Sometimes dead is better.
That’s what the old-timers used to say about bad ideas, and
brother, if you’re looking for a prime example of something that should’ve
stayed buried, look no further than the latest political nightmare brewing in
Indonesia. They’re talking about killing direct regional head elections—what
the locals call pilkada—and handing the whole bloody mess back to the Regional
People’s Representative Council (DPRD). The ruling coalition boys—Gerindra,
Golkar, and now even the Democratic Party—are pushing this thing
like a drunk driver heading straight for a guardrail at midnight, and their
excuse? Budget efficiency.
Jesus wept.
If you believe that one, I’ve got some swampland in the
Florida Everglades I’d like to sell you.
See, what they’re really doing—what they’re actually
doing, if you strip away the political bullshit and the fancy talk—is opening a
door. A door that should’ve been nailed shut, boarded over, and left to rot in
the basement of history. Because on the other side of that door? Corruption.
Not the small-time stuff, not the penny-ante graft you can see coming a mile
away. No, this is the wholesale, industrial-grade variety. The kind that
happens in back rooms and luxury hotels, where suitcases full of cash change
hands and nobody asks questions because everybody’s already bought and paid
for.
The Democratic Party’s flip-flop is the kind of thing that
would make your stomach turn if you were watching it in a movie. Back in
2014—and I remember this, Constant Reader, because it was the kind of political
theater you don’t forget—the House of Representatives tried this same stunt.
The Red and White Coalition, backing Prabowo Subianto, passed a law
eliminating direct regional elections. The people went apeshit, and rightfully
so. They knew a power grab when they saw one.
At the time, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono—they called him
SBY, and he was coming to the end of his term—refused to sign the damned thing.
Instead, he issued two Perppu (Government Regulations in Lieu of Law,
for those keeping score at home) to restore direct elections. The Democratic
Party, under SBY’s leadership, staged a walkout. They positioned themselves as
the heroes of the story, the defenders of the people’s voice. SBY’s words had
the ring of a man who believed what he was saying:
“While I respect the DPR’s process in deciding on regional
elections through the DPRD, allow me to continue striving for the upholding of
popular sovereignty and democracy of the people, by the people, and for the
people.”
Noble words. The kind that look good carved in marble.
But here’s the thing about marble—it’s cold and it’s dead,
and sometimes the people who speak those noble words are just as cold and just
as dead inside.
Flash forward to January 2026, and the Democratic Party—the
same outfit that walked out in protest twelve years earlier—is singing a
different tune. Secretary General Herman Khaeron says they’re standing “united”
with President Prabowo Subianto. They’re supporting the very thing they once
fought against, all for the sake of coalition solidarity.
The academics and watchdogs like the Regional Autonomy
Monitoring Committee (KPPOD) are calling it what it is: betrayal. The party
that once saved the people’s voice is now helping to stuff a gag in its mouth.
They’ve traded democratic values for power, and if you’ve read enough
history—or enough horror stories—you know how this one ends.
It ends badly.
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The Monster Has a Long Memory
The fight over how Indonesia picks its regional leaders isn’t
new. It’s a monster that’s been sleeping in the basement for a long time, and
every so often, somebody gets the bright idea to go down there and poke it with
a stick.
During the Guided Democracy era under Sukarno, Presidential
Decree No. 6 of 1959 turned the DPRD into window dressing. They could propose
candidates, sure, but the real power stayed with the president and the Home
Affairs Minister. Regional heads were puppets on strings that ran all the way
back to Jakarta. They weren’t accountable to the people they governed. They
were accountable to the Great Leader of the Revolution, and if you didn’t like
it, well, tough shit.
Then came the New Order—and if you think Guided Democracy
was bad, buckle up, because Soeharto’s 32-year reign made it look like a church
picnic. Law No. 5 of 1974 cemented centralization like concrete poured over a
body. Regional heads were “elected” by the DPRD, but calling it an election was
like calling a lynching a neck-stretching exercise. The candidates were
handpicked from the center—usually military men or loyal bureaucrats—and the
DPRD, packed with Golkar and ABRI (the armed forces), rubber-stamped whatever
Jakarta told them to stamp.
Accountability flowed up, not down. The regional heads
answered to the president, not to the people, and the people? They could go
pound sand. This political alienation—this sense that the system didn’t give a
rat’s ass about ordinary folks—was gasoline waiting for a match. In 1998, the
match got lit, and Soeharto’s regime went up like a pile of dry kindling.
After the fall, there was a wave of regional autonomy
demands. Law No. 22 of 1999 gave the DPRD full power to select regional heads,
and you know what happened? It turned into a goddamn political marketplace.
Council members’ votes went to the highest bidder. They’d get “quarantined” in
luxury hotels—and by quarantined, I mean wined and dined and bribed—to keep
them from defecting. The whole thing was a mess, a circus, a feeding frenzy.
So in 2004, they tried something different. Law No. 32
introduced direct regional elections—one person, one vote. Let the people
decide. It was expensive, sure. Sometimes it got ugly. But it restored
something important: legitimacy. The Constitutional Court even weighed in,
saying direct elections were the concrete expression of Article 1 Paragraph (2)
of the 1945 Constitution. Sovereignty, they said, lies in the hands of the
people.
And now they want to take it back.
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The Devil’s in the Details
Here’s where it gets tricky, and where the lawyers and
politicians start playing word games that would make a con artist blush.
Article 18 Paragraph (4) of the 1945 Constitution says: “Governors,
regents, and mayors as heads of provincial, regency, and city governments shall
be elected democratically.”
Notice what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say “elected directly
by the people,” like Article 6A does for presidential elections. That little
gap—that tiny crack in the language—is where the monster slips through.
