Women Talks about Elections: We Want Fair Competition

During a public discussion titled “Kartini Talks about Elections” in Jakarta (04/20), members of the Caucus for Women Politics in Indonesia (KPPI) share their experience when participating in elections as candidates. Two female politicians say that they have been traumatized by the experience of participating three times and failed in every of those elections.

A former candidate from the People’s Conscience Party (Hanura), Rahmawati, says that she deeply disappointed by the Election Monitoring Body (Bawaslu) which fails to prevent and punish money politics in elections. Rahmawati says money politics in elections has rendered her campaign activity during elections useless.

“Bawaslu is practically dysfunctional. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how effective my campaign strategies were, I could never win. It traumatizes me,” says Rahmawati.

Another politician, Nur Hayati, confirms Rahmawati’s complain. Nur Hayati is disappointed by the fact that the government did not provide any legal resolution on electoral frauds and money politics. She is also disappointed by the fact that her party did not provide equal support and facilities to all of its members.

“There is no justice for us. I hope KPPI can provide female candidates in elections with more supports and facilities, for example, independent electoral witness and observers at polling stations. Such help would be very helpful whenever there is a fraud or undue practice that disadvantages us female candidates,” says Nur.

A female parliament member from the Golkar Party, Hetifah Sjaifudian, responds to those complaints by acknowledging that the cost that has to be paid by female candidate to be able to win election is indeed very expensive. Such high-cost politics is enough to be a strong deterrent for many political parties to propose female candidate on their candidates’ list. This is unfortunate because there are many competent and high-quality female politicians in political parties in Indonesia.

“The majority of women in Indonesia do not have steady jobs. They do not know where to find money to participate, and let alone win, in an election,” says Hetifah.

According to Hetifah, this leads to a public perception that all the winning female candidates are mostly rich female politicians or, at the very least, have a rich husband.

The Executive Director of the Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem), Titi Anggraini, says, money politics has rendered the playing field unequal. She says that we need to put an end to money politics by completely prohibiting electoral candidate to give any kind of grant to voters. The government should also provide financial support and subsidies for campaign activities.

“Female candidates face more problems thatn their male counterpart. Many of our friends here said that they have been traumatized by their experience participating in elections. Such trauma is caused by unequal playing field. We hope the government can finally fix this with the new Elections Law Bill that is currently being discussed in the Parliament,” says Titi.