Jakarta – Syamsudin Haris, a political observer from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), predicts that 60-70 per cent of old politicians will win seats in the People’s Representative Assembly in the 2004 elections.

“[This is] because they are placed in high in the list (ranking) [of legislative candidates]”, said Haris to journalists before participating in a seminar at the Hotel Alia on Tuesday afternoon.

As well as this, in looking at the list of candidate legislative members which have been provided by the 24 political parties, Haris felt pessimistic that the coming elections will produce any significant political change. Because of this he continued, the public should choose politicians who are not contaminated by the politics of the earlier period [the New Order regime of former President Suharto], that is candidates from the new political parties.

He admitted however that the new political parties are not well prepared. “They shouldn’t (the new political parties) need to force all of the electoral districts to fill up the legislative candidate lists [with the maximum number of candidates allowed by law]”, said Haris. He appealed to the new political parties to concentrate on electoral districts which they consider to be able to give support [to these parties].

At this time 24 political parties who will participate in the 2004 elections have provided lists of candidate legislative members to the General Elections Commission (KPU). The next part of the process which will take two weeks is for the KPU to carry out an examination of the dossiers which have been provided to decide which candidate legislative members are legitimate.

[Translated by James Balowski.]