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Wednesday, October 19, 2005
  One down, three to go.


It's a year since SBY became the first directly elected President of Indonesia. The editor-in-chief of the Jakarta Post, Endy M. Bayuni, gives a fair appraisal of SBY's performance so far, rating it 7 out of 10.

For those of you who are unable to read the full article, a word of advice ~ register so you can access the archives I link to.

And now for a balanced extract of Endy's thoughts.
Indonesia's first directly elected president found his powers clipped by the newly amended 1945 Constitution. Now, he has to share power with the House of Representatives, and with a new player in town, the Regional Representatives Council modeled on the U.S. Senate.

Elected members of these two institutions owe their allegiances to the electorate or their political parties, and not so much to the President.

Unlike Soeharto, whose word would immediately become law, SBY knew that he faced a tough fight from many powerful detractors, particularly the opposition factions in the House, which are determined in giving him a run for his money.

Every major decision he made had to go through the scrutiny of the House and stand up to other political forces in the country who owe their allegiances to the electorate or their political parties, and not so much to the President.

To complicate matters even further, beginning this year Susilo is losing his clout over the regions. With direct elections for governors and regional chiefs, the elected leaders owe their allegiances to the people first, the political parties that sponsored their election second, and the President a distant third, if at all.
Enter Jusuf Kalla who got elected as vice president on the same ticket. Kalla is no ordinary vice president as he came in with a lot of his own political capital, including initially a breakaway faction of Golkar, but later on, in December, the full force of the party with the most seats in the House. SBY thus has had to share power, for better or for worse, with a politically powerful vice president.

Yet that now gives SBY levers to overcome the occasional intansigence of the DPR, the House of Representatives which, it should be noted, gave its approval for the recent decision to drastically lower the oil subsidy, thus freeing up funds for government expenditure on social welfare, education and other measures to benefit the electorate.

His first year was marked with many events that were beyond his control.
Overall, SBY did relatively well in dealing with these largely unforeseen problems.
He made little inroads into his agenda of fighting corruption and promoting investment, but they did not suffer terribly either.

Perhaps the only bright spot in his presidency was the peace agreement that the government signed with the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM) in August which officially ended a 30-year bloody war.

There are still many areas of concern that have not been fully addressed.
I still feel that he was kite flying in order to gauge public reaction. Regarding the murder of Munir, we can expect little clarity whilst the masterminds remain immune. And there, I suspect, lies SBY's achilles heel: Suharto's cronies are entrenched and it will take a generation of gradual glasnost to eradicate them.
Jakartass agrees with Endy's assessment and I look forward to bearing witness to the evolution of a democratic society which can afford to stop looking inwards, as befits one of the most populous and heterogeneous nations of our world.
 

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