DURING the same period that the Indian general election was going on in April and May, voters in Indonesia, South Africa and Thailand also exercised their franchise. Barring the flawed electoral exercise in Thailand, the polling in the other two countries was free and generally non-controversial. There were no surprises emerging out of the ballot box in all three countries. In South Africa, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) won as expected but with a reduced margin. In Indonesia, the fight was once again between President Joko Widodo and Prabowo Subianto. The two had come face to face five years ago with Joko, or Jokowi as he is known, winning hands down.
Jokowi is known to be an honest politician. His government invested heavily in expanding social programmes, including making health care more accessible to the poor, and is credited with building roads and airports in remote parts of the Indonesian archipelago. Before becoming President, Jokowi earned his reputation as an able administrator as Governor of Jakarta. During his first term as President, he made further efforts to make Jakarta a more liveable city.
Prabowo, a former military man, has cultivated a strongman image. He was discharged from the army despite being at the time the son-in-law of former President Suharto. He was found guilty of serious human rights abuses. This was his fourth attempt at winning the presidential election. His candidature was backed by former Suharto loyalists and parties that want a stronger role for the armed forces in the affairs of the country. Prabowo, who is not known for his religiosity, had started tailoring his views to encompass the views of radical Islamist groups.
Jokowi had, however, stitched up a broad alliance of leading secular and mainstream religious parties to counter his rival’s tactics. Prabowo’s main alliance was with fundamentalist Islamist groupings that, in the last couple of years, had gained considerable strength by targeting minorities. These groups were responsible for the dismissal and jailing of the Governor of Jakarta and a close associate of Jokowi, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, or Ahok. He was convicted on trumped-up charges of “blasphemy”. Ahok is of Chinese ancestry and is a Christian.
The general election in Indonesia, which was held in April, was one of the largest exercises of its kind and rivalled that of India. However, unlike in India, the vote was conducted in a single day. There were 190 million registered voters, and a record 2,45,000 candidates contested in the presidential, parliamentary and local body elections. Like in the Indian election, social media and circulation of fake news played a big role. Most of the activity on Facebook and Instagram was in favour of Prabowo. The opposition alleged that Jokowi was a “closet Christian” with Chinese ancestry. Jokowi was previously alleged to have had secret links with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which remains banned despite the end of military rule in the late 1990s. More than a million PKI activists and sympathisers were killed in the Central Intelligence Agency-backed coup in Indonesia in 1965.
For the 2019 election, Jokowi formed a tactical alliance with Nahdaltul Islama, one of the country’s oldest Islamist groupings. Jokowi had the backing of three Islamist parties, while Prabowo, despite protestations of being a born-again Muslim, had the support of only two Islamist parties. Prabowo had pledged to implement an overtly Islamist agenda if elected to office. The Indonesian province of Aceh has already implemented Sharia law.
The results of the Indonesian elections were officially announced in the third week of May. Jokowi won 55 per cent of the votes, 17 million votes more than Prabowo. Prabowo turned out to be a sore loser, refusing to accept the results, and his supporters staged a violent agitation in central Jakarta causing widespread destruction of property. Six demonstrators were killed. The opposition has said that it will contest the result in court. This will be Jokowi’s last term in office as the Indonesian Constitution allows a person only two consecutive five-year terms as President. He will be in a position to act more decisively this time and face up to fundamentalist groupings that brought Jakarta to a standstill several times during his previous tenure.
ANC Victory margin falls
In South Africa, the ANC under Cyril Ramaphosa registered a comfortable victory in arithmetical terms. But it was a setback in political terms. After the votes were counted in the election held in the second week of May, the ruling party got 58 per cent of the votes, down from 62 per cent in the last election. It is the first time since the collapse of apartheid that the ANC has gone below the symbolically important threshold of 60 per cent. The party got 70 per cent of the vote in the 2009 election. The ANC just about managed to hold on to the key province of Gauteng, where most of the country’s black middle class reside.
