<![CDATA[Proposals to return the election of provincial and municipal executives to local legislatures (DPRD) repeatedly resurface in Indonesia, often justified by high campaign costs, vote-buying, and electoral conflict in direct local elections (pilkada langsung). Yet replacing direct elections with DPRD based selection raises serious constitutional and institutional design concerns: executive mandates shift from citizens to elite bargaining, vertical accountability weakens, and the risks of elite capture and local cartelization increase. This article rejects DPRD based local executive elections by developing a “constitutional consistency test” grounded in six indicators: popular sovereignty, accountability, integrity, openness, governmental effectiveness, and constitutional safeguards. The research problems are: (1) what constitutional foundations and normative consequences would follow if local executives were elected through the DPRD; and (2) how such a model would affect institutional risks (transactional politics, oligarchic capture), and what constitutionally sound alternatives can improve direct elections without abolishing them. Using doctrinal legal research with statutory, conceptual, historical, limited comparative, and constitutional court case approaches, the article argues that DPRD based election would undermine democratic legitimacy and sever citizen executive accountability chains in the post-Reformasi constitutional order. Cost-control objectives are better pursued through targeted reforms in campaign finance regulation, transparency, ethics enforcement, and strengthened oversight within the direct election framework]]>
