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BIES 059 003 Reformasi Reversal Structural Drivers of Democratic Decline in Jokowi S Middle-Income Indonesia
BIES 059 003 Reformasi Reversal Structural Drivers of Democratic Decline in Jokowi S Middle-Income Indonesia
Jacqui Baker
To cite this article: Jacqui Baker (2023) Reformasi Reversal: Structural Drivers of Democratic
Decline In Jokowi’s Middle-Income Indonesia, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 59:3,
341-364, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2023.2286020
Jacqui Baker1
Murdoch University
This article surveys the marquee events in the year ahead of Indonesia’s 2024 election,
finding that the field of democratic political contestation has further narrowed due to
the criminalisation of political opponents, the end of the campaign against corruption,
the decline of judicial activism, political recentralisation and the collapse of national
protest movements. Examined in totality, this article argues not only that Indonesia’s
reformasi movement is dead as a salient political force, but also that today’s political
elites seek to roll back many of its core achievements. While elites continue to support
national elections, those in 2024 will occur in the context of a weakened opposition
and heavy presidential interference in the coalition formation of key candidates.
Why has democratic contestation, including by oppositional and protest movements,
contracted so noticeably under the two-term Joko Widodo (Jokowi) presidency? The
article proposes a structural contribution to the continuing debate about Indonesia’s
democratic decline, arguing that Indonesia’s middle-income status under Jokowi
has been accompanied by dramatic changes to the country’s socio-economic make-
up. Importantly, Indonesia’s electorate is now dominated by a massive number
of ‘precariously non-poor’ whose dream of social mobility lies in the provision of
quality government services and changes to the structure of labour. This article sug-
gests that the intractable political challenge of managing this group’s aspirations for
economic security in a context of lagging reform has set in train the demobilisation
of the opposition, the consolidation of President Jokowi’s ruling coalition and the
curtailing of political contestation. The project of managing the political economy
of the middle-income trap will continue to dominate Indonesia’s political future
regardless of which coalition will triumph in 2024.
Keywords: reformasi, New Order, elections, middle income, democracy, corruption, Jokowi
JEL classifications: D70, D72, D73, D74, D63, P10, P16, R50
1. The author thanks Indonesia Update convenors Professor Edward Aspinall and Associate
Professor Amalinda Savirani as well as Dr Liam Gammon, Eve Warburton, Marcus Mietzner,
Ross McLeod, Blane Lewis, Garry Rodan, Sana Jaffrey, Burhanuddin Muhtadi, Nava
Nuryaniyah, Ian Wilson, Rebecca Meckelburg, Lian Sinclair, Ian Baker, Piero Moraro and
Michael Buehler for their support, comments and feedback on this paper.
INTRODUCTION
In 2023, as the second term of Joko Widodo (Jokowi) concludes and the 2024 election
looms, elements of the ruling coalition have renewed strategies of accommoda-
tion, co-optation, legal challenge, repression and coercion to restrict the prospects
of open political contestation. These strategies include, as I discuss in this paper,
aborted efforts to delay the coming election and the instrumentalisation of corrup-
tion cases to destabilise and reshape rival coalitions. In addition, political elites are
aggressively, though not always successfully, turning to the Constitutional Court
as a means to reshape electoral and party institutions in ways that entrench their
advantage. The effect has been to reorganise the field of coalition formation in line
with narrow elite, and particularly presidential, political interests. These strategies
have played out in a landscape of political recentralisation as the central govern-
ment winds back elements of fiscal and political power to Jakarta, and anti-regional
autonomy discourses become increasingly persistent. Furthermore, the effects of
the longue durée co-optation, repression and harassment of civil society through
physical and legal coercion have expressed themselves in Jokowi’s second term
in the failure of national broad-based coalitions for reform to meaningfully ignite.
The strategies used by the government to restrict challenge are not new. In 2018,
on the cusp of Jokowi’s second presidential election, Power (2018) observed that the
Jokowi government used legal threats to control opposition politicians, suppress
and curtail opposition groups and employ the police and military as campaign
instruments. In 2023, having co-opted opposition leader Prabowo Subianto and
his supporters, and dismantled Islamist mobilisations, the ruling coalition’s use of
those tactics has accelerated and become more audacious in scope and ambition,
driven by a range of party and presidential interests. Examined in totality, these
tactics directly target the core institutional and political wins of Indonesia’s refor-
masi movement: regular elections, human rights, rule of law and judicial activism,
regional autonomy and anti-corruption. The inability of oppositional and protest
movements to resurrect and rebuild a national coalition to curtail the elite-rollback
of reformasi indicates that these social forces are exhausted as a salient political force.
