Politics in Indonesia: Resilient elections, defective democracy

Abstract

On 17 April, 193 million Indonesians will enter more than 800 000 polling stations spread over hundreds of islands to choose their leader in the world’s biggest direct presidential election. For the first time, this election will be held on the same day as the legislative elections. Indonesians will be voting for the upper and lower houses of the national parliament, as well as provincial and district legislatures. There are more than 245 000 candidates running for over 20 000 seats in what may be the most complicated single-day election the world has ever seen. Just over 20 years after the fall of Suharto’s long-ruling authoritarian regime, free, fair, and peaceful elections have become the norm in Indonesia. President Joko Widodo’s rise to power from obscurity illustrated the genuinely competitive nature of the electoral system. Encouragingly, a new generation of hard-working, more responsive local leaders is now looking to follow his lead. Ironically, however, Jokowi, as he is known, has allowed human rights, the rule of law, and the protection of minorities to weaken since he was elected in 2014. Law enforcement has become politicised, with government critics arrested and jailed on questionable charges. Jokowi has blinked in the face of opposition from conservative Islamic groups, legitimising anti-pluralistic views that undermine the rights of Indonesia’s minorities and galvanising the rise of divisive identity politics. And, surrounded by powerful former generals, he has countenanced an expanding role for the military in politics, threatening to undermine the reforms that followed the fall of Suharto in 1998. A decade ago, Rizal Sukma, one of Indonesia’s most eminent policy analysts (and the current ambassador to the United Kingdom), published a paper arguing that the country’s politics were characterised by “defective elections, resilient democracy”. Now, Indonesian politics looks more like a story of “resilient elections, defective democracy”.