page_title: 1955 Indonesian legislative election
section_title: Campaign
hierarchical_section_title: 1955 Indonesian legislative election / Campaign
caption_attribution_description: Campaign posters for the 1955 Indonesian election. Photo attributed to the Department of Information of the Republic of Indonesia, dated October 2, 1965. I assert that as the work of a government ministry, this renders it a public domain work.
context_page_description: Legislative elections were held in Indonesia on 29 September 1955, the first since independence. Candidates ran to be elected to the 257-seat People's Representative Council, which would replace the existing provisional legislature. Despite hopes that the elections would bring about political stability, the legislature elected only lasted four years before being dissolved by presidential decree.
context_section_description: According to Feith, the first phase of the election campaign began on 4 April 1953 when the election bill passed into law, and the second phase when the Central Electoral Committee approved the party symbols on 31 May 1954.
  At the time the bill passed into law, the cabinet was a coalition of the Islamic-based Masjumi and the nationalistic PNI. The next two successive cabinets were coalitions led by one of the two aforementioned parties with the other in opposition. Therefore, the main issue of the campaign was the debate between these two parties over the role of Islam in the state. Masjumi denied aiming for an Islamic state while the PNI emphasized that their pro-Pancasila stance was not anti-Islam as Masjumi sought to portray. The other two main and major Islamic parties, the NU and the PSII, supported Masjumi in this debate. A third factor was the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), which campaigned on such significant issues like poverty due to the continued imperialist-leaning/-influenced nature of the government's cabinet policy. Masjumi tried to draw a clear line between the PKI and other political parties, accusing it of being a puppet element and a tool of Moscow in the country, as well as of seeking to influence and then spread communist ideology across Indonesia.
  Party programs were rarely widely discussed during the campaign. Party symbols with or without campaign slogans were displayed on most streets and thoroughfares in cities, towns and villages all across the country, as well as on private homes, public buildings, buses and trains, trees and even calendars. The PKI made extraordinary efforts to promote its symbol, as seen in their displaying it everywhere, from political posters to simple graffiti to newspapers, to make sure people everywhere saw and noticed it. The PKI's election campaign was based around social activities such as organizing tool-sharing programs for farmers and leading and directing the building of irrigation canals and channels for agriculture and the peasantry. As mentioned earlier, the party was looking beyond the election to build a permanent basis of widespread and large-scale support throughout Indonesia.
  In the last few months of the election campaign, the major parties focused on educating and mass-informing voters in areas where they had managed to establish village-level influence, organization and control. This phase included persuasion as well as threats.
  All through September, party leaders constantly traveled around the country to promote their parties, themselves and their political ideologies. Daily party-newspapers and magazines were printed in constantly-increasing numbers and given away for free. The articles in such political-dailies and media like these attacked rival parties and extolled their own. In the villages across Indonesia, the emphasis shifted from large-scale mass rallies to small-scale meetings and gatherings and house-to-house canvassing of political support.
caption: Various large election-campaign posters of participating political parties, with their symbols (amongst many, the PSII, the PNI, the PKI and Masjumi) on display in the run-up to the election.
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