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Indonesia United Development Party (PPP)
The United Development Party (PPP; also sometimes
referred to
as the Development Unity Party) was the umbrella Muslim
grouping
that developed when the four Muslim parties were forced to
merge
in the 1973 restructuring of the party system. The four
components were Nahdatul Ulama, the Muslim Party of
Indonesia
(PMI), the Islamic Association Party of Indonesia (PSII),
and the
Islamic Educational Movement (Perti). The PPP's
constituent
parties neither submerged their identities nor merged
their
programs. As a result, no single PPP leader with a
platform
acceptable to all the sectarian and regional interests
grouped
under the PPP umbrella emerged. Despite their manifest
differences representing divergent santri streams,
however, the PPP's parties had the common bond of Islam,
and it
was this that gained them the government's close
attention. The
dominant partners were Nahdatul Ulama and the PMI. The PMI
was a
resurrected version of Masyumi, which had been banned in
the
Sukarno era. The return of the modernist Islamic
interests--
represented by the PMI--to mainstream politics was
stage-managed
by the government, and the PMI within the PPP was
seemingly
favored by the government to counterbalance the appeal of
Nahdatul Ulama. The rivalry between Nahdatul Ulama and the
PMI,
while strong, was suppressed for the 1977 electoral
campaign. But
a severe split in the PPP over candidate selection and
ranking on
the PPP's electoral list occurred before the 1982
elections,
leading the government to intervene on the side of the
more
docile PMI leadership.
The split between Nahdatul Ulama and the PMI over the
political destiny of the PPP became a schism in the wake
of the
August 1984 PPP National Congress, the first since its
1973
formation. The principal task of the congress was the
adoption of
the Pancasila as the PPP's basic ideological principle.
The
party's general chairman, the PMI's Jailani (Johnny) Naro,
who
was backed by the government, stacked the new
thirty-eight-member
executive board with twenty PMI supporters, leaving
Nahdatul
Ulama, the largest of the component parties, with only
thirteen
seats. The decline in Nahdatul Ulama's influence in the
PPP,
together with constraints on the Islamic content of the
PPP's
message, confirmed the traditionalists' perception that
Nahdatul
Ulama should withdraw from the political process and
concentrate
on its religious, social, and educational activities. The
theme
of Nahdatul Ulama's December 1984 congress was "Back to
Nahdatul
Ulama's Original Program of Action of 1926." While
constitutionally accepting the Pancasila as its sole
ideological
principle, the Nahdatul Ulama congress tacitly opted out
of the
Pancasila political competition by holding that political
party
membership was a personal decision and that individual
Nahdatul
Ulama members were not obligated to support the PPP.
Data as of November 1992
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