Money, Power, and Ideology: Political Parties in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia

Chapter 1: Indonesia's Parties and Party Systems: A Historical and Analytical Overview

28 Money, Power, and Ideology 28 1 Indonesia’s Parties and Party Systems A Historical and Analytical Overview Any discussion of Indonesian party politics must start with an overview of its historical origins, an analysis of its main trends, and an introduction of the major actors. First, a historical contextualization of Indonesian parties is key to grasping the patterns of post-Suharto party politics — especially since many quantitative examinations have refrained from such a historiographical exercise (Hicken 2006; Tan 2006; Croissant and Völkel 2012). Second, a summary of major trends in Indonesia’s current party system is crucial to provide a platform from which later chapters can enter into in-depth discussions . In this short overview, the analytical tools developed by the institutionalization school will help identifying significant features of Indonesian parties. Third, it is necessary to introduce the main players. For practical reasons, the discussion here is limited to the nine parties elected to the parliament of the 2009–14 term. In later segments of the book, some newer (and also older) parties are introduced as well, but the nine parties covered in this chapter have been the leading protagonists. Naturally, the chapter’s sections on historical origins, current dimensions of institutionalization, and individual party profiles do not aim to provide an exhaustive picture of Indonesia ’s parties. Rather, they provide readers with indispensable information for the further course of the book, and allow the following chapters to concentrate on thematic fields of inquiry without having to disrupt the analysis with basic narratives and data. Indonesia’s Parties and Party Systems 29 Indonesia’s Parties: A Short History A narrative of the evolution of Indonesian party politics is not just a historiographical enterprise. Rather, it goes to the heart of the debate on the stability and institutionalization of Indonesian parties. Depending on how exactly we date the origins of Indonesia’s first parties and identify continuities with today’s organizations, they can either be described as relatively long lasting or, on the contrary, as fitting the East Asian stereotype of being notoriously short lived. Generally, average party age is one of the indicators for the stability of a party system (Stockton 2001: 104), and the United States and the United Kingdom have scored the highest marks in this field as their main parties go back to the nineteenth century (Hicken 2006: 37). Indonesia’s score, by contrast, has often been relatively low, with the birth dates of its key parties set in the 1960s and 1970s, or even in the years following Suharto’s fall. But a closer look suggests that some of the parties operating in Indonesia today are the direct successors to organizations founded in the 1920s, and that therefore the country’s party longevity score has so far been undervalued. In fact, this study argues that the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, PDIP) is one of the longest-operating parties in Southeast Asia, second only to the Nationalista Party of the Philippines founded in 1907. In Asia, only India’s Congress Party (1885), Taiwan’s Kuomintang (1919), the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (1921), and the Japanese Communist Party (1922) are older. Today’s PDIP has its origins in the Partai Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian National Party, PNI), which was founded in 1927. While initially established as a pluralist social movement, it adopted the name “party” in 1928. Obviously, the Dutch colonial regime imposed severe restrictions on parties, especially on those which — as the PNI — openly sought Indonesia’s independence. Unlike the British in India or the United States in the Philippines, the Dutch did not allow for party-based elections in their colony. Instead, they viewed parties as rebellious organizations and were determined to dissolve them. Thus, PNI’s leader, Indonesia’s future founding president Sukarno, was arrested in 1929 and sentenced to four years in prison in 1930 (Legge 1990). The party officially disbanded in the following year, but some of PNI’s second-tier leaders maintained its formal structures. More importantly, in the minds of many citizens, 30 Money, Power, and Ideology PNI had entrenched itself as a party that not only stood for anticolonialism , but also for a multi-religious and cross-ethnic composition of a future Indonesian state. Hence, although the Dutch colonizers tried to curtail the PNI throughout the 1930s, the concept of a party as a political vehicle to promote ideas and — eventually...