Surveying this narrowed field of political contestation in the twilight of the Jokowi
administration, we are struck by the extent to which the previously untouchable
institutions of reformasi are not only contested by powerful actors but also subject
to rollback.
At first glance, the argument presented appears to endorse the widespread
conclusion that Indonesia’s democracy is undergoing decline. But conceptually,
the article draws on a contrasting framework. The idea of democratic decline often
invites an understanding of democracy and autocracy as two opposing ends of a
sliding scale upon which countries can be measured, ranked and quantified by the
‘strength’ or ‘weakness’ of their democratic institutions. For social conflict theorists,
the problem with this understanding is that often the unit of analysis slips towards
institutions rather than the social forces that contest power through them (Rodan
2018). This is not to say that institutions are not important but their determinative
role in forging the ‘democratic-ness’ of regimes has been exaggerated (Hameiri and
Jones 2020). Institutions shape who can participate in conflict, how and on what
grounds, but institutions are ultimately shaped by the dynamics of contestation
among social forces (Rodan 2018; Rodan and Baker 2020). The idea of ‘democratic
decline’ can lay the blame on weak or unreformed institutions rather than focus
Structural Drivers of Democratic Decline in Jokowi’s Middle-Income Indonesia 343
attention on the shifting balance of power among social groups. These conceptual
differences are neither abstract nor inconsequential. For instance, foreign donors
continue to measure the success of programs to strengthen democracy in terms of
technical or policy-based solutions, rather than building relationships and broad-
ening coalitions in support of democratic institutions. Decades of embedding
important mobilising actors—such as non-government organisations (NGOs)—in
governance projects have, as we will see, muffled their ability to critique power and
galvanise oppositional forces in support of change. These conceptual differences
are also reflected in the use of the terms ‘ruling coalition’ or ‘ruling regime’. By this,
I don’t just refer to the Jokowi government or the elected and party/political elites
that have joined the president’s governing coalition. The ruling coalition includes
these actors but also the wider constellation of social groups that have reorganised
around the president’s second term. This includes political elites and parties but
also conglomerates, tech entrepreneurs, technocrats and elements of the upper
middle class that wield political and material power in support of this coalition’s
interests. What contestation there is appears primarily generated by internal splits
within this ruling coalition, explaining, as I will show in this paper, the limits of
that political narrowing. The analysis in this article argues that the acceleration
and audacity of ruling elites’ use of state institutions in favour of their political
interests is indicative of the degree to which the ruling coalition has consolidated.
But why have these political dynamics intensified under the Jokowi presidency?
Scholars are divided on the drivers of ‘democratic decline’. Power (2018, 23) argues
that Indonesia’s weak state institutions have rendered them vulnerable to ‘politici-
sation’ by a president with a categorically authoritarian streak. Other scholars have
emphasised how democratic decline is being propelled by the ruling coalition’s
efforts to overcome seething social and political polarisation, particularly in the
wake of two bruising national elections (Warburton 2020; Mietzner 2020; Fossati
2023). In this argument, democratic decline is the outcome of government efforts
to elevate illiberal, nationalist developmentalism over Islamic populism. In such a
context, argues Mietzner (2021), civil society has fragmented and cannot galvanise a
common front to defend democracy from elite attacks. Indeed, Indonesia’s opposi-
tional movements lack a strong left that would put equality and social justice issues
on the electoral table (Hadiz 2019). Aspinall et al. (2020) explore the wider norma-
tive drivers of democratic rollback in which the wider Indonesian public is only
weakly committed to liberal and democratic values and institutions. For Diprose,
McRae and Hadiz (2019), this normative illiberalism is a function of Indonesia’s
deep-rooted and growing social inequality. This gaping income inequality is trans-
forming electoral contests into competing populisms, as we saw in 2014 and 2019,
and absorbing reformasi’s new political actors into old-order, predatory politics.
These are valuable and empirically grounded contributions to our understand-
ing of Indonesian democracy. But the deeper structural roots driving decline are
ill-captured by oblique references to pro-poor policies, popular illiberalism, social
polarisation or even rising inequality. The fact is that Indonesia has undergone
massive socio-economic changes over the past 20 years, the political implications
of which have been neglected. We are often reminded that since the fall of authori-
tarianism and the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, tens of millions have been moved
out of poverty, precipitating Indonesia’s shift into middle-income status. But what
have the poor moved into? The past 20 years have seen the dramatic expansion
344 Jacqui Baker
and the growth of the precariously non-poor present new political challenges to
rule. Specifically, I suggest that the mobilisation of elements of this group through
populist messaging on inequality by the Prabowo camp and broader Islamist
organising represented a threat to the ruling coalition. I argue that the project of
co-opting the opposition and demobilising this ‘aspiring middle class’ set in train
political dynamics that at once narrowed the field of political contestation and
consolidated the power of the ruling coalition. I conclude by reflecting on what
the contradictions of governing middle-income Indonesia could mean for future
regime trajectories.
