Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 50
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Popular Culture Review
three motorcycles. This campaign strategy worked especially well in the Carenang
sub-district in which twenty precincts and four villages delivered all their votes to
Golkar. Overall, Golkar raised its share of the votes from 57% (in the 1992 election)
to 72%.^ Thus, it seems apparent that the cartoonist was targeting a serious defect
of the political system Suharto imposed on Indonesia after his troops took over the
country (in response to an alleged communist party coup attempt) in 1965.
It is too easy for Americans to criticize Indonesians who sell their votes for
material gain. I like to ask my students whether they would vote for a different
presidential candidate in response to a rival party’s promise to install a satellite
television dish on their dormitory building (plus hook every room up to it) free of
charge if everyone who lived there voted for that party’s candidate. (This was an
actual situation reported^ by a graduate student doing research in Indonesia in
1997; her building’s residents yielded to the temptation!) Very few of my students
claim that they would turn down such an election campaign bribe offer. I hope a
U.S. candidate like Donald Trump doesn’t read this, buy a satellite television
company, and launch a successful presidential campaign!
The fact that the Indonesian government promoted the 1997 elections as a
“festival of democracy” probably gave Tusuaria the idea of using the Hindu temple
festival ceremony as a metaphor in this cartoon. That this cheerful government
slogan is a shameless example of doublethink is made clear by the following facts:
1. Only two opposition parties were allowed to contest the
election against the government-sponsored Golkar party.
2. When Megawati Sukarnoputri appeared to pose a
potentially serious challenge as leader of one of these
opposition parties, she was deposed from her position by a
“government-backed coup”.^
3. Direct cirticism of government policies or government
posit