Articulation of ”People Power” in Discordant Democracy

Simply put, democracy is people power. There is an irregularity in the people power discourse that has been disclosed by Prof. Amien Rais, so that there is commotion. There is dislocation in the people power discourse that implies our democracy is actually the problem.

The terminology of people power is equivalent to popular control or public control. This control is expected to cover the entire cycle of governance. In Abraham Lincoln\'s slogan, "from", "by", and "for" the people.

In another expression, democracy is the articulation of popular sovereignty. To trace the dislocation, we must be sensitive to the context behind the noise, namely general elections, including presidential and vice presidential election. In terms of articulators, the disclosure of this discourse is carried out by a noble figure of democracy of this country more in the capacity of a participant, rather than observers or commentators.

In this position, disclosing the discourse of people power, is 100 percent legitimate, as a choice of strategy to participate in the democracy that he wants to manifest. The commotion arises when the people power discourse is articulated as a threat or ultimatum. There are those who feel that the threat is addressed to the rulers or government authorities who happen to be currently participating in the contestation. In this context the commotion occurs. In order not to prolong the commotion, this article wants to highlight its essential threat.

That voting or general elections are actually designed to articulate people power through a procedural agreement. Whoever has the most supporters, he is the determinant. When the agreement to fight for power through a peaceful path (nonviolence), whose main requirement is to obey procedures including being honest, is harmed, then people power is brutally articulated. Whether or not it is said by Amien, the capacity of people power to be brutal exists.

The most important thing to be underlined, in the framework of democracy, the determinant of brutality is the people; a string of togetherness of the citizens. What justifies Amien\'s complaint is that the shared infrastructure has never been resolved to legitimately contest. Even though it is still in a legitimate dose, the election so far is still haunted by fear of fraudulent practices. The articulation of this complaint widened into commotion when he led the reform movement in the 1990s, when people power at that time broke down the authoritarian order. The reform movement presents two sides of articulation of people power. From this commotion, there was a consensus that what was explicitly rejected was not really the centrality of people power, but rather the potential for turning democracy from an electoral path to the streets.

Two important lessons

Here, there are two important lessons. First, political change where we call its significance "reform" involves two faces of articulation of people power. Both are interrelated. Our failure in electoral democracy will spill into street democracy. Pak Amien has difficulty explaining the relationship between the two because he is directly involved as a participant in the contest. The meaning of the nuance "we" which refers to "the people" narrows into being a contestant. The commotion takes place in a small scope, the contestants, who fight over something real: power existing in the people.

Second, there is a great irony that escapes our reflection. When the reform fighters were absorbed in government practices, the enormity of the power of "the people" as the owners of power turn out to be nonexistent. They are the spectators of the commotion. Therefore, there is a need to save the essential meaning of people power, not to defend Pak Amien, who is harvesting discordant voices, but because our democracy is actually discordant.

Discordant democracy

Yes, our democracy is discordant because of threats in the use of people power, where actually it does not come from the people, but from the contestants. It should be underlined, what makes "the people" powerful is overall nature, which is the foundation of the validity of the system. General elections, including the presidential election, have indeed opened up space for a battle of strong support, a battle of greatness in dragging into one of the contestation camps.

However, the nuance of "we" or "the people" is missing because every citizen is converted as vote coins. Our discordant democracy occurs because there is a disconnection between citizenship and voting. What is valuable is that the vote owned by every citizen is not the citizenship that we glorify, or at least we sanctify it with an antipathy towards cheating in voting.

When general elections, including presidential election, still belong to the contestants, the reasoning for our democracy is not much better than the reasoning for democracy in authoritarian rule. The significant difference is that there is an atmosphere of fairer contestation, but democracy remains flawed because we have not defined violations in contestation as harassment of our citizenship. When the quality of our citizenship has reached this level, the threat to the street democracy incident does not come from figures who are at the same time contestants, but from common sense or the wisdom of the citizens.

The democratization process in this country follows the liberal path and the key words in liberalization are participation and contestation. In democracy according to this model, the ancestral mandate for deliberating is articulated in the commotion and willingness to take lessons from this commotion is badly needed. What has taken place so far is the commotion in elitist scope, which is still functional, stemming the massive commotion we fear, which is articulated as street democracy. It just needs to be noted, what must be avoided is its articulation, so that it remains nonviolent.

What remains is precisely the most essential; ensuring this country to remain in the control of people power. If the articulation is reversed, how can the political participants, who have been directed to be partisans from the start, contest not be trapped, just to fight for victory. Like the body that is exercising, the stretching of the muscles in the body must be done, but the aim is a body that is fit or healthy. In this metaphor, contestation is a tug of muscles and democracy is the health we will get. Our democracy is easily twisted (experiencing muscle dislocation) because the tug among muscles is not realized to make the whole body healthy, but for the excellence of one muscle.

The dislocation of the muscles of our democracy can easily happen because we are not careful in the heating process. Because of the high level of eagerness to follow the prescriptions of democratization in a number of countries, the first thing to be planned in reform is to institutionalize the contestation among parties. What is missing is citizenship education. Precisely because the essence of democracy is people power, political parties must be ensured as an instrument of articulation. As happening in the era of authoritarian rule, it was the political parties that deceived the people or citizens. When political parties as the muscles for liberal democracy are encouraged for contestation, we should not be surprised to find the fact that Indonesia\'s democratic body, which is still addicted to mobilization, must be in sprain. It is from this body that is in pain there is an expression that, if we deeply comprehend it, seems to contain a discordant feeling.

Electoral democracy requires improvement of the wisdom of citizens, the sharpening of intelligence to be present as a collectivity. The presidential election is getting closer and the development of citizenship cannot be held on a daily basis. In the cycle of the development of post-election electoral democracy, this must made a key agenda.

Purwo Santoso, Professor of Governance Science at Gadjah Mada University and Rector of Nahdlatul Ulama University Yogyakarta.