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View all search resultsElections are an engine of corruption. Let’s change that
As lawmakers finally prepare to debate new electoral law, the runaway cost of election campaigns deserves to be at the center of the discussion.
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A district election committee (PPK) opens ballot boxes during a vote tabulation of the Tasikmalaya regency regional election revote in West Java on April 21, 2025. The regency was one of 24 regions ordered by the Constitutional Court in February to hold reruns of the 2024 regional elections. (Antara/Adeng Bustomi)
T
he revision of Indonesia’s electoral law has stalled. More than a year after it entered the legislative agenda, the overhaul of the General Elections and Regional Elections laws, now floated as an “omnibus law on politics”, has still not been formally debated, even as Commission II of the House of Representatives targets July or August this year to begin.
So far the public argument has fixated on legislative thresholds and on a recurring push to let regional legislatures, rather than voters, choose governors, regents and mayors. One issue has barely featured, though it may matter more than any of these: the staggering and corrosive cost of running for office.
On June 29, researchers from Gadjah Mada University (UGM) and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) will launch a report that shows how serious that cost has become.
We conducted a survey of 478 candidates in the 2024 local elections across 10 provinces, in which we asked candidates to assess each other’s spending rather than rely on their own under-reported figures. These politicians assessed that winning candidates spent, on average, Rp 36.8 billion (US$2.05 million) to capture a single district. That is roughly 468 times what an ordinary Indonesian earns in a year.
Measured per voter, Indonesian campaigns are more expensive than those in Pakistan, India, Kenya or even Liberia. The numbers candidates submit to the General Elections Commission (KPU), rarely above Rp 3.5 billion, are a polite fiction.
This is not merely extravagant. These campaign costs are a primary engine of corruption. A politician who spends tens of billions to win office faces an overwhelming incentive to recoup the money once in power, by selling official positions, skimming procurement or auctioning permits.
Between 2004 and 2024, some 171 regional heads and 441 legislative council members were convicted of corruption. Much of that corruption is not simple greed. It is the predictable consequence of a system that forces candidates to spend fortunes they then have to earn back at the public’s expense.
