Grounds that Refuse to be Forgotten

On Wednesday evening, the long bench in my regular warung, a roadside coffee stall for those reading from elsewhere, was still propped on yesterday’s cardboard, now soft with steam from the flask. The customers were bent over their phones, awaiting news of uncertain brewing. It arrived all the same: a hundred and twenty members of the House of Representatives, from eight parliamentary groups, had signed a motion to use the House’s right to state an opinion on the Vice-President. The minimum is twenty-five members across the groups, so the motion cleared the bar easily, and the House leadership scheduled it for Thursday’s plenary session at around ten in the morning. Earlier this week the tally stood at about fifty from six groups, and at Tuesday’s plenary the motion was not read out, the Speaker offering no explanation. A surge that brisk put me in mind of instant coffee: tear, pour, stir, never wait for the granules to settle.

At the table by the window, a retired schoolteacher was reading the Supreme Court judgment published on Tuesday. The equivalency certificate numbered 9149/D.D1/KS/2019, dated 6 August 2019, had been annulled because it equated a school following a foreign curriculum with the national level without any diploma or graduation certificate, an act the judges called careless. ‘Care,’ the old man muttered, ‘is a rare commodity, sought only after the glass has broken.’ Paperwork long dismissed as trivia is now rattling the second-highest chair in the republic. The certificate was a condition for registering in the 2024 presidential election and has only now been tested; who should have checked it upstream, from the issuing office to those vetting candidacies, nobody has yet answered plainly.

Meanwhile the Palace kitchen, the Vice-President’s office and the government’s spokespeople stirred one recipe into flavours that contradicted one another. The State Secretary said the intention to resign had been voiced, that the President had not refused but offered advice, and that the Vice-President had asked for a chance to prove his documents before the administrative court. The Vice-President himself said the President’s advice was to fight his corner there. The coordinating minister for law, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, judged that pointless: the Constitutional Court’s ruling is final and binding, the Supreme Court’s is final too since nobody can seek a review, the education ministry seemingly will not seek one and will instead carry the ruling out, and the dispute in the administrative court concerns the same subject. He left the choice of route to the Vice-President and, according to one report, stressed that the rulings do not automatically void his office. The government communications agency then denied that the President had advised going to that court, citing the minister. The office thus sits between two official sentences, no legal route left yet nothing to end it, like a waiting room that hands out no queue numbers. A few hours after the intention to resign was announced, the Vice-President was still at the President’s side at a state event. An intention without a deadline is a glass left on a table: nobody knows whose it is, or whether it is safe to drink.

The parties, too, are adept at playing in the gaps. Gerindra, which on Tuesday morning said none of its members had signed and left its cadres free to decide, was later reported to have supplied eleven signatories; I mark that unverified, since the report itself confused two parties. From the Golkar camp, a senior figure stressed that the right belongs to each member, not the group, and that this is only a beginning. By the rules, perfectly true. Still, those of us sipping at the tables want the official taste of the brew, not merely the name of whoever spooned in the sugar.

At the warung, sugar is always the troublemaker. Two spoonfuls disguise the bitterness; three erase the coffee itself. Statements sweetened by self-interest do likewise: pleasant for a moment, until the tongue forgets the true flavour. The House leadership had said it was waiting for the official copy of the Supreme Court ruling; the copy appeared on Tuesday, and the signatures flowed on Wednesday. Respect for procedure deserves praise, provided it does not become an excuse to wait for tempers to cool.

On a separate plate I set down the fritters with no label. A constitutional-law scholar speaks of a closed agreement among the elite that ties the intention to resign to legal protection for a certain family, and there is an allegation of wiretapping by a former senior police officer, said to have stoked the talk of impeachment. A foreign news agency judged the wiretapping story apparently unconnected to the intention to resign. I cannot yet check the evidence for either, so both stay on that plate, still allegations, not served as a main course.

The headlines peddle only two items, resign or be impeached; a third, staying on while awaiting clarity, is never chalked on the board, though it is the dish most often ordered in this country. The second route, however, is a long road: after a plenary attended by at least two-thirds of the members, the matter must still go to the Constitutional Court and then to the People’s Consultative Assembly. A signature is only the gate, not a verdict; a hundred and twenty names have removed no one. We, the sharers of links, add to the din by forwarding snippets we never opened.

The way out is modest and needs no hero. The Vice-President and the Palace need only announce a decision, whether resignation or staying on while pursuing the legal route, by a set deadline and through one spokesperson. The House should read the motion out in public, let the Vice-President explain himself, and declare each group’s position officially, not through the side door. The education ministry should carry out the order to revoke the certificate and explain its consequences in writing, while the competent court settles retroactivity once a case reaches it. Those vetting candidacies at the next election could check documents upstream against a published checklist. Parties had better state their official stance before Thursday and leave the vote to conscience rather than the coalition meeting. The media could separate fact from allegation in plain type, and we readers could finish a story before sharing it. To defend one’s own documents is justified, to question them is normal; what is unbecoming is a situation left hanging.

The owner gathered the grounds from the glasses and scattered them over the chilli plant by the door. Grounds that are admitted to be grounds, she said, can become fertiliser; those hidden beneath cardboard only turn into a smell. At the bottom of my own glass, the black sediment had gone cold, waiting its turn for the pot.