2. The elections are for the People’s Representative Council (DPR), the Regional Representative
Council (DPD) and Local People’s Representative Council (DPRD).
3. The KPU argued for a 120-day campaign period as the agency’s shortest possible prepara-
tion time for the national elections.
4. Postponement would require a two-thirds quorum of the People’s Consultative Assembly
(MPR), which comprises the DPR and DPD.
346 Jacqui Baker
5. Parties seeking to contest the election should have functioning offices in each of Indonesia’s
514 districts. PRIMA, which has Golkar connections, fell short in 22 of 34 provinces.
Structural Drivers of Democratic Decline in Jokowi’s Middle-Income Indonesia 347
and background in student and regional politics at first made him appear to be
Jokowi’s natural successor until his vocal opposition in March 2023 to the Israeli
team’s participation in the U-20 World Cup planned for Indonesia caused football
body FIFA to move the tournament offshore. Ganjar’s rejection of the Israeli team
was widely seen as an attempt to placate the party chair, Megawati Sukarnoputri,
raising presidential doubts about Ganjar’s ability to adeptly negotiate PDIP
demands in a thin coalition with the United Development Party (PPP).
The second candidate is Jokowi’s former political opponent turned defence min-
ister, Prabowo, whose third bid to be president has produced a campaign that has
plainly sought presidential endorsement, so much so that his alliance—including
Golkar, the Gerinda Party, the National Mandate Party (PAN), the Democratic Party
(PD) and the Crescent Star Party (PBB) parties—has rebranded itself the Onward
Indonesia Coalition, named after Jokowi’s current cabinet. The third is the dark
horse of 2024, former governor of Jakarta Anies Baswedan, an academic and former
minister whose long track record of disputes with Jokowi has made his coalition
the one most closely resembling an anti-government alliance. Nonetheless, the
Coalition of Change for Unity is made up of two parties that sit in Jokowi’s cabinet,
the National Democratic Party (NasDem Party) and the PKB. Only the Prosperous
Justice Party (PKS) and PD, who as we will see, exited the alliance in late August
2023, have been outside of the government coalition.
Over much of 2023, an awkward three-way slow dance occurred as the presi-
dent accepted lavish praise and promises to continue his policy platform, from the
most competitive presidential candidates, Ganjar and Prabowo, who were neck
and neck in the polls through much of the year. Demonstrations of fealty have
included pledges to continue the president’s signature project of constructing IKN
Nusantara, Indonesia’s new ‘rainforest’ capital, despite low foreign investment
and persistently ambivalent public polling. IKN Nusantara has come under criti-
cism for dubious environmental credentials, local opposition and flagging support
from Indonesia’s public service. Despite the pervasive sense of unease around the
project, even Anies has been reticent to oppose it openly, suggesting ambiguously
that, under his government, the IKN Nusantara project would be subject only to
‘review’ (Shibata 2023).
But the president’s priorities for the next administration concern more than
just policy. During 2023 Jokowi has shored up his family dynasty by promoting
the political careers of his sons, Gibran Rakabuming Raka and Kaesang Pangarep.
Jokowi’s eldest son, Gibran, is currently in his father’s old chair as mayor of
Surakarta, for which he ran uncontested on a PDIP ticket. Jokowi was instrumental
in ensuring Gibran would claim the vice-presidential nomination on a Prabowo
ticket. Within the Prabowo coalition, Gibran’s low national polling numbers are
seen as offset by the voter bounce gained from presidential endorsement and access
to Jokowi’s considerable resources and financiers for the campaign period. At 36,
Gibran was legally too young to nominate for the vice presidency until a highly
controversial decision by the Constitutional Court on 16 October lifted the age
ban for candidates who, like Gibran, had previously been elected to a regional
government post.
