Jakarta, Indonesia

IN the days and weeks after the April 9 parliamentary elections in Indonesia, employees at the mental hospital in Surakarta, in Central Java, have been working double shifts. “We’ve been overwhelmed with 200 patients a day,” said the hospital spokeswoman, Dyah Srimarwati. Other mental institutions are reporting a similar surge. Losing candidates in the election apparently account for the bulk of new patients.

All sorts of sad stories have emerged: a losing candidate in West Java hanged herself; another on Bali died of a heart attack after the polling stations announced the results; and when one man on Sulawesi discovered that most of his neighbors had not voted for him, he cut off public access to a well on his property.

About one million people from 44 parties were contesting up to 50,000 seats in the national, provincial and local legislatures. So you had an average of a 1 in 20 chance of winning. And you couldn’t expect help from your political party. You recruited your own volunteers, organized your own town hall meetings and raised your own money. If you were of limited means, this meant selling everything you had  your house, your car, your lifetime savings, even your parents-in-law’s property if you could persuade them. Or you just went deep into debt. No wonder people got very depressed as soon as they learned they had lost.

Image Credit... Emma Houlston

This is only Indonesia’s third free and fair election since General Suharto resigned in 1998, but April’s election, along with those in 1999 and 2004, have proven to skeptics that democracy can be practiced here, in the world’s largest Muslim nation. Over the past decade, Islamist parties have not done particularly well; most Indonesians, including the majority of Muslims, obviously feel more comfortable with the secular parties. (Preliminary counts indicate three secular-centrist parties, including the Democratic Party of the incumbent president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, will dominate the national Parliament.)