Ramaphosa, who replaced Jacob Zuma as leader of the party and the government, ran his campaign on an anti-corruption platform. The nepotism and cronyism that characterised the ANC rule in the last decade alienated a large swathe of black voters. This was reflected in the voter turnout figures. It was only 66 per cent this time compared with 73 per cent in the 2014 election. In earlier elections, black voters used to wait patiently for hours to vote for the ANC, which freed them from the shackles of apartheid and second-class citizenship.
But the economic rewards that the end of apartheid was supposed to bring remain a pipe dream for the vast majority of South Africans. It is said that South Africa is a country where the First World and the Third World continue to coexist, albeit peacefully for the time being. The left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, which calls for radical economic reforms, including the redistribution of land, increased its tally of votes and seats. But with just 10.7 per cent of the vote, it only occupies the third position in Parliament. However, it has almost doubled its vote share in this election.
The party, under the leadership of Julius Malema, a former leader of the radical ANC youth wing, now has 44 seats in Parliament. The main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (D.A.), holds 84 seats. The vote share of the centrist D.A. has also gone down in the 2019 election. It had experienced a surge in 2014 after the party leadership went to a black politician. The D.A. is viewed as representing the white minority, but many black middle-class voters have turned to the party.
Some ANC leaders have credited their victory to the leadership of Ramaphosa and his anti-corruption campaign. They claim that without him at the helm, the ANC would have got only around 40 per cent of the vote. Other ANC leaders do not want to give the credit to Ramaphosa. They say that even the discredited Zuma played a role in mobilising his Zulu mass base in favour of the party. ANC Secretary General Ace Magashule said the credit should go to the party and not to any specific individual.
After the results were announced, Ramaphosa pledged to rid the party of “bad and deviant tendencies”. He promised not to appoint leaders “who fill their own pockets”. But he had to reappoint his Deputy President, David Mabuza, despite accusations of graft being levelled against him. Mabuza was the man responsible for Ramaphosa’s elevation to the presidency in 2017. He had backed him at the eleventh hour and handed Ramaphosa the leadership of the ANC. The next four years will be crucial for South Africa. The economy is floundering and people are becoming increasingly restive. The call for radical land reforms is getting louder.
Flawed exercise in Thailand
The most controversial electoral exercise was the one conducted in army-ruled Thailand. From the outset, it was evident that the election would be deeply flawed. The process lasted even longer than that in India. Thais had gone to the polls on March 24, but the Prime Minister was elected only in the first week of June. There was initial confusion about the number of seats won by the various parties. The Election Commission had allowed many new parties, many of them propped up by the military, to compete in the elections.
The armed forces had prepared an uneven playing field for the opposition. Many opposition parties and prominent individuals were banned from contesting on one flimsy pretext or the other. The military-backed Palang Pracharat Party, despite the acquiescence of the Election Commission, could only come second. In a hung parliament, the Pheu Thai party, owing allegiance to the former Prime Minister and telecom magnate Thaksin Shinawatra, got the highest number of seats despite all the hurdles placed in its way.
The new Thai Constitution drafted under the supervision of the military junta was tailored to ensure that parties with popular support would not be able to form the government. A 250-member Senate, appointed by the military, has equal voting rights as the elected members of the 500-strong Lower House. Their job is to ensure that the military’s agenda is not derailed by a popularly elected Lower House. The military-backed party in the Lower House has already managed to induce defections from opposition parties by offering lucrative ministerial and other governmental positions.
The current military leader and coup leader, Prayuth Chan-ocha, was confirmed as Prime Minister in a parliamentary vote in the first week of June. He got 500 votes after indulging in horse-trading. His sole rival, Thanathorn Juangroongruankit, got 244 votes. Prayuth’s coalition will be an unstable one as it consists of representatives from 20 parties. As of now, Prayuth has a slim majority in the Lower House. The newly elected lawmakers have shown that they can be easily induced to defect to the highest bidder. Thanathorn, the leader of the Future Forward Party, has taken a strong stand against the military, which is backed by the monarchy. He is the new rising star of Thai politics.
“Today we cannot stop the dictatorship but we have not been beaten,” he said after the vote. “It will be a long way to democracy for Thailand, but we believe the people will win in the end.” Thanathorn, who has a large support base in the capital, has threatened to launch street protests if meaningful democracy is not restored soon.
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