Jokowi has also been instrumental in manoeuvring his youngest son, Kaesang,
a YouTuber turned catering entrepreneur, to become the chair of the Indonesian
Solidarity Party (PSI) in early October 2023. Over Jokowi’s second term, PSI shifted
348 Jacqui Baker
Budi Gunawan, whose nomination to be national police chief in 2014 was scup-
pered when the KPK declared him under investigation for corruption (Kustiani
2015). These legislative and leadership changes, though widely criticised, were
justified within a wider government drive ostensibly targeting Islamist-populist
forces, which ultimately purged anti-government critics. Social media buzzers and
influencers alleged that the KPK had become a ‘nest for the Taliban’ that needed
rooting out (Sudin 2021). Not only did this narrative effectively splinter public sup-
port for the institution, but it also enabled Firli to oust 57 KPK investigators and
administrative staff who made up the driving force of the KPK staff union, falsely
suggesting that their failure of a ‘nationalism test’ exposed them as anti-Pancasila
Islamic extremists.
With the KPK now co-opted, we see the agency’s once-prized war on corruption
was harnessed to interests seeking to influence party coalition formation in the
lead-up to 2024. A prime target of the KPK’s criminalisation campaign has been
the coalition of parties supporting the Anies ticket. When Anies first announced
his intention to run in late 2022, he was supported by the NasDem Party, a solid
player in the government with three important portfolios (information, agricul-
ture and environment/forestry), and by opposition parties, the PKS and PD under
Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono (AHY), the son of the former president SBY. Initial
polling was positive, with Anies running a close second to Ganjar in a three-way
presidential race (Muhtadi 2022).
However, a series of high-profile corruption scandals pursued by the KPK (and
the attorney general) irreversibly weakened the opposition coalition. In mid-Sep-
tember 2022, the KPK announced it had opened a corruption investigation into the
then governor of Papua, Lukas Enembe, a major revenue raiser for PD. In addition,
the KPK chair, Firli, circulated rumours that Anies had misused funds at the electric
vehicle grand prix, known as Formula-E, organised under his governorship. The
affair became a full-blown crisis when Firli terminated Endar Priantoro’s second-
ment from the Indonesian National Police (Polri) to the KPK as its investigations
director, after Endar allegedly refused to indict Anies, citing a lack of evidence
(Jakarta Post 2023b). As the conflict escalated, the Jokowi ally and national police
chief, Listyo Sigit Prabowo, issued a directive returning Endar to his position at
the KPK. The tussle between Polri and the KPK suggests conflicting strategies
within the ruling coalition over the tactics of criminalisation. Many within the
palace feared that arresting Anies would be an own goal, resurrecting his mid-2023
slumping performance in the polls and distracting from the president’s courtship
by Ganjar and Prabowo, which had by then taken centre stage.
At the same time, the attorney general’s office, an agency with a limited track
record in democratic reform, has also broken with anti-corruption convention
to lead (rather than just prosecute) corruption cases targeting backers of Anies
within the government. In early 2023, the office began investigating and eventually
arrested the then NasDem Party secretary general and then minister for commu-
nication and information technology, Johnny G. Plate, on suspicion of graft to the
tune of $550 million in the procurement for base transceiver station projects. The
arrest was a colossal blow to the NasDem Party and its chair, Surya Paloh, sapping
party finances and the chair’s drive. By mid-June 2023, the KPK had also put the
NasDem Party politician and then agriculture minister, Syahrul Yasin Limpo, under
investigation, raiding his homes and the ministry. Under such pressure, Anies has
350 Jacqui Baker
struggled to consolidate his support base, exacerbating tensions with his coalition.
His eventual pick for vice-presidential running mate, PKB’s Muhaimin, saw the
vice-presidential hopeful AHY withdraw PD from the coalition and defect to the
Prabowo ticket.
KPK harassment of the Coalition of Change for Unity nonetheless continued.
Two days before Muhaimin declared he was joining Anies’s ticket, the KPK sum-
moned him to discuss a corruption case in the Ministry of Manpower, which
Muhaimin had led during the SBY government from 2009 to 2014 (Janti 2023c).
The case is proceeding, with three suspects already named, suggesting that a full
investigation will unfold over the campaign period.
The attorney general was also instrumental in the collapse of a fourth coalition—
known as the United Indonesia Coalition (KIB). This consisted of government allies
including PAN and PBB, which had formed in May 2022 under the Golkar chair
and coordinating economic minister, Airlangga. The long period of dithering by the
KIB appeared to indicate that Airlangga was awaiting presidential blessing for his
nomination. By June 2023, Golkar factions allied to the coordinating maritime and
investment minister, Luhut, had begun agitating to overthrow Airlangga through
an extraordinary congress. In a sudden turn of events, in July 2023, Airlangga
was forced to submit to an interrogation by the attorney general’s office after it
announced it was reopening a 2021 investigation into bribes for palm oil export
permits. In the melee, both Luhut and Investment Minister Bahlil declared interest
in the Golkar leadership. By mid-August 2023, KIB had collapsed. Golkar’s move
to the Prabowo ticket—which had been openly courting the president’s eldest son,
Gibran, for the vice-presidential role—boosted the Onward Indonesia Coalition
across the presidential nomination threshold. The Airlangga case illustrates how
political criminalisation in the Jokowi era does not just target the ruling coalition’s
rivals but inveigles allies to abandon their interests in order to align with those of
the president.
