More Indo elec­tion good­ies. The first, well, clearly this guy sees him­self as a peace­maker, bring­ing together, in har­mony, two wor­thy but com­pet­ing global fac­tions. I’m sure the Amer­i­can peo­ple would be keen to to out­stretch the hand of friend­ship to Osama. Remem­ber, these folks have been nom­i­nated by their par­ties to take a seat in the assem­bly of the 4th biggest nation on the planet. They see them­selves as play­ers, if you will.

The sec­ond guy (it is a guy I think) is clearly run­ning to tar­get the Golkar’s poten­tial fetish voter (and there are a few of those amongst the devout, to be sure). Or the local KKK / Golkar Coali­tion ticket.

And so it’s elec­tion day in Indone­sia today. Actu­ally it’s the first of two. Today, hope­fully, sees the leg­is­la­ture, elected and it’s struc­ture, in a par­tic­u­larly irra­tional Indone­sian way, decides who can run for pres­i­dent in a cou­ple of months.

As in all things here, it’s thor­oughly dis­or­gan­ised and you scratch your head at the chaos of it all, but when all is said and done, it’s truly a mighty thing and some­thing that this nation, spread across so many islands, each of which is increas­ingly self serv­ing (it’s a prob­lem that any future leader is going to have to deal with…just jail­ing folks for talk of inde­pen­dence or rais­ing flags doesn’t make it go away) as it tries to find a way past the endemic cor­rup­tion that plagues the nation at every level, rightly takes great pride in.

The fact that Indone­sia, not too far in the past the home of one of the 20^th Century’s worst dic­ta­tors, is now on to it’s third, largely fair and unre­stricted embrace of uni­ver­sal suf­frage, would’ve seemed a bizarre fan­tasy to much of the world just 15 years back. And the credit for that goes to the peo­ple here who’ve done this almost with­out out­side help (lets not for­get that until he looked like falling Suharto was, despite his, as bad as Sad­dam, mur­der­ous excesses, backed by most West­ern pow­ers..and even after the stu­dents over­threw him, hailed by John Howard) or much more than vague moral support.

No, this is par­tic­u­larly Indone­sian rev­o­lu­tion and it now proudly sits as the 4th largest func­tion­ing democ­racy in the world.

I’m watch­ing this process with some fas­ci­na­tion. There are all the trap­pings of democ­racy found glob­ally, from the self serv­ing nut­ters you find on the periph­ery of power…in NZ it’s Rod­ney Hide’s ACT, here, rather more dan­ger­ously, it’s the PKS, a party tar­get­ing the estab­lish­ment of a Caliphate, who are cur­rently polling near the mar­gin of error despite doing rather bet­ter last time: most Indone­sians sim­ply don’t want the sort of Saudi funded medieval­ism that these folks (who recently nom­i­nated Suharto to be ele­vated to Hero Of Indone­sia sta­tus, a small elite that mostly con­sists of Inde­pen­dence War heroes. The nom­i­na­tion was ignored by the gov­ern­ment who, prior to their recent dis­as­trous polling paid rather more atten­tion to these guys) want, to the huge promises from can­di­dates across the board which will likely be quickly for­got­ten after today.

So, allow­ing for the afore­said chaos (down the road from us is a polling station..in the rather filthy fore­court of a garbage pro­cess­ing plant…why not use one of the many schools in the area? One soon learns never to apply logic to any process here if you want to remain sane) we should have a result in a day or two, fol­lowed closely by an intense period where any result is scru­ti­nised for the inevitable ques­tions about an odd result here or there. In Bali there are many sto­ries of vil­lages being told by the Ban­jar (the male only organ­i­sa­tion which con­trols all life at a local level) which way to vote, and I think pri­vacy in the booth may be an alien concept…..rural life in Indone­sia often lives under it’s own rules regard­less of what cen­tral gov­ern­ment may or may not say. One would be naïve to assume that it’s not the case. But such is also widely accepted and any such direc­tion would only come after rather intense ban­jar dis­cus­sion. You have to be very wary of apply­ing west­ern styled scrutiny to demo­c­ra­tic processes in Indone­sia at every level.

But the most impor­tant part of this whole process, for the long term sur­vival of Indone­sia as a func­tion­ing nation, comes in a cou­ple of months when the next pres­i­dent is elected. Com­mon wis­dom is that the cur­rent incum­bent, Susilo Bam­bang Yud­hoy­ono, will romp in again, and there could be a worse result. He’s over­seen a mod­er­ate attack on the cor­rup­tion here and the econ­omy has grown steadily, if unspec­tac­u­larly. And mod­er­ate is the key word: he’s mod­er­ate in just about every­thing and seems to be a firm democrat…and the west loves him.

But like the growth, he too is rather unspec­tac­u­lar and few actu­ally know what he really stands for. He smiles and signs things and has a big motor­cade. He’s failed to date to take on the most cor­rupt insti­tu­tions in the nation: the police and the courts….the rule of law remains a very vague con­cept in Indone­sia; and his fund­ing for that most cru­cial of all things, edu­ca­tion, still sits at the low­est per­cent­age of GDP out­side Africa. Envi­ron­men­tal issues too, are largely ignored as are pub­lic health and wellbeing.

All of which has led to many want­ing a return to some­one stronger..perhaps the rather sus­pect Prabowo Subianto, a Suharto rel­a­tive and a for­mer Gen­eral from the bad old days.

I guess we will see.

I’m get­ting some sort of per­verse sat­is­fac­tion watch­ing the ongo­ing, day to day, Repub­li­can train-wreck, espe­cially when the train’s dri­ver is such a will­ing accomplice:

Behold:

The sweaty, swollen man in the black, half-buttoned shirt who ranted for nearly 90 min­utes Sat­ur­day at the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence. He reit­er­ated his desire to see the pres­i­dent of his coun­try fail. He mis­stated the Constitution’s intent while accus­ing Pres­i­dent Obama of “bas­tardiz­ing” the document.

[From Fears of a Clown — Tim­o­thy Egan Blog — NYTimes.com]