With the country’s main opposition party seemingly headed for victory in both the legislative election on Wednesday and the presidential election on July 9, observers say the euphoria needs to be tempered by a rational look back at its track record in government.
Ade Irawan, the coordinator of Indonesia Corruption Watch, said on Friday that voters were quickly forgetting the “colorful past and track record” of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) when its chairwoman, Megawati Soekarnoputri, was president from 2001 to 2004.
He noted that when she came to power, after decades in the opposition during the rule of the strongman Suharto, the party went “power-hungry,” privatizing state-owned enterprises in processes that were often prone to graft.
“It’s like when people who have fasted for so long finally get to break their fast. They can get out of control when they finally get to eat,” Ade told Jakarta Globe.
“When the PDI-P was in power after they won the election [in 1999], it seemed as though they abused their power. A few cases were quite obvious. The most obvious is the privatization. It was likely done against the backdrop of corruption.”
But Arbi Sanit, a political analyst from the University of Indonesia, said Megawati and the PDI-P had inherited a deeply troubled system from Suharto’s government and they were doing the best under trying circumstances.
“She had to sell those state-owned companies because there were deficits that needed to be resolved. And there were overseas loans as well,” he told the Globe.
“She inherited the problems that Suharto left behind. And those couldn’t be fixed instantaneously.”
But he acknowledged that the PDI-P did have its checkered moments. He cited the “obvious disparity” between the party’s socialist and nationalist rhetoric and the economic policies it applied when it was in power.
“Although the PDI-P’s philosophy is to support peasants and the poor, it didn’t do so in terms of its macroeconomic policies. They had to compromise. That was its dilemma, because the economic power was held among the elites,” Arbi said.
The party was also the hardest-hit in a scandal that snared an entire oversight commission of the House of Representatives, whose members were accused of taking bribes in the appointment of a central bank official. Most of those subsequently jailed were from the PDI-P.
Megawati, in addressing the scandal back in 2012, famously declared that she was the one who had established the country’s antigraft body, the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), but ICW’s Ade disputes that.
“The initiative didn’t come from Mega,” he said. “I remember well that the pressure came from the public.”
Critics have also denounced the party for the lack of generational change within its ranks, with Megawati continuing to monopolize power since before the advent of the reformation era that began with Suharto’s resignation in 1998.
The PDI-P, however, say it helped shepherd the country through the tumultuous transition that followed.
“The New Order was very undemocratic. Don’t forget, we have changed the system,” Maruarar Sirait, a PDI-P spokesman, said on Wednesday.
Source/Fuente: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/pdi-p-record-govt-mixed-bag/
