Efforts of Political Reciprocity in the Lame Duck Period

The following can describe some of the president's efforts in carrying out his political reciprocity during the lame duck period:

  1. Presidential intervention in the Constitutional Court in the process of suing the age limit for presidential and vice presidential candidates. Where the chief justice of the Constitutional Court at that time was none other than the president's own brother-in-law who handled the application related to the nomination of the president's eldest son. Even in the MKMK decision, Chief Justice Anwar Usman was dismissed from his position as Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court for alleged violations of the code of ethics.
  2. Distribution of social assistance/BLT funds during the 2024 Election campaign using a large amount of funds. It is even only slightly different from the social assistance budget during the Covid-19 pandemic. This is also strongly suspected as a form of support for the nomination of candidate pair 2.
  3. Controlling Constitutional Court Judges through the revision of the Constitutional Court Law, in the substance that is changed is related to the reconfirmation mechanism to the institutions that nominate Constitutional Court judges (president, MA, DPR) who have served for more than 5 years. This results in the loss of independence of Constitutional Court judges and creates the potential for conflict in interest of the institutions that nominate Constitutional Court judges in constitutional justice.
  4. Increasing the number of state ministries through the revision of the State Ministry Law. This is strongly suspected as the president's political reciprocity to the elected candidate pair to increase the number of state ministries. Because we can see that this news emerged along with the plan of candidate pair 2 to divide the spoils to their supporting team, where again this is one form of implementation of political reciprocity.
  5. Killing the fourth pillar of democracy through the revision of the Broadcasting Law. The press is the fourth pillar of a democratic country to live and develop. This cannot be killed or eliminated in the blink of an eye by the government. But unfortunately, in the final period of his term, the government is actually trying to threaten press freedom through the revision of the Broadcasting Law with regulations prohibiting the exclusive broadcast of investigative journalism.

Recommendation

The five massive activities of the president during the lame duck period certainly feel irrelevant and inefficient. All of them are activities that produce strategic policies that are not normally carried out by the current government. The massive political activities of the president can be seen as forms of the president's political reciprocity efforts to Prabowo. Political reciprocity has certainly become the biggest scourge of the nation's constitutional system.

Therefore, it is necessary to form new legal norms to circumvent the use of lame duck by the president or presidential activities that lead in the wrong direction, one of which is revenge politics. It is necessary to re-examine the effectiveness and efficiency of the length of the interval between the determination of the elected president and the time of his inauguration. This is intended to reduce the potential for the government that is still running to pursue airtime to issue strategic policies. As well as minimizing or narrowing the authority of parliament and the head of state and regional heads in policy productivity. In the sense that not only the president, but also parliament and regional heads need to be regulated to eliminate central and regional inequalities. However, this can be excluded if there are urgent or pressing state/regional problems.