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National Mandate Party PAN

Paralleling the PKB’s relationship with Nahdlatul Ulama and Wahid, the National Mandate Party (PAN) is strongly associated with Muhammadiyah and political-science professor Amien Rais from Yogyakarta. Beginning in the early 1990s, Rais became a thorn in Suharto’s side, calling for presidential succession and highlighting cases of corruption and other malfeasance. Despite (or perhaps because of) this vocal opposition, he was elected chair of Muhammadiyah in 1995. In 1998 he became the most prominent adult face of the student-led reformasi movement, which succeeded in forcing Suharto’s resignation. (Wahid had had a stroke in January 1998, and Megawati remained on the sidelines.) Following the founding of the PAN in August 1998, Rais had to step down as Muhammadiyah’s chair. Although founded as an open party, with Christians and ethnic Chinese prominent among its leadership, the PAN also has a significant hard-line Islamist wing.

As that wing gained ascendancy within the party, many of the PAN’s initial secular and Christian leaders began to abandon it. While few of these leaders were linked to mass-based organizations that could deliver votes, they were among the key intellectual capital in the party, and their departure also fostered the perception of a party in trouble.

In the 1999 elections, the PAN fared worse than had been expected, given Rais’s prominence in opposing Suharto, winning only 7.1 percent of the popular vote (34 DPR seats). Although this result dashed his presidential ambitions, it was enough, combined with clever political maneuvering, for Rais to be elected speaker of the MPR. From this position, Rais chose to involve himself more in politicking against presidents Wahid and Megawati than in the constitutional-reform process being undertaken by the MPR. This strategy may have hurt the PAN, for it reinforced the public perception of Rais as strident, divisive, and having abandoned the reformasi movement for sheer power politics. In addition, the PAN’s poor showing weakened Rais’s position within the party, enhancing the ascendancy of the Islamist wing and leading to further defections by members of the secular/Christian wing.

The Islamist wing’s hypothesis that a more focused albeit more narrowly based party would attract more voters than a less focused, but broader-based, party was proven wrong in the 2004 elections, in which the PAN’s share of the popular vote shrank to 6.4 percent (52 DPR seats), making it the smallest of the seven major parties. (The PAN’s support in 2004 was more evenly spread around the country than in 1999, and so its share of DPR seats actually increased from 7.4 percent to 9.5 percent.)

Although Rais tried his hand in the first direct presidential election, he lost in the first round and subsequently left the political scene after completing his term as MPR speaker in October 2004. He was replaced as PAN chair by a much less well-known figure, Sutrisno Bachir, and returned to his former life as an academic at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta. With several of its leaders holding cabinet posts in the Yudhoyono administration, the PAN mostly supported the administration, although it has reserved the right to criticize on occasion. In 2009 the PAN’s support declined to 6.0 percent of the vote (46 DPR seats), because of waning overall support for Muslim and Islamist parties as well as greater competition from the DP, Gerindra, and Hanura parties.