Indonesian Celebrities Act in Political Roles

By Lauren Gumbs

Indonesian politics favours the bold, but for the beautiful there is always a place on the stage. 

Political parties are becoming outlandishly personality orientated with many offering up unqualified celebrities as candidates for office, in a bid to use popularity to supplement their image.

Political parties or ‘parpol’ increasingly resemble products whose selling point is not policy but personality, nurturing celebrity culture popularism as advantageous to positive public perceptions.

The Indonesian version of Wikipedia even has an extensive list of celebrity politicians who have served at all levels of government, local, regional, and legislative.

The phenomenon has not escaped political observers in Indonesia, who have commented for several years on celebrity politicians as a rising phenomenon, well aware that what celebrities lack in credibility they make up for in benefaction to party mentors.

In a recent Jakarta Globe article Pitan Daslani wrote that candidate grooming is depressingly absent, which leaves Indonesia with the problem of finding the suitable candidates to fill positions in the legislature and executive.

“Political parties are mandated by law to conduct proper civic education and groom members to fill legislative and executive bureaucratic positions. Instead, they are simply riding on the popularity of celebrities without even bothering to upgrade the qualities of these vote-getters,” Daslani said.

The practice of hijacking a celebrity persona who will project their star power onto a party reaffirms practices of clientelism and constrains democratisation within exclusive webs of patronage.

Hiring the right actors consolidates party appeal at the expense of democratising access.

Last year 51 celebrities were listed as legislative candidates for the 2014 general election.

Kenawas and Fitriani, writing in The East Asia Forum (EAF), gave three reasons for the phenomenon: weak implementation of the rule of law; ‘idol syndrome’ or personalistic voting behaviour; and weak party institutionalisation.

They said one of the core problems lies with Indonesia’s political parties.

“Most parties are catchall parties whose main priorities are to win elections and fund party operations, rather than to establish fair and open selection and promotion mechanisms.”

They did see it as a way however, that female politicians could gain increased representation.

Only the pretty ones of course.

“Populism is seen as a way of enabling political parties to fill the quota of 30 per cent women candidates that is required under electoral law. In raw numbers, the rise of celebrity and family-network politics has certainly increased the proportion of women in parliament.”

Yet the fact that political entry is facilitated for VIPs, with little experience in governance, translates across to a general de-legitimisation of democratic processes as well as the changing nature of contemporary political patronage.

While political dynasties are on-trend in many regions, celebrity politics shows how votes are won legitimately through staged popularity contests.

Parties are casting for a role rather than recruiting meritorious political and academic representatives who have the skills and expertise to address pressing social and economic issues.

Yet celebrities on the party frontline are not all charm and glamour. It is risky business putting neophytes in the glare of the electorate and celebrity politicians are prone to the sort of slip ups that come with having little political knowledge or credibility.

Then again, when one of Indonesia’s mainstream dailies reduces its political reporting to commentary on Joko Widodo trying to find the bathroom at Surabaya airport, it’s clear that catering to the lowest common denominator is not just seedy but also savvy.

The appointment of celebrities to spruik party brands however, comes at a cost to democratisation as the focus on packaging draws attention away from policy and at even precludes the need for it.

Instead of a marketplace of ideas where freedom of political speech and communication produces informed citizens, politics literally becomes a market.

Leadership positions and successful campaigns go to the highest bidder, and a patronising distraction away from issues to instead gravitate around personality, impoverishes an informed political community.

Aliran, or stream politics, refers to clusters of ideologically similar groups, but due to the effects of political fragmentation, these coalitions have been replaced by a tendency to enact more atomised patronage networks whose diversity is represented in cults of personality as opposed to essentialism or ideological differences.

The fragmentation of aliran politics created a gap that fandom and personality popularism has filled, albeit with the help of mass media.

These are the days of our lives; when strongmen are replaced by songmen. Less game of thrones, more Indonesian idol.

 Lauren is a writer and Human Rights student.