Mediaboss Marketing

Ziad Salim Mataram

The Jakarta Post

Publication Date : 20-05-2014

Listening to the complaints about vote-buying by some of the sore losers of the recent legislative election or watching some of them going nuts after losing, one could almost be forgiven for thinking that the election had been a total disgrace or Indonesias democracy had gone to the dogs.

But the following points are more than enough to dispel these notions: 1) the antics and semantics of the losers do not explain vote-buying but indicates how much money they had spent with nothing to show for it afterward; 2) losers explain, complain and whine while the winners keep mum, go home and celebrate; 3) as long as the concept (and practice) of secret ballots remains sacred, voters can never be bought. The incessant complaints about vote-buying are nothing more than sour grapes, post-election fatigue or a pesta demokrasi (fiesta of democracy) hangover.

More seriously, the critics of so-called vote-buying missed some important points on the relation between money, politics and democracy: Unlike people in the street, who overwhelmingly believe that politics is dirty, they assume and regurgitate that money is dirty, while politics is noble and democracy is a moral system and both are tainted by the dirty money, not realizing that with or without money, politics is dirty because in the pursuit of the holy grail of politics (i.e. government positions), politicians use every trick in the book and every means at their disposal to get what they want.

As Harold Lasswell (1936) wrote, politics is about who gets what, when and how, and the what in that definition is unmistakably money. The government collects it from the people, spends it recklessly and will give it back to the people, usually around election time, in the form of subsidies, social assistance and so on to influence the voters, of course.

So, not only is politics dirty but the whole business of governing is dirty because in both instances, you have dirty politicians playing with other peoples money or the money they never earned. This deadly embrace is the reason why corruption is inevitable and endemic, as the steady parade of high-profile politicians to Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) headquarters indicates.

Money, they say, is the root of all evil but the fact of the matter is, it is only so because we dont have enough of it. To run an election you need money, and the government itself also needs money to run. Money isnt called a liquid asset for nothing. Even spiritual institutions, which mostly look down on money, cant get enough of it and, quietly, they make you accept that even to be God-loving, you have to have enough money to donate.

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Vote-buying and democracy