Party Politics and the Media in Indonesia: Creating a New Dual Identity for Golkar (Author Abstract‪)‬

In 2004 the Golkar Party (hereafter: Golkar) emerged as the strongest party in Indonesia's second legislative election of the post-Soeharto era. With 21.58 per cent of the vote the party, which between 1971 and 1998 had served as the electoral vehicle of the authoritarian New Order regime, finished on top of the voting tally, even though it had actually lost some votes in comparison to the 1999 election. That Golkar was able to reclaim top spot from the 1999 winner, Megawati Soekarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia-Perjuangan, PDI-P), had many reasons, (1) but one that has been widely overlooked in most analyses of the elections has been the role of the mass media. This neglect is astonishing because the increasing influence of the Indonesian media in shaping political opinion has already been well-documented (Asia Foundation 2003; Luwarso, Samsuri, and Siswowiharjo 2004). While Indonesia's young electoral democracy may not yet be a "media democracy", as Meyer (2002) has cynically labelled the consolidated democratic regimes in Europe, (2) it is undeniable that television and newspapers and, to a lesser extent, radio and the Internet, do indeed exert substantial influence on people's perceptions of politics. In the words of Kingsbury (2005, p. 118), "[t]he media in Indonesia became increasingly influential in the post-Soeharto period, but they were and remain one influence among many".