2020, parliament passed an amendment that lengthened the term limits of the
current chief and deputy chief justice, technically extending Anwar’s tenure from
2020 to 2026 (Butt 2020). When petitioners successfully won the right to have chief
justices periodically elected, Anwar was returned to his chief justice role by vote.
Anwar’s tenure became even more controversial when he started dating Jokowi’s
sister in late 2021, eventually marrying her in May 2022.
At the same time, parliament has been candid in its determination to rid the
bench of dissenting justices. In November 2022, the national legislature dismissed
Justice Aswanto in a closed session with Commission III, with members accus-
ing the judge of disloyalty for his independent opinions on government policy,
in particular his position on the government’s labour law (Law 11/2020 on Job
Creation). In the uproar that followed, the PDIP chair of Commission III, Bambang
Pacul, argued that Aswanto had breached his role as ‘a representative from the
parliament’ (VOI 2022). In support of parliament, the president affirmed Justice
Guntur Hamzah to replace Aswanto by presidential decree. Once in place, Guntur
changed the wording of a court ruling challenging the dismissal of his prede-
cessor Aswanto, without informing the other justices (Janti 2023a). In September
2023, parliament further shifted the politics of the Constitutional Court’s bench by
appointing Arsul Sani from the PPP, the only sitting lawmaker from the choice of
candidates (Janti 2023b).
The composition of the court’s bench—where reform-orientated justices are
increasingly trapped between PDIP and presidential factions—means that a range
of political elites view it as a potentially viable site to advance their interests. The
court has accordingly presided over a range of decisions that strengthen the politi-
cal status quo. This included a petition by Gerindra Party ally Garuda Party to
revoke Article 170 (1) of Law 7/2017 on Elections that required ministers to resign
in order to become official nominees. The ruling was seen as benefitting Prabowo,
who will maintain his position as the defence minister while running for presi-
dent. The court also found in favour of a Jakarta politician that state facilities
could be used in campaigning, opening up a range of new resources to the current
administration. In February 2023, the court dismissed a petition to annul articles
in the new criminal code that criminalise insulting the government, the Regional
Representative Council (DPD), the Supreme Court and the president, despite the
Constitutional Court previously finding these articles constrained freedom of
speech (VOI 2022). In a surprise decision in May 2023, the court found in favour
of a KPK commissioner and approved the extension of KPK leadership term limits
ostensibly to ‘protect the independence’ of the KPK. This has effectively paved
the way for KPK chair Firli, whose term was to finish in late 2023, to maintain his
campaign of criminalisation throughout the 2024 campaign period.
While these decisions clearly strengthen the political status quo for 2024, more
contentious decisions expose the splits between Jokowi’s ruling coalition. In mid-
October 2023, the court ruled that candidates under the age of 40 could nominate
for presidential roles if they had previously been elected to regional office, a deci-
sion widely derided as pandering to the president’s intent to see his eldest son
Gibran paired as vice-presidential candidate with Prabowo. The court presided
over the cases of 10 plaintiffs who wanted to remove or amend the minimum age
for nomination. The only petition to succeed saw Chief Justice Anwar suddenly
assume the position of chair, going back on his previous pledge to recuse himself.
352 Jacqui Baker
The four dissenting justices on the ruling were furious, condemning the ‘unac-
ceptable’ and ‘extraordinarily bizarre’ circumstance in which the ‘court changed
its stance in a flash’ (Rayda 2023). The public nature of their protest highlights the
factionalised character of the Constitutional Court bench.6
Two other Constitutional Court decisions sustain this argument. In 2022, the
court ruled against an appeal to postpone the 2024 election and extend the presi-
dential term. Another ‘test of democracy’ came in July 2023 when the court ruled
against a PDIP challenge to restore closed voting lists that limit voter choice to
the party rather than the candidate (Jakarta Post 2023a). This decision reaffirms
the court’s previous 2008 open-list ruling, which stressed that voters deserved a
greater exercise of choice. Both the closed-list and election delay petitions were
widely rejected by most political parties. Indeed, the open-list system was defended
by eight of the nine party factions in parliament as an expression of ‘progress [in]
Indonesian democracy’ (Lai 2023).