Near closing time, the old radio in the corner of the warung was playing the adagio of Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. My ears, raised on cowboy films, had always taken that melody for the soundtrack to a high-noon duel: two gunslingers facing each other on a dusty street, the whole town peeping through the gaps in its shutters. Tonight I caught something else. In that adagio there is only one guitar, small and easily drowned by a hall-sized orchestra, yet it is the orchestra that holds back each time the guitar speaks. The people in this warung are that guitar: no pistol in hand, no chair in the string section, merely keeping one note alive until it reaches the ear. The players out in the street, whether resigning, holding on or impeaching, may pull the trigger whenever they please; all we ask is the habit of a good orchestra, which is to know when to come in, know when to rest, and never cut a melody off before its note has finished. The owner switched off the radio. The last note lingered a moment, like the grounds at the bottom of a glass: black, bitter, honest, waiting to be planted rather than thrown away.

Bahasa

When the Exit is Busier than the Entrance

Notes from a coffee stall on departing cadres and grounds that cannot be brewed twice

My regular warung, a roadside coffee stall, keeps an unwritten rule: customers may bring their own flask, but the glass belongs to the stall and must go back on the shelf. The rule crossed my mind this Tuesday evening, 10 November 2026, as news on the other customers’ phone screens spread faster than the steam from my coffee. Yesterday three senior figures of the Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI), a minister and two deputy ministers who also held seats at the heart of the party, took their leave almost in unison, some through personal social media posts, some by letter to the chairman. With their departure, no party member is any longer listed in the cabinet. I sip slowly; a stall like this teaches that news arriving in a bunch seldom has a single cause.

The chairman, according to a written statement in circulation, accepted the decisions respectfully and stressed that service to the state stands above the interests of any faction. The sentence is like black coffee measured just right: there is no reason to reject it out of hand. Running forests, population policy or culture is full-time work, and an official drawing up programmes can hardly attend branch consolidation meetings at the same time. Such a reason deserves a hearing before suspicion.

Even so, the tables of this warung disagree about the flavour. At the middle table, three men in thick spectacles, whom the owner calls the panel of experts, offer their readings. The first says the three were simply being realistic about which way the wind blows. The second judges it a manoeuvre to find a safe berth. The third reminds us that leaving a party does not necessarily mean abandoning the figure who once nurtured it. I mark all of this as conjecture; not one reading is proven, and all three sip their coffee without anyone stirring it. The owner, who has watched four general elections from behind the fritter display, merely raises an eyebrow: in her view, the cheapest interpretation always sells fastest.

The timing does raise questions. The farewells fell amid a noisy dispute over a Supreme Court ruling on the Vice President’s educational documents, the figure the party backed in the 2024 presidential race. This morning the House of Representatives opened its new session without taking up the matter, although its Speaker confirmed receiving a proposal to use the right to express an opinion. Whether the two events are connected, I have found no evidence; that is only whispering between tables. In politics, coincidence is rather like sugar in a sachet of instant coffee: always present, seldom acknowledged.

This evening’s fritter is the official statement: warm, savoury, quickly gone, and filling only briefly. What will not fit on the plate is the arithmetic. At the 2024 legislative election the party won 4,260,169 votes, or 2.80 per cent, leaving it short of the four per cent parliamentary threshold and without a seat in the national legislature. After yesterday, some observers expect the road to 2029 to grow steeper, an estimate and not a certainty. A party that set out with a youthful image and a willingness to criticise now faces the most homespun of questions: who is left to run the kitchen when the faces on the screen have gone to work elsewhere?

At the back table, a vegetable seller and a temporary-contract teacher count on their fingers. For them, a party is like a coffee supplier: what matters is not who stands at the display counter but whether the grounds arrive on time and the measure is honest. The seller admits he cannot name any of the three, yet remembers precisely who patrolled his market before elections and vanished afterwards. The teacher adds that faces may come and go, provided the promised allowance reaches the bank account. Voters’ tastes, it turns out, are plainer than the experts’ readings, and are rarely consulted when strategies are drawn up.

Yet the burden should not fall on a single glass. Other parties are just as used to welcoming figures on the rise and waving off those on the decline; defecting cadres are no patent of one colour. Voters play a part too: we love to praise fresh faces on billboards, then vote by family habit. Commentators, this writer included, also like to read grounds as if they were scripture. Grounds are pleasant to gaze at, but reading them in haste often makes the guess miss. And the government that took in these officials may fairly be asked how they divide their time between desk and politics, so that the state duty so often invoked shows in results.

The way out needs no incantations. A party could draft and announce an ethics code on holding dual roles, with its transition period, before any cadre is sworn in, so that departures need not be watched like a soap opera. Reasons for leaving can be disclosed in moderation, including what the organisation learns from them; an honest exit interview costs far less than an electability survey. Cadre-building should reach local officials who never stand in front of a camera. Voters can weigh track record and programmes rather than the splendour of banners, while we interpreters would do well to postpone verdicts until evidence arrives.

The woman who runs the stall gathers the glasses from every table and returns them to the shelf; none goes home, only each customer’s flask departs. At the bottom of my glass sits half a spoonful of grounds, calm and indifferent to anyone’s interpretation. I recall one lesson of this stall: a second cup brewed from the same grounds is merely coloured water. Perhaps that is why regulars stay loyal to the stall that is honest about its measures rather than the one with the loudest music. Trust, likewise, cannot be brewed twice from old grounds; it demands fresh beans in the form of clear programmes, promises kept, and honesty about why people come and go.

Bahasa