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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies
ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20
SBY's consensus cabinet – lanjutkan?
Stephen Sherlock
To cite this article: Stephen Sherlock (2009) SBY's consensus cabinet – lanjutkan? , Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 45:3, 341-343, DOI: 10.1080/00074910903424043
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074910903424043
Published online: 16 Nov 2009.
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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2009: 341–3
ISSN 0007-4918 print/ISSN 1472-7234 online/09/030341-3 © 2009 Indonesia Project ANU DOI: 10.1080/00074910903424043
Policy Dialogue: A Rainbow Coalition? (2)
SBY’S CONSENSUS CABINET – LANJUTKAN?
Stephen Sherlock
Canberra
Our second expert on democracy gives his perspective on the preceding comment by Larry Diamond and on the newly re-elected president’s reported plan, since
con-fi rmed, to forge a ‘rainbow’ coalition representing most of the parties represented
in the new parliament. Stephen Sherlock is a political analyst who specialises in governance and political change in Indonesia. Since 2001 he has been an independ-ent consultant, straddling the dividing line between academic research and devel-opment work. (Ed.)
Following SBY’s landslide victory in the presidential election and the great boost to the representation of the Democrat Party (Partai Demokrat, PD) in the parlia-ment (DPR), there has been a ground-swell of comparlia-mentary arguing that Indonesia is in danger of losing an effective opposition. The argument goes that, because SBY appears to be looking to form a ‘rainbow coalition’ of all or most of the major parties in the DPR, there will be no ‘check and balance’ from opposition parties in the parliament.1 A less extensive discussion has focused on the problem of
cabi-net ineffectiveness when agreement must be forged among a plethora of parties. Larry Diamond has succinctly summarised these concerns, focusing on the issues of lack of opposition, absence of united government purpose and fostering of cor-ruption.
These are indeed well-founded concerns, but formulating the problem in such a way seems to me to be somewhat off-target. The formulation does not take account of two key issues: fi rst, that relations between the DPR and the execu-tive do not work in the way suggested, and second, that a new ‘rainbow cabinet’ will not be particularly different from SBY’s fi rst cabinet. Therefore the new SBY administration will be problematic not because of a lack of opposition but because it may be just as muddled as the old one: as the president’s campaign slogan ‘lanjutkan!’ (‘continue!’) was rather unkindly translated – ‘more of the same’.2
1 ‘Next Cabinet could go wild without proper checks and balances: Indonesian experts’, Jakarta Post, 6 September 2009; ‘Growing Indonesia coalition may hurt democracy, say activ-ists’, Jakarta Globe, 2 September 2009.
2 ‘More of the same: the world’s biggest Muslim-majority democracy prepares to go to the polls’, Economist, 2 July 2009.
342 Stephen Sherlock
On the fi rst issue, the idea that SBY will have an overwhelming majority in the DPR and that this will stifl e it as a voice of accountability is based on a misunder-standing of the way Indonesia’s parliament works. Its decisions are not made by majority vote, but by so-called ‘consensus’. And almost all key decisions are made in committees, each of which has its own internal balance of power. So having an overall numerical majority does not necessarily translate into control of decisions about legislation, appointment of key state offi cials and oversight of executive government spending and policy.
On the second issue, if SBY does include all parties in his cabinet, it will not be so different from the cabinet of 2004–09, which contained members of PD, Golkar and the Islamic and Musim-based parties, PAN, PKS, PPP, PKB and PBB. Only PDI-P claimed to be an ‘opposition’ party. But cross-party solidarity within this cabinet was very weak, with each party taking positions that were largely deter-mined by its own perceived interests in any particular decision. The chances that a new rainbow cabinet will be united and monolithic seem slim.
A post-2009 rainbow coalition will therefore look rather similar to the coalition of 2004–09. It will be a largely cabinet-based coalition, with its infl uence being felt only patchily in the parliament. Even though SBY’s Partai Demokrat will have immense clout in the DPR (for the fi rst time in the post-Soeharto era, the presi-dent and the speaker will be from the same party), it will not be able to rely on consistent support from the other parties in the loose arrangement grandly called a coalition.
