Indonesia—A New President, with a Troubling Past, Has Been Elected
What happens in Indonesia has a significant impact on democracy globally. It is an island nation, consisting of over 17,000 islands. As the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country—and the second highest ranked in the 2023 EIU Democracy Index among the majority Muslim nations—Indonesia is an important exemplar of what democracy can look like for the world’s two billion Muslims. Ruled by two authoritarians for the first 50+ years of its independence,[1] Indonesia is a young democracy, having overthrown dictatorship in 1998 and having its first direct presidential election in 2004. Its democratic institutions, being just a couple of decades old, need to be nurtured and buttressed.
On February 14th, 2024, Indonesians elected Prabowo Subianto to be their next president. This is not the best news for democracy in the country. In countering the pro-democracy protests of 1998, he organized the kidnapping of 23 democracy activists (13 are still missing) and later was discharged dishonorably for those kidnappings. He was commander of Kopassus (special forces), which committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during their occupation of East Timor. In this year’s election, Mr. Subianto ran a shrewd social media campaign—he was able to rebrand himself as an endearing grandfatherly type, deflecting attention away from his sordid past.
The Journal of Democracy points out that “most of the challenges facing Indonesian democracy long predate the current moment. They include the continued political dominance of the country’s wealthy elite …; the oversized legislative coalitions required to govern in a multiparty presidential system … ; gross inequalities that produced marked differences in the quality of democracy across Indonesia; antipluralist and illiberal social forces; a military that remains stubbornly unwilling to cede full control of politics to civilian forces; high levels of official corruption; dynastic politics; and electoral clientelism and vote buying that distort representation and partisan politics from the local level on up.” This does not mean that Indonesian democracy is on the verge of collapse. It remains to be seen what direction president Mr. Subianto takes the country, but his past actions do not auger well.
[1] Sukarno was president of Indonesia from 1950 to 1967, having led their struggle for independence throughout the 1930’s and 1940’s. His rule was marked by a chaotic start to democracy, then becoming increasingly authoritarian. Sukarno was overthrown by Major General Suharto in 1967. Suharto also ruled as an increasingly authoritarian president until 1998, when he was ousted by mass popular protests (led by students), after which democracy finally emerged in Indonesia. Both Sukarno and Suharto had only a single name (i.e., no family name), as is common in Indonesia. — Return to article text above