Politics in Contemporary Indonesia

Institutional Change, Policy Challenges and Democratic Decline

Ken M.P Setiawan, Dirk Tomsa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780429860935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In Politics in Contemporary Indonesia, Ken M.P. Setiawan and Dirk Tomsa analyse the most prominent political ideas, institutions, interests and issues that shape Indonesian politics today. Guided by the overarching question whether Indonesia still deserves its famous label as a 'model Muslim democracy', the book argues that the most serious threats to Indonesian democracy emanate from the fading appeal of democracy as a compelling narrative, the increasingly brazen capture of democratic institutions by predatory interests, and the narrowing public space for those who seek to defend the values of democracy. In so doing, the book answers the following key questions:

• What are the dominant political narratives that underpin Indonesian politics?
• How has Indonesia's institutional framework evolved since the onset of democratisation in 1998?
• How do competing political interests weaken or strengthen Indonesian democracy?
• How does declining democracy affect Indonesia's prospects for dealing with its main policy challenges?
• How does Indonesia compare to other Muslim-majority states and to its regional neighbours?

Up-to-date, comprehensive and written in an accessible style, this book will be of interest for both students and scholars of Indonesian politics, Asian Studies, Comparative Politics and International Relations.

1 Trends and Features of Contemporary Indonesian Politics

DOI: 10.4324/9780429459511-1

Introduction

On 22 December 2020, Indonesian president Joko Widodo, better known as Jokowi, reshuffled his cabinet. Little more than a year after commencing his second and final term, Jokowi dismissed 6 out of 34 ministers, in a desperate attempt to lift his cabinet’s performance in battling the Covid-19 pandemic, which by December 2020 had cost more than 20,000 Indonesian lives and driven the country into its first recession since the onset of democracy in 1998. Given Indonesia’s poor track record in handling the pandemic, the reshuffle had been widely anticipated, especially the dismissal of controversial Health Minister Terawan Agus Putranto, who early on in the pandemic had made international headlines when he suggested that prayers would keep Indonesians safe from Covid-19 (Lindsey & Mann 2020). Throughout 2020, Terawan had faced constant criticism for his failure to implement any effective measures to contain the pandemic, so his replacement was widely regarded as an overdue reaction to consistent policy failure and ongoing public pressure. More broadly, however, the reshuffle also offered notable insights into some general trends and features of contemporary Indonesian politics.

First, it illustrated President Jokowi’s belief in technocratic solutions for complex political, and in the case of the pandemic, scientific challenges. To be sure, the replacement of Terawan was overdue and hardly surprising. But Jokowi’s choice of a former banker, Budi Gunadi Sadikin, as new Health Minister seemed to suggest a conviction, not uncommon among Indonesian presidents, that a professional with managerial skills from the corporate world would be best suited to overcome challenges that are inherently political. Yet, while such an approach may have helped the government address some of the organisational inefficiencies in Indonesia’s underdeveloped public health system, Sadikin’s appointment was hardly the kind of drastic measure required to tackle deeper political issues that had prevented a more effective response to Covid-19, such as populist anti-science attitudes, religious polarisation and endemic corruption (Mietzner 2020a).

Corruption, in fact, was the second key feature of Indonesian politics that left its mark on this cabinet reshuffle. Despite modest advances in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) in the years before the pandemic hit (Transparency International 2020), Indonesia remains a highly corrupt country, so it was hardly surprising that two of the six ministers who were replaced in the reshuffle had only just been named suspects in large-scale corruption cases. President Jokowi therefore had virtually no choice but to appoint new ministers for these portfolios. What was particularly embarrassing for the president was that one of the two ministers, Social Affairs Minister Juliari Batubara, was accused of embezzling money from the aid budget that had been designated for Indonesians hit hardest by Covid-19. In the wake of these and other recent high-profile corruption cases, Indonesia’s CPI score promptly dropped again in 2020 by three points.

Batubara’s replacement, the former mayor of Indonesia’s second largest city Surabaya, Tri Rismaharini, represents the third important feature of contemporary Indonesian politics, namely the importance of local politics as a catalyst for a career at the national level. Since the beginning of regional autonomy for provinces, municipalities and districts in the early 2000s, local leadership positions such as governor, mayor or district head have become important pathways to power, especially for politicians from outside established party networks. Jokowi epitomised this new crop of leaders when he rose from mayor of the small town of Solo (2005-2012) to become governor of the capital Jakarta (2012-2014) and eventually president (2014-2024). Several other ambitious local leaders have been regularly touted for higher office in recent years, including as potential successors of Jokowi.

Fourth, the reshuffle highlighted the persistence of a particular kind of transactional politics by which Indonesian presidents have long co-opted political opponents into coalitions of power. When Jokowi won his first presidential term in 2014, he had initially pledged to end this practice, labelled ‘promiscuous powersharing’ by Slater and Simmons (2013). But he soon abandoned that campaign promise and, just like his predecessors had done, appointed leading representatives of opposition parties to cabinet posts. After winning the 2019 election, he went a step further and made the very person who had run against him in both 2014 and 2019, Prabowo Subianto, the Defence Minister. With the 2020 reshuffle, Jokowi completed the set when he appointed Prabowo’s running mate from the 2019 election, Sandiaga Uno, the Minister of Tourism and Creative Economy.

