After the euphoria of free elections comes the hard bargaining. Indonesian political parties, none of which will command a majority in parliament after last Monday's poll, now enter a phase of dealmaking to form a government and work out a common platform.
This is something in which Indonesians have no experience. Other countries, like Ireland, are resource-rich in coalition builders, especially after the interminable Dail crises of the 1990s. Which is why Brendan Howlin of the Labour Party, who is credited with putting together programmes for government in 1992 and 1994, will be travelling to Jakarta in July. He will join a succession of Irish political educators and advisers who have become involved at ground level in assisting Indonesia's fledgling democracy.
The invitation to Mr Howlin comes from a Corkman, Kevin O'Driscoll, an Irish Labour Party member who has been organising political workshops in Jakarta in his capacity as political parties programme director of the Washington-based National Democratic Institute (NDI).
Mr O'Driscoll, who was programme manager for Mr Michael D. Higgins, Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht in the last government, is a familiar sight these days in Jakarta's Aryaduta Hotel, the centre for the long-drawn-out election count. There too one can find Kerryman Edward Horgan, an ex-Army officer and now a mature university student who as liaison officer of the EU election unit is responsible for co-ordinating reports from 125 European election monitors, including six Irish observers.
The NDI began its direct involvement in the Indonesian elections when the political director of the American pro-democracy organisation - who just happens to be Mr Ivan Doherty, former general secretary of Fine Gael and programme manager for Fine Gael in the 1994-1997 government - came to Jakarta with Mr O'Driscoll in December as dozens of fledgling political parties began to organise for the general election. Michael D Higgins's former manager began a series of workshops in February attended by about 1,000 political figures representing half of the 48 Indonesian political parties, including the leading contenders.
"The first programme that we organised dealt with the whole area of communication, radio and television interviews and press releases," he said over coffee in a quiet corner of the Aryaduta Hotel. "Oliver Donohoe of the Irish Council of Trade Unions, former producer of The Late Late Show and The Gay Byrne Show, came and participated in workshops for a week with the political parties. We were taking people who had never involved themselves in politics before to the stage of putting together press releases on issues that they saw as important to their parties, and then converting those into two-minute radio interviews, and one-minute television interviews."
Some of the smaller parties had emerged just to combat corruption, cronyism and nepotism and had not formulated any policies. In March Senator Pat Magner, political organiser of the Labour Party, came to Jakarta for workshops dealing with campaign management, methods and organisation. For some election candidates, the workshops helped to overcome stage fright.
"One man was shaking, he was so terrified of the microphone and cameras," Mr O'Driscoll said. "He told me: `I know I shouldn't be afraid. They put me in jail for 12 years for speaking out. I was beaten and tortured. But I'm more terrified of the camera than I was in jail'."
Mr O'Driscoll believes that the workshops, in which Asian and American officials also took part, played a significant role in the Indonesian transfer to democracy and that the shared historical experience of Ireland and Indonesia - "both countries were once dominated by foreign powers" - enabled the barriers to come down much more quickly. Ireland also has a multi-party system, unlike the United States, "so I think they found our political experience to be very valuable."
He found the success of the election, in which 96 per cent of the electorate voted, an "amazing event ", an outpouring of democracy in a country of 212 million people with hundreds of different languages and ethnic groups and over 14,000 islands and a 20 per cent illiteracy rate, which had not been allowed free political expression for half a century.
"The next phase is making sure the parties have the confidence to put a government and a programme together which addresses the needs of the people, and hold it together."
He said: "It looks now as if it's going to be a coalition of reformers, probable three or four parties and maybe even more, and that will take quite a degree of delicate bargaining."
The next task for NDI is setting up communication programmes for newly elected deputies to help them to find their way around parliament and master rules and regulations. "The likelihood is that most of the new deputies will never have served in a parliament before," he remarked.
"There's a very limited civil capacity at this stage. There's no tradition of involvement and there are huge challenges facing the country , the first of which is poverty which nobody seems to be talking about. Some 52 per cent of people live in abject poverty, they haven't got enough to eat, and 135 000 children under the age of five die of malnutrition each year in what is one of the richest countries in the world. There is no justification for hunger and poverty disease here."
One of the dangers in the future he believes is disillusionment - "The street vendor celebrating democracy and finding a year later that he is burying one of his children because of diarrohea." Another is that some Indonesians will think that the international advisers have all the answers. "One political activist told me, at least you have no corruption in Irish politics," Mr O'Driscoll said. "They still have a lot to learn."