I asked Syennie why she left the cool mountain air of her "haute cuisine" hometown for the polluted traffic jams of Jakarta. Turns out, she came to the Big Durian to visit Indonesia's Constitutional Court (MK) to resolve a dispute in the Tomohon mayoral elections.

You see, Syennie isn't just any ordinary citizen. In fact, she's head of the North Sulawesi chapter of the Democratic Party, and was deputy mayor of Tomohon from 2005 to 2010. This year, she ran for the top job against the incumbent, Jefferson Rumayar. Syennie was considered the favorite, but she lost by a very thin margin.

Syennie claimed gross election fraud, including manipulation of demography (people imported from outside Tomohon), forms not sent to areas that supported her, ballot-stuffing, invalidation of ballots, proxy votes (using children's names with dates of birth changed), vote-rigging, bribery and various forms of intimidation.

What also bothered Syennie was the fact that Jefferson Rumayar could run at all. You see, he'd been officially declared a suspect in a corruption case by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) in June. For two years, the KPK had investigated irregularities in the regional budget, and he was accused of embezzling funds amounting to Rp 19.8 billion (about US$2 million).

Naturally, Syennie had my sympathies, but what she is experiencing is hardly unusual. Eight cases like Syennie's were lodged on Aug. 13 alone. In fact, by Aug. 27, 159 of the total of 212 cases filed with the MK this year were about regional electoral disputes. That's 75 percent!

I suppose it's not surprising really, given the regional elections this year involved 246 regional head elections: seven governors, 204 regents and 35 mayors. A recipe for chaos and corruption? Bambang Widjojanto, legal adviser to the Governance for Partnership Reform (and candidate for the vacant chair of the KPK) thinks so. He correctly predicted that the 2010 regional elections would be marred by rampant corruption.

Ibrahim Fahmi, the coordinator of the political corruption division of Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) has a similar view, but is more concerned that corruption suspects, like Jefferson, can run unimpeded.

"Once they get elected", he said, "the likelihood is that their corruption case can be covered up."

I can see his point, but imagine if corruption suspects were barred. All that would do is open the way for politicians to accuse opponents of committing a crime just to knock them out of the race. A catch-22 situation, huh?

It's problems like these that led Home Minister Gamawan Fauzi to announce that the government was seriously considering returning to the old mechanism of letting provincial legislators appoint governors, instead of having direct popular elections. Besides, regional elections are costly, he says.

Hang on a minute there, Gamawan! Sure, elections are messy and expensive, but so is democracy! We have a saying in Indonesia, "Rambut boleh sama hitam, pendapat berbeda-beda", meaning, "we all have black hair [in Indonesia, that's generally true!], but we all have different opinions too". Democracy is, in part, the freedom to disagree, fight and squabble - to argue! We had much more orderly (and cheaper) "'elections" in the authoritarian era of Soeharto, but do we really want to return to that?

The reality is that for democracy to work, elections must be (party) politics in action, and politics, like true love, rarely runs smooth. And that's hardly unique to Indonesia - just look at the recent elections in Australia, where Julia Gillard's Labor and Tony Abbott's Liberal conservative opposition coalition got virtually the same number of votes, resulting in a hung parliament. And remember the controversial 2000 presidential elections in the US, where Bush defeated Al Gore by a handful of contested votes?

But it's at regional level that elections are the craziest, as Syennie now knows. There's a famous Australian political documentary from 1996, "Rats in the Ranks", about the battle for power in an inner-city council that would probably remind her of recent events in Tomohon. It shows what a terrible business politics is, a low game played by sharks and megalomaniacs where the only real political principle is "watch your back!" Perhaps the candidate in West Sulawesi, who forced his wife to prostitute herself to repay his campaign debts, had seen the film?

Yep, politics is not for the faint-hearted. There are lots of rats in the ranks, and it's not easy to skewer them like the roasted rats in Tomohon market, although that's probably what many local politicians deserve.

Anybody who reads my columns will know how critical I am of Reformasi. But I will admit that democracy is a learning process, and it ain't all bad. Yes, corruption is still with us, but at least good politicians like Syennie now have somewhere to go when the local rats get out of hand. At least we have the MK, and at least its judges generally decide the electoral disputes before them cleanly and fairly.

And there's always the KPK! Regardless of how Syennie's appeal at the MK goes, if the KPK decides Jefferson was corrupt, then she may become mayor of Tomohon after all.

Then it will be party time in Tomohon market! They'll go bats, I reckon.

Rats Ranks Regional Elections