Election marks Indonesian democracy's wobbly advance

Neutered during the dictatorship of Suharto, who stepped down in 1998, Parliament has become a powerful counterweight to the executive branch. Under new rules, only parties that win at least 2.5 percent of the national vote will receive seats. This is expected to winnow the number of parties from 17 in the current Parliament, to nine or fewer.

Among those parties are secular and Islamic groupings that date back to the 1950s. Others are new vehicles for presidential hopefuls, two of them former Army generals who hope to emulate Yudhoyono, himself a retired general. But the Army's political power, which underpinned Mr. Suharto's New Order regime, is vastly diminished.

Old elites still overshadow new leaders

Old elites haven't been swept away by Indonesia's democratic upheaval, though. Suharto died last year, untouched by half-hearted judicial probes into abuses during his 32 years in power. The elites have adapted and managed to stall the emergence of new leaders, says Jeffrey Winters, a political scientist at Northwestern University in Chicago who studies Indonesia.

"Here we are, 11 years after the fall of Suharto, and everyone on the political stage is a New Order progeny," he says.

The collapse of the American-backed regime was triggered by an economic meltdown that reduced millions of people to penury. Today, Indonesia largely has been spared by a global recession, as it is less dependent on exports than its Asian neighbors are. Most voters say the economy is the key issue in the electoral race as well as the probity of those seeking to run it.

Corruption has cast a long shadow over Indonesia's democratic institutions. Since 2005, a string of high-profile arrests by a new anticorruption agency have chipped away at blatant graft in the parliament and in other public bodies.

Some voters disillusioned

Paradoxically, though, voters who follow such cases are losing faith in elections as they start to see all political parties as corrupt, says Ikrar Nusa Bhakti, a political analyst at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences based in Jakarta. Disillusionment over the broken promises of politicians has even prompted nostalgia for the certainties of dictatorship.

"Some people in Indonesia still long for the Suharto period, when prices were low [and] they had political stability and security," he says.

Under Suharto, token elections were held regularly. But there was never any doubt that Golkar, the ruling party, would win comfortably. Two other parties were allowed to contest, in the knowledge that neither could win.

A troubling echo of such rigging surfaced in a January election for governor of East Java. The losing candidate's claim of fraud was echoed by a preliminary police report into hundreds of thousands of extra names on voter rolls. Opponents allege that the Democrat Party, whose candidate won the close contest, stole that election and may repeat the trick in other battleground provinces. Party officials have denied any involvement and say police are still investigating.

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