Finally, the appointment of Yaqut Cholil Qoumas as Religious Affairs Minister cemented the formidable political influence of Indonesia’s largest Islamic organisation, the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). For Jokowi, NU has long been an important ally in his fight against Islamic radicalism (Nuraniyah 2020), and in 2019, he won his second term in office with senior NU cleric Ma’ruf Amin as his vice-presidential running mate. But he then broke with protocol when he appointed a retired military general to lead the Religious Affairs Ministry, which has traditionally been held by a member of one of Indonesia’s two largest mass organisations, NU and Muhammadiyah. The 2020 reshuffle rectified this by putting Yaqut, the leader of NU’s youth wing GP Ansor, in charge of the ministry.

This short analysis of the 2020 cabinet reshuffle illustrates some of the key features of contemporary Indonesian politics. Though often hailed as Southeast Asia’s largest democracy, Indonesia’s current democratic regime is in fact laden with democratic deficits and, as many observers have noted, these deficits have become more plentiful and more severe in recent years (Diprose, McRae & Hadiz 2019, Mietzner 2020b, Warburton & Aspinall 2019). While promiscuous powersharing and corruption have been characteristic traits of Indonesian politics throughout the democratic period that began in 1998, other issues have only recently become more prevalent, prompting scholars to speak of the advent of a democratic regression (Power & Warburton 2020). Among the most concerning indicators of this regression are the spread of nationalist and religious populism, discrimination against religious and sexual minorities, as well as the governments’ heavy-handed use of laws and state institutions to silence critics.

This book aims to build on the various recent assessments of Indonesian politics and further enhance our understanding of the reasons behind Indonesia’s democratic decline. At the same time, it aims to provide readers with little prior knowledge of the country with some basic background about the most prominent political ideas, institutions, interests and issues that shape political dynamics in Indonesia today. Guided by the overarching question whether Indonesia still deserves its famous label as a ‘model Muslim democracy’, the book argues that the most serious threats to Indonesian democracy emanate from the fading appeal of democracy as a compelling narrative, the increasingly brazen capture of democratic institutions by predatory interests and the narrowing public space for those who seek to defend the values of democracy. But the book goes beyond a mere assessment of democratic quality. By linking various democratic deficits to a range of public policy issues, it also highlights how the declining democratic quality diminishes prospects for Indonesia to successfully confront its most pressing policy challenges in the areas of public health, gender equality, human rights and environmental conservation.

The remainder of this introductory chapter will review the vast literature on Indonesian politics and outline the main contours of Indonesia’s current democratic regime. With frequent references to the key arguments presented in the following chapters, the discussion will interrogate how the complex interplay between ideas, interests and institutions has shaped the country’s democratic trajectory. The chapter will end by highlighting some of the key policy implications of Indonesia’s democratic decline.

The State of Indonesian Democracy: Resilient, but Increasingly Vulnerable

Indonesia democratised in 1998, after many decades of authoritarian rule under the country’s first two presidents, Sukarno and Suharto. Chapter 2 will provide a brief summary of the key periods in Indonesian history that led up to the regime change from Suharto’s New Order to democracy, underlining the adverse conditions under which the country commenced its political transformation. Not only was Indonesia in the midst of a severe financial crisis, but the pro-democracy forces that led the charge in 1998 also had to contend with a heavily politicised military, entrenched corruption and a spate of separatist, ethnic and religious violence at the margins of the archipelago. Moreover, as the largest Muslim-majority country in the world – about 90 percent of Indonesia’s 270 million people are Muslims – Indonesia faced difficult questions about the place of religion in politics and public life.

Against the odds, however, the transition to a democratic regime proceeded remarkably well. Within less than ten years, the military retreated from politics, collective violence in most provinces subsided and demands from Islamists to turn Indonesia into a sharia-based Islamic state were rejected during deliberations about constitutional amendments. To address the problem of corruption, a new Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, KPK) was established. Yet, as Aspinall (2010, p. 21) pointed out, the irony of the successful transition was that ‘spoilers have been accommodated and absorbed into the system rather than excluded from it, producing a trade-off between democratic success and democratic quality’. Thus, Indonesia never evolved into a consolidated liberal democracy. Instead, the country has been described as a ‘patronage democracy’ (Van Klinken 2009, Simandjuntak 2012), an ‘electoral democracy’ (Davidson 2009, Tomsa 2009) or, especially in more recent assessments, an ‘illiberal democracy’ (Hadiz 2017, Warburton & Aspinall 2019, Wilson 2015).

The range of different labels points to the variety of analytical lenses through which scholars of Indonesian politics have analysed the trajectory of Indonesia’s post-authoritarian regime. While structural political economists consistently emphasise the pre-eminence of material wealth as a source of power, others have stressed the agency of social and political actors, including both elite and non-elite actors, or the influence of institutions in shaping political outcomes. In this introductory chapter, we canvass insights from these various approaches and integrate them into a broader regime-based framework that considers ideational, institutional and structural factors as complementary rather than contradictory features of Indonesian politics.

A political regime can be defined as a prevailing set of ideas, interests and institutional arrangements that provide a framework of opportunities and constraints for political actors, including the top decision-makers at the helm of government (Skowronek 1997). Indonesia has had four distinct regi...