00074918.2013.850629
Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies
ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20
Indonesian politics in 2013: the emergence of new
leadership?
Dave McRae
To cite this article: Dave McRae (2013) Indonesian politics in 2013: the emergence
of new leadership?, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 49:3, 289-304, DOI:
10.1080/00074918.2013.850629
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2013.850629
Published online: 05 Dec 2013.
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Date: 17 January 2016, At: 23:48
Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Vol. 49, No. 3, 2013: 289–304
INDONESIAN POLITICS IN 2013:
THE EMERGENCE OF NEW LEADERSHIP?
Dave McRae*
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Lowy Institute for International Policy, Sydney
The rise of Joko Widodo (Jokowi) from small-town mayor to presidential frontrunner asks again whether new, alternative leaders could enter Indonesian politics in
the 2014 elections. This article surveys Jokowi’s impact on Indonesian politics over
the past 12 months, and examines whether his election as Jakarta governor, and his
evident popularity, has opened the way for alternative candidates at local level, or
if it has changed parties’ calculations for the presidential election. The article concludes by considering whether a new leader could tackle some of the entrenched
defects of democracy in Indonesia, given that he or she may have only minority
support in the parliament. The article focuses in particular on corrupt law enforcement, the military and the rule of law, and violent religious intolerance.
Keywords: elections, democracy, alternative candidates, corruption, religious intolerance, military reform
INTRODUCTION
In 2013, as next year’s legislative and presidential elections draw near, there has
been a dramatic change of tone in the discussion of Indonesian politics. For some
years, expert analysis of Indonesian politics has focused on stagnant reform and
democratic regression, as efforts to address the problems of democracy in Indonesia have slowed markedly, while conservatives have attempted to wind back
certain reforms. This focus has shifted conspicuously over the past 12 months
with the election of Joko Widodo, ubiquitously known as Jokowi, to the position
of Jakarta governor. Before Jokowi’s election and subsequent rise to presidential frontrunner, widespread voter disillusionment and dropping voter turnouts
stood as evidence of the defects of Indonesian democracy. A new optimism would
now cast this disillusionment as political capital for Jokowi or a like-minded rival
candidate to win the presidency next year.
Asked in mid-2013 about whether and why the 2014 elections are important,
Indonesian interlocutors’ answers centred on change. Among their responses:
the elections could be the irst time since reformasi that there will be a change of
generation in Indonesian politics, and with an alternative candidate there would
* I would like to thank Ed Aspinall, Greg Fealy, Peter McCawley, Ross McLeod and Marcus Mietzner for their insightful feedback and helpful advice. Thanks also to Philips Vermonte for his role as discussant at the 2013 Indonesia Update conference.
ISSN 0007-4918 print/ISSN 1472-7234 online/13/030289-16
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2013.850629
© 2013 Lowy Institute for
International Policy
290
Dave McRae
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be an excellent chance of change. A civil-society igure imagined new access to
decision-makers under a new government.1
But will this optimism be leeting? How great an impact will Jokowi’s rise have
on Indonesian politics leading into next year’s elections? Will he even be able to
run as a presidential candidate? This article discusses these questions, surveys the
prospects for a changing of the guard and considers whether a new leader could
tackle some of the entrenched defects of democracy in Indonesia.
STAGNATION
The conclusion that democratic reform in Indonesia has stalled, stagnated or
even regressed has become pervasive, including in recent political updates in this
journal.2 The reasons are numerous and familiar. Most of the central reforms to
establish a democratic order in Indonesia were concluded during the irst six to
seven years of post-Soeharto rule, circa 2005 (Mietzner 2012). Since then, far fewer
pieces of reformist legislation have been passed. In fact, under democratic rule the
Indonesian legislature (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR) has passed only around
30 laws on average per year,3 many of which have been budgetary bills or bills
to create new districts and provinces. Some recent legislation has also been criticised as regressive, such as a new mass-organisations law enacted in 2013. Civilsociety groups have expressed their concern that this law reactivates Soeharto-era
controls on societal organisations, which had not been enforced under democratic
rule (although they had never been repealed) (Wilson and Nugroho 2012; Human
Rights Watch, 17/7/2013).4 A government draft of legislation to end the direct
election of district heads would also be a regressive step if enacted; returning to
indirect elections would remove the direct accountability of local leaders to voters.