Sustained political interference over Jokowi’s second term means that the court
is no longer a space of judicial activism in the spirit of reformasi. However, this
does not mean that the court will always act as a rubber stamp for particular elite
interests. Instead, its pattern of rulings suggests that the court is better understood
as a legal forum in which political elites contest each other. The court’s decisions
that affirm democratic competition in turn highlight continued elite affirmation
for elections as a means of contestation.
Political Recentralisation
While national democratic elections are secured for now, the ruling coalition has
increasingly coalesced around an anti-regional autonomy position that questions
the validity of regional elections and has sought to further shift the balance of
power to the political centre. Law 22/1999 on Regional Government was a major
win for the reformasi movement, transferring fundamental government responsi-
bilities (and most importantly funding) to local administrations. Subsequently, in
2005, direct elections for district and provincial heads were introduced. Within
the context of the reformasi movement, regional autonomy (otda) was an avow-
edly political undertaking intended to reverse the pattern of centralised extraction
that characterised New Order authoritarianism. As Ahmad and Mansoor (2002,
3) argued, ‘the demand for decentralisation is associated more with control over
resources and political and legal autonomy than with a perceived need to improve
local service delivery’. This is not to suggest that service delivery is of no conse-
quence. While regional governments have improved access to services, the quality
of those services is mixed or declining (Lewis 2023). But the central government
has seized and expanded upon neoliberal discourses of good governance to jus-
tify a rebalancing of centre-periphery relations that works in the material and
political interests of Jakarta. Anti-regional autonomy discourses portray elected
regional governments as corrupt and inefficient, and present their democratic
mandate merely as a delegation of ‘administrative’ functions from Jakarta. Despite
6. The actions of Justice Anwar in chairing the case have been reported to a newly formed
ethics committee to examine violations and conflicts of interest. In turn, the dissenters of the
ruling have also been reported to the ethics committee for their legal opinions.
Structural Drivers of Democratic Decline in Jokowi’s Middle-Income Indonesia 353
continued public support for regional elections and high turn-out rates, these argu-
ments have evolved from a fringe idea first circulated by the Prabowo opposition
to a discursive glue that consolidates key players within the ruling coalition.
An important advocate for recentralisation is the home affairs minister, Tito
Karnavian, who also served as Jokowi’s national police chief in the president’s first
term. Tito came to office in 2019, promoting a system of ‘asymmetrical democracy’
where the right to hold local elections would be tied to a government index of
democratic maturity. Where provinces did not make the grade, regional heads
would return to being appointed by regional parliament. The PDIP chair, Hasto
Kristiyanto, and the Golkar head of Commission II, Ahmad Doli Kurnia, both
declared their support for the ministry’s intention to re-evaluate local elections,
expressing concerns about the efficiency of local elections. While the proposal for
‘asymmetrical democracy’ ultimately failed, Tito has routinely frowned on regional
elections, unironically emphasising the dynastic characteristics of their political
candidates and the proliferation of vote-buying as evidence that these mechanisms
are being abused.
As the home affairs minister, Tito has also appointed caretaker administra-
tions, as per the 2016 regional election law, for hundreds of regions awaiting the
simultaneous regional elections scheduled for late 2024. The scale of the program
is massive. By the end of 2023, 24 provinces, 56 cities and 191 districts will be gov-
erned by an interim leader appointed by the Ministry of Home Affairs (Ramadhan
and Rastika 2023). Regional caretaker administrations have frequently been utilised
in the context of creating new districts (pemekaran), but usually with 12-month time
limits, performance reviews and clear stipulations to maintain existing staffing. By
contrast, the regional caretaker administrations established by the Jokowi govern-
ment will have terms of up to 34 months and have been endowed with a broad
range of powers including the power to hire and fire at will and govern according
to central government priorities (Wilson 2023). As Wilson (2023, 4) argues, ‘There
is a clear expectation that interim leaders will use their time in office to actively
govern and make significant changes in line with national government priorities
“unburdened by political interest”, rather than operate in a caretaker mode or
continue the policies of their predecessors’.
Another critical problem with the appointments has been the ministry’s unwill-
ingness to adhere to a clear set of guidelines around who can be an interim leader.
After sustained backlash, the Ministry of Home Affairs outlined a process in April
2023 whereby regional parliament would put forward three names for considera-
tion by the minister and approval by the president. But many of this cohort are
centrally selected with little regard for regional preferences (Wilson 2023). A signifi-
cant number of the appointees are officials from the Ministry of Home Affairs itself
or active intelligence, police and military officers who are under no obligation to
resign from their positions (Aqil 2022). The core concern is that regional appointees
will use their office to promote either their own or other political interests in the
lead-up to the 2024 elections.
