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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Indonesia
Index
The Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) was created from
a
fusion of the two Christian parties: the Indonesian
Christian
Party (Partindo) and the Catholic Party (Partai Katolik);
and
three secular parties: the Indonesian Nationalist Party
(PNI),
the League of the Supporters of Indonesian Independence
(IPKI),
and the Party of the Masses (Partai Murba). The PNI, the
largest
of the PDI's five parties, and the legatee of Sukarno, had
its
base in East and Central Java. IPKI had been strongly
anti-PKI in
the Old Order in contrast to the once-leftist Partai
Murba. Even
more heterogeneous than the PPP, the PDI, with no common
ideological link other than the commitment to the
Pancasila as
its sole principle, was faction-ridden and riven with
personality
disputes, held together only by direct government
intervention
into its internal affairs. It was only under the auspices
of the
minister of home affairs that the PDI Executive Committee
could
meet at all after the 1983 elections. The government
insisted on
keeping the PDI viable to avoid the risk of polarization
and a
direct Golkar-PPP, secular-Islamic face-off. With the
gradual
public rehabilitation of the late President Sukarno as an
"Independence Proclamation Hero" and the father of the
Pancasila,
the PDI was not reluctant to trade upon the Sukarnoist
heritage
of its component party, the PNI. Using a son and a
daughter of
Sukarno on its ticket and waving posters with the image of
Sukarno, the PDI went into the 1987 elections aggressively
courting young voters who had no personal experience of
Guided
Democracy and who were looking for channels of political
protest.
Data as of November 1992
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