Jakarta, IO – Apparently, the decision of the government, the House of Representatives (DPR), and the Regional Representative Council (DPD) to remove the Draft Law on General Elections (RUU Pemilu) from the priority list of the 2021 National Legislation Program (Prolegnas) will have an enduring effect.
Early on, the government argued that the current Election Law and Regional Election Law, Law No. 1 of 2017 concerning General Elections and Law No. 1 of 2015 concerning the Election of Governors, Regents, and Mayors, had been implemented effectively during the examination of the 2019 Simultaneous Elections and 2020 Simultaneous Regional Elections.
The Regional Election Law’s simultaneous model must be implemented according to the existing schedule before making any changes. However, the government took other measures for change, ones which did not involve legislative modifications or legislative reviews but rather the issuance of administrative regulations in lieu of laws (Perppu).
The regulation was claimed to be necessary to organize elections for a number of new autonomous regions in Papua and West Papua, including the executive’s need to make subjective emergency contingency plans, such as the pliability of political parties serial numbers in the election that come from the parliamentary seat bearer and the start time of the campaign period.
The government has even proposed a Perppu to move the simultaneous regional elections from November 2024 to September 2024, which, in fact, was the chosen date of February 14 based on consideration of the upcoming November regional elections.
Oddly enough, since the Perppu on Elections and the Perppu on Regional Elections surfaced, discussion on the issuing of the Perppu—a legal instrument issued by the President to address urgent matters—seemed like a prepared and planned agenda of the Minister of Home Affairs and Commission II of the DPR, which then raised concerns regarding the Perppu’s urgencies.
Not to mention a number of laws (fast-track legislation) swiftly enacted by the government and the DPR, including the National Capital Law and the revision of the Constitutional Court Law. If everyone is on board about the content of the Perppu, why didn’t the legislators immediately adjust the Perppu from the beginning?
Judicial Politicization
In addition to this phenomenon, the removal of the Election Bill has affected the rising judicialization of politics, regulating the 2024 simultaneous elections. The parties have relocated the policy-making advocacy space from the parliament building to the Constitutional Court (MK) trial rooms. Judges and the judiciary are involved in resolving political issues, something which should be the responsibility of political actors.
The Constitutional Court’s evaluation of the Election Law and Regional Election Law is like the swarming mold during the rainy season. As of October 1, 2023, the Constitutional Court was recorded to have examined Law No. 7 of 2017 more than 120 times, making it the most evaluated law throughout the existence of the Constitutional Court. Meanwhile, the Regional Election Law and all of its amendments came in as the second-most-evaluated law by the Constitutional Court. This evaluation trend occurs not because of the high level of trust in the Constitutional Court but because the Court is the only space available to make changes to election arrangements, because of closed, unreachable legislators.
The complexity of the massive simultaneous 2024 election aroused controversy in 2024, as there have been ongoing legal efforts to test the judicial norms underlying its implementation, as occurred in the DPR and DPRD election system testing for case 114/PUU-XX/2022.