TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The poor quality of candidates for the legislature indicates that the state of our political parties is in havoc. Parties re-nominate the members of the House of Representatives which were known problematic. If any new faces appeared, their background will be businessman, artist, or relatives of party leaders. The party leaders are not only fooling the people, but also ignoring good regeneration.

Hard to imagine that there is a reasonable regeneration process when approximately 80 percent of House members were re-nominated. Cadres who have been working hard get disrespected because parties are more likely to recruit more businessmen or artists. Recruitment is often based on superficial considerations. Artists are considered to boost the party’s popularity and businessmen are expected to bring in more money.

The party leaders are also not ashamed putting family members or relatives in the legislature candidates list. Most of them were in top first or so numbers. This happens in a lot of parties, such as the Democratic Party, Golkar, PDI-P, and the United Development Party. Nepotism even ventured into regions. Many relatives of party leaders bought positions in the legislative and executive.

All of that describes the political parties’ arrogance. Parties tend to dictate people, instead of absorbing their aspirations. As if the parties exploited the people’s mild political knowledge. People are also likely to be fooled by the parties’ promises and not too keen on seeing the candidates’ quality and integrity. Moreover, some parties also controlled television stations who could cast a favorable image of them.

These behaviors could potentially destroy democracy. Lots of parties are trapped by the practice of oligarchy, collusion, corruption, and nepotism.

In reality, it’s impossible for parties to deceive people forever in an election. This needs to be taken into account by the political parties. People will no longer trust the promise to fight corruption when in reality many party cadres involved in bribery cases. People will doubt the ability of political parties to manage the state if they cannot finance political activities with a clear funding.

No matter how convincing their campaign slogans are, it will not be attractive unless their behavior changes. Not only randomly putting up posters of their candidates, political parties are also not being transparent about their source of funds. This initiates suspicions. Would it be possible that they still rely on corrupted money to fund their political activities?

These behaviors really are dangerous, because it could make people to lose trust on political parties, even democracy itself.