Recently, President Yudhoyono’s son Edhie Baskoro, showed up in Partai Demokrat’s adverts saying that one of the reasons why ‘people vote for the party’ because it is a centrist party (Partai Tengah). “Not an extreme right or an extreme left. Partai Demokrat is a centrist party!” he said.One might wonder, what is a centrist party? Does it mean that the party’s ideology is exactly at the center? Or, in other words, does it mean that the party does not have any tendency at all towards the left (progressive) or the right (conservative)?
I would say that such a position is impossible. There can be a centre-right or a centre-left party, but it is impossible to be in the ‘perfect-centre’. There will always be a tendency in every ideology.
For example, the two strongest parties in the United States, the Democrat and the Republican, also do not have any extreme ideologies. However, we can observe, especially during the current presidential campaign, that the former is ‘centre-left’, while the latter is ‘centre-right’.
Then, what are centre-left and centre-right ideologies? Although it needs a lot of space to define them, we can simply define a ‘centre-left’ ideology as tendencies toward more equal distribution of income, more focus on high growth instead of inflation, social security, promoting civil rights, workers’ rights, and advocating equal gender position. On the other hand, a ‘centre-right’ ideology focuses more on protecting wealth accumulation, macro-economic stability, labour market flexibility, promoting ‘family values’ and ‘religious values’.
Thus, what about Indonesia’s political parties? Some experts and observers have stated that the political parties in our country do not have a clear ideological stand. It makes us, the voters, hard to differentiate the political parties and it subsequently makes them look ‘the same’.
Nevertheless, we can observe their ideology tendencies through issues that they promote. For example, in a recent debate on ‘pornoaksi law’ we know that only two parties, PDI Perjuangan and Partai Damai Sejahtera (PDS), reject the implementation of such law.
We can say that the ‘pornoaksi law’ issue is part of ‘family and religious values’ that belong to the ‘right wing’. Thus, we can also say that the parties which support the ‘pornoaksi law’, including Partai Demokrat, have a ‘centre-right’, or conservative, standing point.
Partai Demokrat’s tendency to the right wing is also clear when the party refused the proposal on forming a house investigation team on fuel price hike. They said that the fuel price hike was necessary to ‘save the state budget’ and to maintain macro-economic stability. This is exactly an issue that a ‘centre-right’ party would stand for.
I have drawn a simple graph (see above) to illustrate the ideological spectrum of various political parties in Indonesia that I have known. However, I could not obtain enough information for many new political parties, except for Hanura and Gerindra. Although these two new comers do not have any records in the parliament, we can guess their ideological tendencies through their top leaders’ background, General Wiranto of Hanura and Prabowo Subianto of Gerindra. The top leaders of the rest of the new parties, unfortunately, do not have familiar backgrounds.In a nutshell, there is no such thing as a ‘centrist party’, Pak Edhie Baskoro. Continue>>
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