Indonesia’s Do-It-Yourself Campaign

In April, while Americans were obsessing about President Obama’s first 100 days, people in countries around the world were going to the polls to vote for their own kind of change. Writers in India, Indonesia and South Africa report on their recent Election Days — as well as the mornings after.

In the days and weeks after the April 9 parliamentary elections in Indonesia, employees at the mental hospital in Surakarta, in Central Java, have been working double shifts. “We’ve been overwhelmed with 200 patients a day,” said the hospital spokeswoman, Dyah Srimarwati. Other mental institutions are reporting a similar surge. Losing candidates in the election apparently account for the bulk of new patients.

All sorts of sad stories have emerged: a losing candidate in West Java hanged herself; another on Bali died of a heart attack after the polling stations announced the results; and when one man on Sulawesi discovered that most of his neighbors had not voted for him, he cut off public access to a well on his property.

About one million people from 44 parties were contesting up to 50,000 seats in the national, provincial and local legislatures. So you had an average of a 1 in 20 chance of winning. And you couldn’t expect help from your political party. You recruited your own volunteers, organized your own town hall meetings and raised your own money. If you were of limited means, this meant selling everything you had — your house, your car, your lifetime savings, even your parents-in-law’s property if you could persuade them. Or you just went deep into debt. No wonder people got very depressed as soon as they learned they had lost.

This is only Indonesia’s third free and fair election since General Suharto resigned in 1998, but April’s election, along with those in 1999 and 2004, have proven to skeptics that democracy can be practiced here, in the world’s largest Muslim nation. Over the past decade, Islamist parties have not done particularly well; most Indonesians, including the majority of Muslims, obviously feel more comfortable with the secular parties. (Preliminary counts indicate three secular-centrist parties, including the Democratic Party of the incumbent president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, will dominate the national Parliament.)

That said, things have not always gone smoothly. Although the election commission said 171 million people were registered, millions learned on April 9 that they could not vote because their names were not on the rolls. It’s not clear yet how many were disenfranchised, but if the number is sufficiently large, say 20 million or more, it would raise serious questions about the credibility of the polls and of the elected government.

Those who did vote found the task overwhelming. Typically, a voter would get four ballot papers, each as wide and almost as tall as an adult body, with the names and symbols of the parties and the lists of candidates fielded by the parties in their respective electoral districts. In my own confusion about whom to vote for, I went for women — we have not yet had a female lawmaker convicted for corruption, so I thought that was a good bet.

The names that stood out on the ballots were not of politicians but of celebrities and comedians. Not surprisingly, some of them won and some seasoned politicians lost or may lose their seats — for instance, a popular Jakarta comedian named Mandra is leading the House speaker, Agung Laksono. Presumably, after what seems like endless scandals, many people feel that if you are going to send a bunch of clowns to Parliament, then you may as well send in the real clowns this time. At least we will all get a good laugh.

Endy M. Bayuni, the chief editor of The Jakarta Post.