Indonesian poll’s predilection for the pretty and the pragmatic

April 5, 2014 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events

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Yet it was Suryadharma who recruited Angel, who has acted in three lingerie-horror movies including The Moans of the Virgin Ghost with an American porn star.

Angel is one of a surprisingly large cohort of what the Indonesian blogosphere has derisively dubbed ”caleg cantik”, or beautiful candidates, recruited for their vote-catching sex appeal. There are 50 or more running, prompting one commentator to bemoan a ”bimbo time bomb” in the national parliament.

Fadlon.

Fadlon. Photo: Michael Bachelard

She is in politics, she says, to reach out to more people, to have a useful life, to build villages. Why else would she run in what in Australian parlance we’d call a marginal, if not unwinnable, seat?

”If it is a difficult election to win, people will respect me more,” she says.

But the contradictions embedded in her candidacy are obvious. On her Christian past, she insists it should not matter to Muslim voters ”because religion should be personal”.

But she’s running for a party whose reason for being is to put the religion into public policy. And in her spiel to villagers she trumpets: ”Do you want a non-Muslim running the country?”

Indonesia’s sexual politics, though, are nothing if not complex. Secret marriages, premarital sex and prostitution are widespread and tolerated. Viewed in this light, Angel Lelga may be little more confounding than Indonesia itself.

Prita Mulyasari is also a celebrity candidate but her fame comes from social media. A middle-class mother from Jakarta’s suburbs, she was jailed in 2008 because she complained about her treatment in a hospital where mumps were misdiagnosed as dengue fever.

After the hospital refused to admit its error or hand over her medical records, Prita’s complaint went viral. The symptoms of a sick health system were depressingly familiar to many Indonesians. The hospital’s response was to sue for defamation. Prita was jailed for 22 days during the investigation, with a murderer, a drug addict and a car thief. ”My eldest child was two years old and the youngest eight months, and I was still breastfeeding the baby … they would not even let me say goodbye to my kids,” she says.

A likely explanation is that the hospital paid police and prosecutors to throw the book at her. Judges are likewise able to be bought and Prita lost the case at the first hearing and was fined 200 million rupiah ($20,000).

For four years she fought the hospital through various courts and through social media until a judicial review in 2012 finally found in her favour.

Megawati Sukarnoputri, chief of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, PDI-P, also lent her support, and now Prita is seeking election in the Banten III district outside Jakarta. Her hope is that, in parliament, she could see improvements in the defamation law, the health system, the legal system and prisons.

Nearly 2000 kilometres from Jakarta, Fadlon is a candidate in an electoral race that makes lesser men quail.

Until 10 years ago, the GAM rebels of Aceh, Indonesia’s westernmost province, waged a fierce war for independence. Fadlon, a former local commander, is now seeking a provincial seat for Partai Aceh, the political party that emerged from GAM.

As a local party, Partai Aceh cannot contest seats in the national parliament, so since the 2009 election it has teamed up with a national party. For 2014, though, Fadlon’s party has made the strangest possible choice of political partner – its one-time deadly enemy, former Indonesian general and Suharto son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto.

Now the former general is a credible candidate for the Indonesian presidency, and his party, Gerindra, desperately needs Acehnese votes. Last month, a former GAM leader, Aceh’s deputy governor Muzakkir Manaf, made an agreement with Prabowo that some call a coalition, and he joined Gerindra’s advisory board. He is telling Acehnese people to vote for Gerindra in parliament, and for Prabowo as president. Prabowo in turn apologised for army misbehaviour during the conflict.

But the tie-up – described by some as ”like oil and water” – will test even the most loyal Partai Aceh supporters in an electorate that’s already tense after two candidates and a number of civilians have been killed in political violence in past weeks.