The supporters of the DPRD mechanism argue that “democratically”
can mean election through representatives. They point to Pancasila’s fourth
principle, which emphasizes deliberation and representation. So, they say,
shifting from direct to indirect elections is perfectly constitutional. Hell,
it’s their job to make that call.
The opponents—and I’m one of them, in case you couldn’t
tell—say this is bullshit wrapped in legalese. They argue from original intent
and the principle of non-regression in human rights. You can’t take back a
political right once it’s been granted. You can’t put the genie back in the
bottle. Doing so violates the spirit of Reformasi, that brief shining moment
when it looked like Indonesia might actually build something decent.
The Constitutional Court has hinted at where they stand.
Legal scholar M. Yasin al Arif, writing in 2017, pointed to the
single-candidate case, where the Court insisted people must have choices via
ballots, not just acclamation by parties or the DPRD. The Court’s view, reading
between the lines, is that the Constitution’s “spirit” involves direct public
involvement in choosing leaders.
And then there’s the practical problem, the one that should
keep anyone with half a brain awake at night: checks and balances. The
DPRD is a legislative body with oversight functions. If it also gets to pick
the executive, what’s to stop it from turning into a hostage situation?
Regional heads would be at the mercy of the people who elected them, and
oversight would become just another arena for political deals and payoffs.
The whole structure collapses into a goddamn house of cards.
---
The Corruption That Crawls in the Dark
The government says direct elections fuel corruption because
they’re too expensive. And sure, there’s some truth to that. But what they’re
not telling you—what they’re hoping you won’t figure out—is that shifting to
the DPRD doesn’t solve the problem. It makes it worse. Much, much worse.
In their 2010 book Korupsi Pemilu di Indonesia,
Ibrahim Z. Fahmy Badoh and Abdullah Dahlan break it down like this:
In direct elections, the bribery is retail. You’ve got “dawn
attacks”—candidates handing out small cash payments or basic goods worth tens
of thousands of rupiah. It’s mass-scale, hitting thousands or even millions of
voters, but the outcomes are uncertain. People take the money and vote however
they damn well please. It’s visible, it’s messy, and the main beneficiaries are
poor people getting short-term gains. Not great, but at least it’s out in the
open.
In DPRD elections, the bribery is wholesale. You’re not
buying individual voters. You’re buying council members. The scale is
smaller—dozens to a hundred members—but the value is enormous. We’re talking
cash in suitcases, project promises, the whole nine yards. The outcomes are far
more certain because party factions can control their members. And it happens
behind closed doors, in hotel rooms and private meetings, where nobody can see
and nobody can prove a damn thing.
The benefits don’t trickle down to the people. They go
straight to party elites and council members, who get fat while the rest of the
country starves.
“First, local oligarchies would strengthen as regional
leadership is determined by elite networks and capital power. Second, regional
heads’ accountability weakens as they orient toward the DPRD rather than
citizens,” said election politics expert Tunjung Sulaksono from Muhammadiyah
University of Yogyakarta. The man knows what he’s talking about, and if you’ve
got any sense, you’ll listen.
Want proof? Look at the 2004 selection of Senior Deputy
Governor of Bank Indonesia, won by Miranda Goeltom. Visitor checks—that’s code
for bribes, in case you’re wondering—were distributed to members of DPR
Commission IX. Twenty-six members from various factions became suspects. The
bribery was systematic, running through faction leaders like poison through a
water supply. It proved that parliament can be a fertile breeding ground for
collective corruption.
“The large number of council members named suspects in one
alleged corruption case indicates that political transactions have become
systemic,” said Adnan Topan Husodo, Deputy Coordinator of Indonesia Corruption
Watch (ICW). And he’s right. When you’ve got that many people caught with their
hands in the cookie jar, it’s not a few bad apples. It’s the whole damn
orchard.
If even tightly monitored national strategic positions can
be bought so easily, imagine what happens in provincial, regency, and city
DPRDs, where oversight is weaker and the darkness runs deeper. Returning
regional elections to the DPRD is like reopening auction markets across
hundreds of regions. It’s the Miranda Goeltom case times a thousand.
Then there’s the 2003 East Java grant funds case. East Java
DPRD Vice Chair Sahat Tua Simandjuntak was proven to have taken bribes from
grant allocations to community groups—grants that council members were trading
like baseball cards. If the DPRD gains the power to elect and oust governors,
their leverage to extort regional budgets becomes absolute. Governors won’t
dare refuse corrupt project demands, because they know if they do, they’ll be
impeached or not reselected.
The corruption risks in a DPRD system aren’t just higher.
They’re systemic. They tie regional heads into long-term political contracts,
weaken popular sovereignty, and strengthen oligarchies. It’s a feedback loop of
graft and power, and once it gets going, it’s nearly impossible to stop.
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The Governor-General Returns
With the mandate returned to the DPRD, regional heads would
no longer answer to the people. They’d answer to Jakarta party leaders who give
recommendations and local council members who elect them. You’d see a revival
of bureaucratic leaders distant from the people—modern-day Governor-Generals,
or New Order regional officials in all but name.
Populist programs that help ordinary folks—free education,
free healthcare, the kind of stuff that makes life bearable—would decline. Why?
Because there’d be no political incentive to please local voters. Regional
heads would focus solely on serving their real constituents: party elites and
council members.
The people would be left out in the cold, and the monsters
would be back in charge.
---
Sometimes dead is better, the old-timers say. And they’re
right. Some things—bad ideas, corrupt systems, political monsters—should stay
buried. But every generation has to learn this lesson the hard way, it seems.
They dig up the graves, thinking they’ve found treasure, and what they get
instead is a plague.
Indonesia’s about to open that door again. And God help them
when they see what comes crawling out.
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