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Indonesia Legislative Bodies
People's Consultative Assembly (MPR)
The highest constitutional body is the People's
Consultative
Assembly (MPR), which meets every five years in the year
following the elections to the parliament--the House of
People's
Representatives (DPR). The MPR has 1,000 seats, 500 of
which are
assigned to the members of the DPR. Of the other 500
seats, 100
are reserved for representatives of professional groups,
including ABRI, appointed by the president and, as of
1992, 147
seats were held by delegates elected by provincial-level
legislative assemblies. The balance of seats--253 in
1992--were
assigned after the 1987 DPR elections on a proportional
basis to
representatives of the political parties, depending on
their
respective membership in the DPR. Golkar took the largest
number
of these seats based on its 1987 winning of 299 of the 400
elected DPR seats. This election resulted in a total of
540
Golkar seats in the MPR, an absolute majority even without
counting the ABRI faction and the provincial-level
representatives. The Muslim-based PPP only had sixty-one
DPR
seats and ninety-three MPR seats, whereas the PDI, with
its forty
DPR seats, was at the bottom of the MPR list
(see Political Parties
, this ch.).
The principal legislative task of the MPR is to approve
the
Broad Outlines of State Policy, a document that
theoretically
establishes policy guidelines for the next five years. The
draft
is prepared by a government task force and is expected to
be
approved by consensus. In 1988, however, the PPP forced a
recorded vote on two amendments to the Broad Outlines of
State
Policy, which, although the government won overwhelmingly,
was
taken by some observers as an indication that automatic
adherence
to the requirement for consensus was no longer a given in
Indonesian politics. The first issue advanced by the PPP
had to
do with the legal status of Javanese mysticism (aliran
kepercayaan) as a recognized religion. Aliran
kepercayaan is the formal expression of
kebatinan (see Glossary)
or religiously syncretic Javanism, a set of
religious
practices that the PPP rejected as heterodoxy
(see Islam
, ch. 2).
The second amendment had to do with a commitment to
cleaner and
fairer elections. This issue reflected the PPP's
experiences in
the 1987 general election. In 1992, in response to the
perception
that the MPR was no longer satisfied with a rubber-stamp
role,
Suharto declared that the 1993 MPR would have greater
input into
the initial stages of drafting the Broad Outlines of State
Policy.
Data as of November 1992
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