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INDONESIANS cannot eat democracy, sniffed Singapore's Straits Times before the last of Indonesia's three elections this year. Singapore's state-controlled press may not be the most dogged defender of political freedoms, but the newspaper has a point. Over the past six years, Indonesia has undergone a remarkable transformation from near-dictatorship to vigorous democracy, culminating in the inauguration in October of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the country's first directly elected president. But ordinary Indonesians have little to show for it. Over the same period, the rapid growth in Indonesia's economy that had lifted millions out of poverty in the preceding decades slowed down dramatically, and for a time went into reverse. Unemployment has risen sharply. The new president now needs to harness his unprecedented mandate to get the economy moving again and give his compatriots a stake in their new democracy.
There is no questioning the magnitude of Indonesia's achievement since the call for reformasi gathered pace in 1998. In May of that year, massive protests forced the resignation of Suharto, the country's strongman of over 30 years. Since then, Indonesia's political life has changed beyond recognition. Elections, which once offered a choice of just three parties, now feature dozens. In place of the sleepy old parliament, which elected Mr Suharto unopposed seven times, there is a newly assertive body which churned through three different presidents in the three years following his resignation. Voters, too, are throwing their weight around: in choosing Mr Yudhoyono, they rejected the incumbent president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, and the big parties that supported her. The courts, which used to follow the regime's bidding, have won complete independence. The many disparate regions of this vast archipelago, previously subservient to the central government's whims, now hold all but a handful of the powers that used to be wielded from Jakarta” (Economist)
The Economist is doing a survey on Indonesia, the largest Muslim secular democracy in the world.