6 - Legislative Contests

Summary

This chapter examines the Indonesian labor movement’s unusual strategy of running union cadres as legislative candidates with a large number of non-programmatic parties. It begins by assessing parties’ motivations for entering into these partnerships with unions, tracking the evolving strategies of the two parties that engaged most systematically with unions. It then turns its attention to SPN and FSPMI, the two union federations that had the strongest organizational commitment to running legislative candidates in the period between 2004 and 2014. In both cases, the initial decision to engage in the legislative arena was necessarily taken by the central leadership. But, in SPN’s case, the poor showing of its candidates in the 2009 elections created internal friction, and the union quickly backed away from its organizational commitment to electoral politics. By contrast, FSPMI deepened its engagement in the 2014 legislative elections, resulting in the election of two union cadres to local legislative office in Bekasi. Unperturbed by the setbacks it experienced during the first Jokowi presidency, it again refined its institutional strategy for 2019.