'Negative Sovereignty' and Jakarta's Gubernatorial Election  

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Campaigns for the election of regional chief executives in the past three months have exposed the dirty side of democracy. Most candidates running for office this Wednesday have fallen into the trap of debating primordial issues, instead of proposing anything substantive.

Meanwhile, their supporters, particularly in Jakarta, have even been using religious and racial sentiment in their campaigns. News reports attacking candidates have appeared in social media. Fake news has spread widely. This show of hatred, which endangers social harmony, has been served up in the most brutal fashion.

There are too few supporters with a basic understanding on how to assess issues raised by the candidates. Debates on the Internet often have no substance and tend to be uncivil. The same topics crop up on the campaign stage: attacks left and right and a surfeit of promises. The crowds at rallies are supplied with gossip that only intensifies the friction between rival groups.

The conduct of voters is saddening. Accusations of blasphemy are repeatedly revived to reduce the popularity of incumbent Basuki Tjahaja Purnama and his running mate, Djarot Syaiful Hidayat. Rumors of illegal Chinese workers, which have nothing to do with the election of regional chief executives, are repeated ad nauseam. So are rumors in Banten of 'Indonesian Communist Party infiltrators' despite the fact that the party (PKI) has long been dead.

The racist and primordial nature of some voters evident also in other nations, like during the recent United States presidential election has resulted in a symptom that Moroccan professor and politician Lahcen Haddad refers to as 'negative sovereignty'. These sentiments are channeled into the ballot box not to find solutions or good leaders, but to express refusal, rejection, fear and hatred. This 'sovereignty' is manifested through the spread of fake news and the mobilization of mobs.

Ironically, however, very few candidates have shown any attempt to restrain their 'hardline' supporters. In the three debates, particularly the ones in the Jakarta gubernatorial race, they avoided discussing issues that have drained the people's energy. The 'blasphemy' rumor has been allowed to grow wild outside the debating arena. Yet raising it would have been an important way of showing their commitment to Indonesian unity.

The police have also made matters worse. As a result of their inconsistency in implementing Police Chief Regulation No. SE/7/VI/2014 which bans processing complaints of legal infractions by candidates during their campaigns tensions between groups have been aggravated. Ahok has been charged with blasphemy, while Sylviana Murni, running mate of Agus Harmurti Yudhoyono, has been caught up in a social assistance corruption case.

Clearly, the quality of our democracy has deteriorated during these elections. It seems the public is unprepared to accept that democracy can produce candidates with different backgrounds. People are still easily driven by issues of minority status, skin color, religion, origin and ethnicity, which have no relevance to the substance of an election. Ideas, strength of leadership and the programs offered by the candidates should be seen as far more important.

The candidates should be offering new programs that will address regional problems. The celebrities and political patrons who are involved should not be there to make the candidates look good, but to convince voters that their programs will bring prosperity.

In Jakarta, all the gubernatorial candidates have turned to patrons to persuade the 20 to 30 percent of undecided voters. Megawati Sukarnoputri, chairperson of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) , Prabowo Subianto, chairman of the Gerindra Party and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, chairman of the Democrat Party, have entered the political fray. They have ordered their followers and their families, to ensure victory for their respective candidates. Perhaps they see Jakarta as a stepping-stone to a bigger project: the 2019 presidential election.

The involvement of these three patrons in the Jakarta gubernatorial election has moved the spotlight from the candidates to these figures from the past. It is fair to say their actions could complicate this electoral process. In several speeches and Internet postings, Yudhoyono gives the impression of wanting to drag President Joko Widodo into the Jakarta political arena.

Today, three months of campaigning and three debates later, voters should know enough not to 'choose a rotten apple'. The next five years could end up being a nightmare if on Wednesday, the people in the 101 regions elect low-quality leaders, who have no clear idea about good governance, whose records are blemished, and who have nothing to offer except promises. (*)

Read the full story in this week's edition of Tempo English Magazine