Rodan (2018) argues that regimes produce institutional innovations when exist-
ing institutions and mechanisms no longer produce outcomes that ruling coalitions
can manage, accommodate or shape in their interests. One innovation has been the
use of ‘omnibus’ laws, a strategy for legislative reform that allows the government
to pass umbrella legislation overruling previous articles and stipulations. There are
354 Jacqui Baker
notable advantages to omnibus law making, including efficiency, the ability to pri-
oritise policy decisions across a range of sectors and give legal certainty. Parliament
also escapes the heavy load of regulatory ‘harmonisation’ as it falls to the relevant
body or ministerial agency to edit conflicting regulations. Omnibus laws have also
recently been proposed in the form of a 2022 omnibus education bill and passed in
the form of the 2023 omnibus health law, which, aside from liberalising the health
sector, has scrapped mandatory health spending for regional government in order
to further centralise control for health. Deliberation times have also narrowed
dramatically, shutting out contending voices in regional government, professional
associations and civil society. The government’s strategy appears to be to use its
majority to hurriedly pass poor or weakly debated legislation and allow a pro-
government Constitutional Court to perform the regulatory fine-tuning. Aside
from the problems outlined in the previous section, this has arguably turned the
court from a space of judicial review into a chamber for the judicial validation of
government legislation, precisely Commission III’s justification for the ousting of
Justice Aswanto.
As noted above, the Jokowi government first turned to the omnibus legislative
strategy with the controversial 2020 job creation law, after the president’s first-term
suite of ‘big-bang’ deregulation policies failed to meet foreign investment goals.
Overriding 77 existing pieces of national legislation, the job creation law strength-
ened the central government’s authority to issue and process business permits in
a range of sectors, including mining, energy and manufacturing.7 As Negara and
Hutchison (2021, 291) observe, ‘This centralization of licensing authority under the
Omnibus Law is contrary to the principle of decentralization. Granting business
permits without involving local government may cause problems such as social
conflicts’. The final years of the Jokowi administration have seen those conflicts
laid bare. Saputra (2023) highlights how post-omnibus mining permits for coal
issued by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources have strained local public
infrastructure. Tens of thousands of coal-bearing trucks ply the public roads creat-
ing perilous 28-hour traffic jams on the roads of Jambi Province and significantly
damaging road infrastructure. Previously, local regulation was relatively effec-
tive but now ‘coal oligarchs know that local leaders are toothless’ (Saputra 2023).
While the central government benefits from extraction, it has eschewed calls to
pay for the infrastructure to support it. This leaves ordinary people lobbying local
government to deal with a problem it did not create and lacks the funds to fix. The
job creation law thus repeats New Order patterns of centralised extraction in the
material interests of the ruling coalition and leaves regional government unable
to respond to local grievances.
A final element of the recentralisation of centre-periphery relations has been
the restructuring of fiscal relations. In his analysis of Law 01/2022 on Fiscal
Decentralisation, Lewis (2023, 1) found that the law uses public finance instru-
ments to ‘facilitate more central government control over regions’. The law seeks
to reduce the discretionary spending by regional governments of general grants
and to tie all types of revenue to the spending preferred by the central government,
7. Law 1/2022, addressed in the following section, further restricts local government author-
ity over these sectors. I thank Blane Lewis for this point.
Structural Drivers of Democratic Decline in Jokowi’s Middle-Income Indonesia 355
sentence commuted to life imprisonment) the structural impunity that led to the
Kanjuruhan tragedy was effectively preserved.
President Jokowi, who has made improving government services, including public
transport infrastructure, the expansion of social welfare, and access to health and
higher-quality education, signature policies of his administration.
But these upgrading reforms require an institutional sophistication and a
temporal horizon that are far more complex than the transition from low- to mid-
dle-income status. More importantly, argue Doner and Schneider (2016, 618–9),
the ‘trap’ of middle-income status is the necessity for ‘extraordinary collective
action and coalition building’ across deep social cleavages and inequalities for
‘benefits that will only emerge in the medium or long term’. In Indonesia, there are
immense challenges to establishing the political pacts required for forging such
reforms. The Indonesian state has been moulded to protect oligarchic interests
(Hadiz and Robison 2004) and the challenge of shifting these interests in service
of ‘better government services’, as the World Bank (2019) puts it, is immense. For
instance, in an important paper, Rosser, King and Widoyoko (2022) examine the
prospect of quality reforms in Indonesia’s education department, a sector critical
to the socio-economic mobility of the precariously non-poor. They conclude that
despite urgent shifts in policy to upgrade education quality, the inability of the
political elites to challenge vested interests means that contestation ‘has been settled
in favour of predatory elites’ (Rosser, King and Widoyoko 2022, ii).
