Old Post: Horse-Trading and Coalition Building in the 1950s
This post was originally from August 8, 2018. As everyone interested in Indonesian politics (including me) waits on pins and needles for the announcement of presidential running-mates and the determination of whether there will be a third national ticket in the 2019 elections (see my previous post on vice-presidents here), I was thinking about the history of horse-trading to build coalitions in Indonesia. For years, there was not much of this involved in the presidency. Sukarno was chosen as president by parliamentary acclamation, and he theoretically stood above parties. Although Suharto had an unambiguous affiliation to Golkar—which was technically not billed as a party but as a “non-party vehicle”—by the 1992 round of national elections, it was PPP, not Golkar, that formally put him up for president in the national parliament.…