Indonesian Campaign

It's that time again people, campaign season for the upcoming election. Everywhere you go you see banners, flags, posters of thousands of candidates from gazillions Indonesian parties.

Not only they put their paraphernalia according to the area of their constituency, but also in accordance to the local events; there's one for Ramadan, one for Idul Fitri (end of ramadan), one for Christmas and New Year, etc.. each with different (professionally taken) picture and size, depending on how much money they are willing to spend. And some people spend a lot. I imagine those who are working as photographers and printing companies, they earn a lot, for them business is booming.

Since there's no exact ruling on where one can put all those paraphernalia or how many you can put at certain place. Those things really add to the clutters of Jakarta. At some cross road like the one near my folks' place,one can see a 3 meters high poster of a candidate at one corner, a bunch of flags of other party at the other corner, several A4 posters of two other candidates of yet two other parties.

I heard a story from a good friend of mine about campaign in 2004 .

So there was this candidate from a big party who was unhappy about a big poster of this other candidate from a rival party. He asked my friend if it's possible to get rid of that rival's poster. My friend said to him that it depends on the money. The candidate paid him several hundreds rupiah, my friend and his gang took the poster down, and put it else where.

Then one of my friend's friend got the idea to let that same candidate know about this poster as if it was a new one. So, my friend went up the guy, and sure enough he paid again to get it removed. As it happened, that same poster moved 3 times, and each time that wacky gang got paid by the same guy!

The candidate also gave out t-shirt worth several hundred thousand rupiah to the people in the area.

After spending at least 1 million rupiah on my friends and his wacky gang alone, on the election day, that candidate got a whooping 15 votes in our area.

I guess it's a good thing Indonesia has election coming up, with a lot of money spend this time around, we could hopefully soften the crisis.