Such is the fragmentation of the ‘aspiring middle class’ that poor government
services and the lagging pace of reform become a problem for rule only when
parts of the ‘dangerous class’ (World Bank 2019) become politically mobilised.
This occurred during Prabowo’s 2014 and 2019 presidential campaigns as Jokowi’s
challenger spoke darkly of corrupt elites stealing away the economic opportunities
of the Indonesian people. This is not to suggest that Prabowo’s ultra-nationalist
populism offered elements of the precariously non-poor a genuine vehicle for them
to pursue their interests, but that he effectively ‘politicised’ their inequality within
a framework of ultra-nationalist populism (Warburton and Muhtadi 2019). Equally,
the dangers of inequality were not lost on Jokowi or his political coalition. In an
interview during his first six months in office, Jokowi admitted that the country’s
Gini coefficient of 0.4—representing the fastest-growing inequality in Southeast
Asia—was for him ‘dangerous’ (Chatterjee, Ho and Brummit 2015). This was not
a one-off statement. The political mobiliser of inequality was a persistent source
of anxiety for members of the governing coalition throughout the president’s first
term, with then PAN legislative assembly speaker Zulkifli Hasan announcing in
his 2017 New Year address that ‘It’s not the far right or far left that are dangerous
here, our main enemy is inequality’ (Lu 2017).
The president’s second term saw a reorientation of the administration’s political
strategy. While the president tried to deal with inequality by promoting vari-
ous social welfare measures and pursuing economic growth, he also tackled the
political problem that sought to mobilise it. As such, critical to the maintenance of
Jokowi’s rule was the 2019 co-optation of opposition figure Prabowo into Jokowi’s
government and a concerted legal and social purge of so-called ‘Islamist’ forces,
dismantling the mobilisational structures of the opposition. These strategies have
left Indonesia without a coherent opposition, consolidating the ruling coalition
and giving it rein to reverse and challenge the key victories of reformasi. Thus,
what has broadly been understood in the literature as ‘democratic decline’ can
best be interpreted as a set of political dynamics set in motion by the underlying
360 Jacqui Baker
Conclusion
In the wake of the 2019 elections, Aspinall and Mietzner (2019, 298) observed
that many of the political strategies of coercion, accommodation and co-option
deployed by the ruling coalition to help the president ‘win big’ had limited suc-
cess. ‘Instead of the 60% Jokowi had aimed for, the president attained 55.5% of the
vote—only about 2% more than in 2014, when he gained 53.2% without the help
of the bureaucracy, security forces or the media’. I have argued that despite the
president’s twilight in office, 2023 has seen the acceleration and proliferation of
these tactics to shore up the electoral advantage for key political actors, some of
which now include Jokowi’s sons.
While the exact impact of these strategies on the outcomes of 2024 remains to
be seen, paradoxically, their long-term effects are easier to grasp. This article has
examined the narrowing field of political contestation in five arenas: (1) the cer-
tainty of democratic elections and a two-term limit on the executive, (2) the political
criminalisation of regime opponents and allies to reshape party coalition formation
towards a presidential nomination, (3) the end of the war on corruption and judi-
cial activism, (4) political recentralisation and (5) the collapse of national protest
movements. Examined in totality, these dynamics roll back the core regulatory and
political wins of Indonesia’s reformasi movement: regular elections, anti-corruption,
rule of law, regional autonomy and human rights. This conclusion suggests that the
social and political forces in serious contest over political power in Indonesia have
definitively broken from the reformasi movement. Instead, the dominant sources of
political contestation are markedly intra-elite. For now, that elite still largely holds
to competitive national elections as the dominant means to contest power, but as
the elite’s souring towards regional democratic elections shows, the institution of
democratic voting cannot be taken for granted.
In the final section of the article, I proposed that the narrowing field of politi-
cal contestation was the regime’s response to an emergent demographic problem
inherent in Indonesia’s middle-income status: the growth of a massive aspiring
middle class. With the demobilisation of the political opposition, this socio-eco-
nomic group has been harnessed to the project of new developmentalism with
little hope of experiencing its benefits. Whatever regime takes power in the future,
managing the aspirations of Indonesia’s new precarious non-poor will be a fun-
damental project of rule for many years to come.
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