certificate appeared, showing he was ethnic Chinese, his father born
in Singapore.
That’d be a big
enough political liability in a country where many hold old grudges against the
tiny Chinese minority.
But worse yet, the
man running to lead the world’s biggest Muslim-majority country was accused of
being a closet Christian.
Jokowi started the
election campaign with an apparently unassailable lead over his only rival,
Prabowo Subianto, of between 20 and 40 percentage points.
But the false claims
exposed his lead to be eminently assailable. By the end of the campaign, Jokowi
had lost his advantage and clung to a lead of 5 per cent or less.
In the final days of
the campaign, Jokowi made a lightning pilgrimage to Mecca to reassure voters.
Was the closely
parallel smear campaign coincidence? No. Among Prabowo’s campaign advisers is
an American, Rob Allyn. He worked with the George W. Bush campaign for the
governorship of Texas and later for the presidency.
Allyn is the man
credited with some attack campaigns in US politics and introducing modern
negative campaigning to Mexico’s presidential elections.
“Clearly Jokowi
didn’t do enough to counter this,” says Marcus Mietzner, an expert on
Indonesian politics and an associate professor at ANU.
Mietzner says he
discussed the reasons with Jokowi’s campaign advisers: “He allowed himself to
get caught up with the image he’d built of himself as a clean, non-conventional
politician – ‘if I do this, I’m just like everyone else.’
“If he’d run strongly
against Prabowo he could have won by 10 or 15 per cent.”
These claims about
Jokowi were all false. But the most troubling accusations against Prabowo, a
former general, are true.
In the campaign’s
very last gasp, Jokowi’s campaign did finally turn the attack. Jokowi’s running
mate, Yusuf Kalla, used a televised debate to accuse Prabowo’s coalition of
entrenched corruption. Referring to structural corruption in key industries, he
posed:
“Since there is no
oil mafia, beef mafia, rice mafia, sugar mafia, no Haj mafia nor forestry mafia
on our side, the question is to whom was your speech about kleptocracy
addressed to?”
Replied Prabowo: “I’m
not saying there are no thieves in my party.”
His father-in-law,
the former dictator Suharto, installed him as the head of Indonesia’s Special
Forces, Kopassus. Suharto used the unit as a political problem-solving force
that suppressed efforts to democratise.
Prabowo committed
serious breaches of human rights in the process.
The former head of
the armed forces, Wiranto, has said that he sacked Prabowo because in 1998 he
had kidnapped and tortured democracy activists, 13 of whom remain unaccounted
for. There is plenty of evidence that this is true.
Suharto’s successor
as president, B.J. Habibie, has accused him of trying to seize power in a
coup.
“Think of a place
like Putin’s Russia,” says Ed Aspinall of the ANU, “and we might have a picture
of what Prabowo’s Indonesia will eventually look like.”
Prabowo doesn’t deny
an authoritarian tendency. In fact, his election platform was built on one. He
campaigned to do away with Indonesia’s current constitution and to revert to
the 1945 version. This was the basis for the dictatorships of Sukarno and
Suharto, centralising power in the palace.
He has said that
democracy is unsuited to Indonesian culture, and he told a gathering of
military officers that democracy “exhausts us.”
Prabowo strikes a
dictator’s pose, parading on one of his stable of Arabian thoroughbreds as he
inspects his private militia, revelling in the role of strongman.
Far from being a
liability, however, the decisive big-man routine is Prabowo’s greatest asset.
With an aristocratic bloodline and a martial past, he is the polar opposite of
Jokowi, a self-made everyman, furniture entrepreneur and provincial
problem-solver. It’s the feudal leader versus the can-do manager.
In the event, Barack
Obama refuted the accusations against him and they weren’t enough to keep him
from office. In Indonesia’s July 9 ballot, the disinformation campaign against
Jokowi wasn’t enough to defeat him, either.
The official vote
count is not due until July 22. But the most credible Quick Counts,
vote-sampling counts conducted by private polling groups on election day, give
the election to Jokowi. Some give Prabowo victory.
But, says Mietzner:
“All the Quick Counts that we’ve followed since democratisation started in
Indonesia, the ones that have always been right, all agree that Jokowi won.”
If the official count
confirms this, Prabowo’s reaction will be key. Will he accept the people’s
verdict in good grace? There is no certainty.
The deputy chair of
his party, Fadli Zon, has said that voting for Jokowi could lead to the
situation that the former Philippine president, Joseph Estrada,
confronted.
Estrada was
democratically elected but forced from office by a “people’s power” movement
and the threat of impeachment. Prabowo’s camp, evidently, has been thinking
about whether democracy might prove just as exhausting for Jokowi – even if he
wins.
Peter Hartcher is the international
editor. Sydney Morning Herald
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