The Troubled Democracy

By: Andika Putraditama

Three days ago there was something interesting on my Facebook news feed. I got a message from the Facebook Site Governance that asked me to join the group and cast my vote on the Facebook Principles and Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibility documents. Apparently, the founder of this phenomenal social networking site thinks that the population of the Facebook Nation has grown so big that it needs a more open and transparent governance. With the population of more than 200 million netizen worldwide, Facebook might become the fifth largest country in the world just ahead Brazil. He believes that a community as large as Facebook now needs a voice in governance. To take a step closer to the Democratic State of Facebook (as Im calling it now), Zuckerberg proposed a more democratic approach to govern Facebook. He proposed two documents that I mentioned earlier and let the netizens gave comments, recommendation and proposals to the original documents. He then made a new draft of the two documents and let us votes on these soon-to-be Facebook Constitution. I really wished our democracy can be that simple and effective. But heres a switch: we spend more and more money on the system, but we got nothing except violence, stagnancy and those eye-poking posters of the candidates all over our streets. I think it is fair to say that those are the accurate snapshots of our democracy practices today. Challenged by the present condition of our democracy, we might want to ask whether the current architecture of our democracy

is just hideous or is it something real that we can put our hope on. Our current system of direct election seems to reduce the dominance of the power elite. Today, everyone can join the hype and be the candidates. Consequently, now we have legislative election candidates from literally any backgroundfrom a parking man to a media mogul. Even a criminal with written record of smuggling weeds joined the competition. If that does count, then various backgrounds will have a whole new meaning for our democracy. Those might be a good example to show how the principle of universal coverage of democracy practiced in Indonesia, but the downside of having too many doors open in our system is that we can no longer have a credible quality control to filters our legislative candidates. Many, if not most, of the legislative candidates are

inexperienced, lack of basic knowledge of legislature activities, or simply uneducated. Today, we have quite a number of candidates that comes from non-political background, including those who are still very young in age and many more are entertainers and comedians with no experience in politics. Sure they are full of ideals and fresh ideas, but real politic needs more than just ideals and ideas. Our democracy should not be this big and expensive joke like we saw in the last four months. What await them for the next four years is a noble yet delicate works. It requires no less than adequate legal drafting ability, an understanding on how our political system works and comprehensive understanding of issues that wait to be resolved. Will they be able to perform well within the next 4 years? I doubt it.

Another harsh criticism says that todays elected legislators are the product of a troubled society. Those who nominate themselves without knowing what the job is all about and those who chose to vote on candidates they barely knowits like a blind-date. Thus, the outcome is likely to be troublesome too. Consider this too: the people who spent millions or even billions of rupiah to put their faces in those corny political posters on our streets are the same people who will control our legislature activity for the next 4 years. I simply cannot trust them to handle this enormous responsibility while the one on top of their heads must be to cover-up their campaign expenses in any way possible. If one thinks that our recent legislative election was a total disaster, then something has got to be changed. But can we do that while our law-making process soon will be handled by the product of a troubled democracy? This is not an overly pessimistic view or an attempt to underestimate those who soon be elected as legislator. This is a wake-up call for anyone out there who still believes in a better way to practice democracy. Even Facebook has a better way to run their democracy, why cant we fix ours? ***

The writer is a member of Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations and actively engaged in the Student Study Group for International Affairs Parahyangan Catholic University.