The discourse on the need to increase the level of
parliamentary threshold — the minimum threshold that is required to gain
seats in the parliament — from 2.5 percent in the 2009 legislative
elections to 5 percent in the 2014 elections in the revised elections
law has been increasingly discussed.
The main argument to
increase the parliamentary threshold is to simplify the number of
political parties, while at the same time improving the quality of
democracy and the effectiveness of the presidential government.The problem is that the extreme multiparty system is considered as one culprit that inhibits the workings of the presidential government and disrupts the quality of democracy.
This
condition raises important questions. First, how does the fragmented
multiparty system influence the political stability and the work of the
presidential system in Indonesia? Juan Linz and Arturo Velenzuela
(1994) build an interesting thesis that the presidential system
applied over a multiparty political structure tends to result in a
conflict between presidential and parliamentary institutions and will
present an unstable democracy.
This view is also strengthened by
Scott Mainwaring and Matthew Soberg Shugart (1997), who believe that
this combination will give birth to a minority president and a
divided government, a condition in which the president is very difficult
to get political support in the parliament. In 1998, the reform has led to democracy and the purification of the presidential system in Indonesia.
However,
the formulation of the purer presidentialism mandated is also
difficult to implement when it is combined with the multiparty political
structure.The combination of the vulnerable presidential
system and the multiparty system had been proven strong enough in the
five years of the administration of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) —
Jusuf Kalla (JK), as well as in the one-year of the era of the
SBY-Boediono administration.
At least, there are three political
facts that portrait the instability and vulnerability of the government.
First, the control of the parliament over the government is so strong,
so the policies of the President is very difficult to gain political
support in the parliament. The questionnaire rights and the
threat of withdrawing support for example have always been tools for the
parties in the House to negotiate with the President. The second
fact, in the process of forming and reshuffling the Cabinet, the
political parties — especially the parties in the House of
Representatives — have cut the prerogative right of the President to
intervene. The third fact, the support of the government coalition of
political parties is not effective.
Although quantitatively the
percentage of a coalition of parties supporting the government is very
high — 75 percent of the seats in the House — it is very fragile and
easily cracked. The Bank Century case becomes the clearest portrait of
the fragility.This political reality is proof of the
vulnerability of the combination of presidential and multiparty systems.
Moreover, the personality and leadership style of Yudhoyono are ones
that are compromising and accommodating.
This is what has caused
the presidentialism in the era of the SBY-JK and SBY-Boediono
administrations be run half-heartedly (the half-hearted
presidentialism). Then, is there any compromise that still allows the
establishment of parties and that ensures the government runs
effectively and stable? The multiparty extreme (the high number of
political parties), as it is now, needs to be pushed into a simple
multiparty system, especially in regards to the number of parties in the
parliament, on a daily basis, the President deals with the parties in
the parliament, not the parties participating in the elections.
Therefore,
what needs to be simplified is the number of parties in the parliament,
not the number participating in the elections, to guarantee democracy
and freedom.At least, there is a five-tiered strategy of
simplifying the parliament through institutional engineering: to apply
the district electoral system (plurality/majority system) or mixed
systems (mixed proportional); to minimize the number of electoral
districts (district magnitude); to apply the threshold of seats in the
parliament (parliamentary threshold); to simplify the number of factions
in the parliament through the tightening of requirements for the
formation of a faction (factional threshold), as well as making
regulations to be directed to the formation of two political blocs
(supporters and opposition).
The implementation of the electoral
system — the First Past The Post system (FPTP), in which one
representative is elected from each electoral district — based on proven
experience of some countries will limit the number of parties.
An
alternative solution if the district system still experiences
resistance is to combine the district system and the proportional to
become the mixed system. The German experience provides some lessons that are interesting enough for Indonesia. Strategies
to reduce the scope of electoral districts will also be a catalyst
toward the simplification of political parties. Because the smaller the
scale of electoral districts and the less number of seats contested, the
smaller also the opportunity for small parties to gain seats.
The
increase of the parliamentary threshold in the 2014 elections will also
simplify the parliament. If the parliamentary threshold, is
consistently applied, the number of political parties will continue to
decrease until the ideal number, approximately five political parties in
parliament. After that, the need to simplify the number of factions through the tightening of requirements for the formation of factions.
Ideally,
there are only about three or four factions in the House so that the
government can run more effectively. The next stage, the factions in the
House need to be engineered institutionally into the “two- party
system” in the parliament, that is, the two blocs of permanent
coalitions in the parliament, the coalition government and opposition
supporters. The main objective is to simplify the polarization of
political forces in the parliament to make the political process more
efficient and stable.
Hanta Yuda A.R., Jakarta | Opinion | Tue, August 03 2010
The writer is a political analyst at The Indonesian Institute.
[PS: For Constitutional Law IP Students, Submit your summary based on this article. Due date is 28 of JUne 2013]
