ABSTRACT
Indonesia is rarely included in comparative studies. One reason for this omission is that comparativists have great difficulties in coming to grips with the multitude of essential factors which have to be taken into account to make sense of Indonesian politics. The literature on current Indonesia will invariably describe civil-military relations in terms of government oppression of civilian groups and parties, interference in party congresses and the preselection of parliamentary candidates, rigging elections and intimidating voters, press censorship, the continuous holding without trial of communists arrested for their alleged involvement in the October 1965 ‘coup attempt’, and the general depoliticisation of society. The first is that the level of autonomous political organisation in Indonesia is too high for a government to set up an effective single party system. The problem with parties in Indonesia is that they have rarely, with the qualified exception of the deceased Sukarno, produced politicians of high calibre.