In such circumstances, the key issue becomes one that Diamond identifi ed: that accountability depends on ‘the incoherence of political parties – that is, the fracture between their executive and legislative wings’. SBY cannot get control of the DPR by majority vote, because the parties in the DPR act in opaque and col-lusive ways. The paradoxical effect is that the parties will frequently put pressure on executive government, both by scrutinising and reviewing legislation and by raising diffi cult and embarrassing issues of public importance. Thus an arguably dysfunctional parliament could be what ensures that the separation and balance of powers between the branches of government will be maintained. Healthy or not, this is likely to be the situation for the next fi ve years.
Of course, this is not the fi rst time that dysfunctional aspects of the Indonesian state apparatus have cancelled each other out. There are numerous illogical and contradictory laws and government regulations at both the national and provin-cial levels that would cause great harm if they were ever implemented, but which remain on paper only because there is no capacity or intention to carry them out. There has been no serious effort, for example, to enforce the potentially disastrous provisions of the anti-pornography law. And one shudders to think that the new regulation on stoning adulterers in Aceh would ever be put into effect.
But in regard to the effective functioning of cabinet, we should emphasise that the ‘incoherence’ of the parties extends to their behaviour with ministerial posi-tions – and that this has major negative effects. The parties’ greatest motivation does not appear to be to contribute to united government policy goals, but rather to gain control of the resources and patronage of a ministry. This is the motive that compelled factions within Golkar and PDI-P to argue before the recent elec-tions that their party should ‘get back inside the tent’. The rents to be earned from
SBY’s consensus cabinet – lanjutkan? 343
being a ‘gate-keeper’ in the DPR cannot match those that come with control of a ministry.
In relation to corruption, there can be no argument that the rainbow coalition cabinet of 2004–09 added to the diffi culties encountered in eliminating corrup-tion, and that a similar cabinet in 2009–14 will have the same effect. SBY’s dif-fi dent actions on this front and his tendency to leave the issue to the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) were probably related to the fact that he feared alienating powerful forces inside his cabinet. It is here that the cost of having a parliament that operates largely according to its own agenda becomes clear. DPR members (and members of the provincial parliaments) were among the main tar-gets of the KPK, and they have fought back by drafting new legislation that will hamper its effectiveness.
Considering the options available to SBY in the composition of his government prompts a question about what he calculates to be the costs and benefi ts of his ‘rainbow’ consensus approach. From his point of view, he gets a rather poor deal from a strategy of buying off the parties with cabinet seats. He gets little in the way of loyalty or consistent support, and what he does get is more than neu-tralised by the policy incoherence that results from having a set of opportunistic party politicians treating ‘their’ ministry as a personal fi efdom. There would seem to be little for SBY to lose in setting up a cabinet composed of technocrats and PD supporters, but at the time of writing the signs were that he would include party representatives from, at the very least, the four Islamic parties that supported his re-election.
The conventional view is that SBY is a naturally cautious individual, and heav-ily infl uenced by Javanese ideas about consensus. The other calculation could be that if one of the Islamic parties is in the cabinet, then the other three must be there as well. And if PKS is included, it might also be wise to bring in Golkar so as to balance the ambitions of PKS. But SBY’s political position is extraordinarily strong and could surely withstand opposition from parties that, with the exception of PKS, are suffering a crisis of public support and a lack of internal cohesion.
So perhaps the real problem is not that there is going to be a new monolithic government controlled by a grand coalition, but that things are going to work in much the same way as they have for the last 10 years. Such arrangements are not conducive to a coherent policy strategy in the critical areas of economic growth, environmental management, infrastructure development, reform of government administration and eradication of corruption.
If SBY does opt for an all-inclusive cabinet, it will surely mean that the second SBY administration will be as mediocre as the fi rst. We will witness not the specta-cle of uncontrollable and unaccountable government, but rather a continuation of the collusive division of spoils among the political elite and, at best, a slow, incre-mentalist approach to government. It will be a tragedy if the massive mandate given to SBY in 2009 is frittered away, particularly since it is unlikely that there will be such a clear result in 2014.
