Should PDI-P be an opposition party? Should Nasdem join the opposition? Would their being in the Opposition help or hinder Indonesia’s growth as a nation? Would an Opposition hasten the breakup of the nation?
These are the questions that should be occupying the minds of the politicians who fielded the losing candidates. Yet they seem to be occupied with fault finding and uncovering instances of voting anomalies. Given the margin of victory of the Prabowo-Gibran pair this looks like a futile exercise.
Instead they should be focussing on how to build a viable opposition to the Jokowi-Prabowo marriage of convenience and figure how to head off Jokowi’s attempts at preventing this from happening. Already he has asked to meet with Surya Paloh the head of Nasdem and the main patron of Anies Baswedan. If history is any guide, Jokowi will want to bring them into the fold of the present and future governments so that all viable opposition is stifled.
If the PDIP-P, Nasdem and other political parties have any sense of self-preservation, never mind the welfare of the country, they would form themselves into the Opposition.
All the election rigging, the intimidation and partisanship of local and federal officials in this round of elections was possible only because of a lack of opposition in Parliament. In fact, what happened, as pointed out in the excellent analysis by Dana Jeffrey and Eve Warbuton in the New Mandala article Explaining the Prabowo Landslide, as that all political parties colluded to dismantle the state’s checks and balances that enabled all the voting manipulation.
In the second term of Jokowi’s rule all the estates of state had failed to provide these checks and balances. Jokowi was the Executive and he’s demonstrated his preference for pragmatism and expediency to override all other considerations. The Judiciary is compromised, with the most obvious case where the Constitutional Court, manned by his brother-in-law ensured that his son could become a vice-presidential candidate. The Legislature was dominated and controlled by Jokowi that it passed laws that weakened the KPK and other institutions and watered down regulations standing in the way of Jokowi’s plans. The Fourth Estate, the Press, is ineffective because it hasn’t figured out how to stay ahead of social media-driven manipulations of the truth.
The electoral process has exposed all these truths starkly.
There is now a glimmer of hope that Indonesia can rise out of this low point in its democracy. Marcus Tantau in his Substack post A New Order! Whoops, I mean Era. A New Era! pointed out that the Anies and Ganjar coalitions are likely to control about 3% more seats than Prabowo’s approximately 48% in the DPR.
“This 3% could create an opportunity for Anies and Ganjar’s coalitions to come together and form a majority in the DPR,” he said, adding that: “Such an outcome would create some real headaches for any future administration in the same way that Prabowo’s Merah Putih Coalition dominated the DPR following the 2014 election,.”
This is something that Jokowi and Prabowo must fear most and explains why Jokowi is already maneuvering to neutralize or enlist the opposition, beginning with Surya’s Paloh, the head of Nasdem and Anies Baswedian’s chief patron. No doubt he will be trying to coop the other political parties from the Anies and Ganjar coalitions, just has he coopted Prabowo after the 2019 elections.
If Jokowi succeeds then Prabowo or whomever holds the political power in Indonesia will be able to do whatever they want to consolidate more power and railroad their initiatives, which may include dynasty building. All of us will be powerless because the laws protecting our rights will be so watered down or altered to work against us, the institutions will serve only the interests of the powers that be and all opposition – even in that so-called frontier of free speech, social media, will be stifled.
It will be a New Order Baru, only more powerful because its is so insidious.
Unspun 
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