Another feature of the stagnation has been attempts to weaken impressive new
institutions, in particular the Anti-Corruption Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, KPK). The DPR also weakened Indonesia’s corruption court, in
2009, when it legislated to situate anti-corruption courts in all provincial capitals rather than maintain a central anti-corruption court in Jakarta.5 This change
required the mass recruitment of judges, spurring doubts over their quality (Butt
2011, 2013). Five corruption-court judges have been convicted or made suspects
in bribery cases during the past year, and anti-corruption campaigners continue
1 Author’s interviews, Jakarta, June–July 2013.
2 See, for example, Hamid (2012), Fealy (2011), Tomsa (2010), but also Mietzner (2012)
3 Kawamura (2010), and the list of legislation at .
4 Islamic organisation Muhammadiyah requested a judicial review of 25 articles of the law
in October 2013 (Viva News, 10/10/2013).
5 The DPR took this step in response to a decision in 2006 by the Constitutional Court,
which ruled that the arrangement of some corruption cases being heard at the corruption
court and others in the regular courts constituted an inequality before the law and gave the
DPR three years to remediate it (Butt 2013: 19).
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Indonesian politics in 2013: the emergence of new leadership?
291
to complain of the short sentences and higher acquittal rate – albeit up from zero
– since the court was decentralised.6
Additionally, political parties have established barriers to new candidates seeking to enter politics. Parties have lost some control of exactly who gets into the
DPR, because of changes to the electoral system prior to the 2009 elections which
allocated seats based on the number of votes received, rather than on who is highest on a party’s candidate list. These alterations have opened up the political system to a degree, as has requiring one of every three candidates to be female. But
the cost of running for ofice remains prohibitive for many Indonesians: most DPR
members whom I interviewed estimated that they will spend around $100,000 on
their campaign for re-election in 2014 (or, in one case, considerably more). Gaining a spot on a party list is an additional expense (Hadiz 2011: 120).
Nor has allowing independent candidates to contest elections for local heads
of government signiicantly diversiied the range of candidates winning executive positions in the regions. Gaining a party nomination often involves a steep
inancial cost and therefore excludes candidates who are unable to pay. Non-party
candidates also face onerous and costly requirements to contest elections, because
they must gather signatures from 3.0% to 6.5% of voters.7 Only a small proportion
of independent candidates win elections, with the obstacles to success including
their lack of political parties’ campaign structures.8
For the presidential election, the Indonesian constitution grants authority only
to political parties to nominate candidates, and the parties have set a threshold to
do so of 20% of seats or 25% of valid votes in the preceding general election. In
2009, this produced a choice between three establishment candidates: the admittedly popular incumbent president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono; the incumbent
vice-president, Jusuf Kalla; and former president Megawati Sukarnoputri.
For much of the past year, this restrictive nomination process looked as though
it would produce an uninspiring, even anti-democratic set of candidates for 2014.
An election last year between the top four parties’ candidates would most likely
have been a contest between Megawati, already defeated twice in direct presidential elections; Aburizal Bakrie, a business tycoon; Prabowo Subianto, a former
general dismissed from the military after the fall of Soeharto, who at the time was
his father-in-law; and a yet-to-be-determined Democratic Party (Partai Demokrat,
PD) successor to Yudhoyono. Polling suggested that Prabowo would have won.
This situation – a stalled reform process, with the real prospect of an
authoritarian-era igure as Indonesia’s next president – produced widespread
disillusionment. Kompas, Indonesia’s largest newspaper, ran frequent articles on
leadership and the need for new candidates, which relected the mood at the time.
For its part, the prominent polling institute Lembaga Survei Indonesia (2012)
observed early last year that none of the established presidential candidates was
a ‘leader of integrity with empathy for the people’, and mused whether there was
really no other candidate who could meet such criteria.
6 See Indonesia Corruption Watch (2013).
7 On the middlemen that this requirement has created, see Buehler (2013).
8 Supriyanto (Suara Merdeka, 25/7/2011) found that only eight independent candidates
succeeded in the hundreds of elections in the irst two years in which they were able to
participate.
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THE JOKOWI EFFECT: FROM SMALL-TOWN MAYOR TO
PRESIDENTIAL FRONTRUNNER
The mood of disillusionment has changed, though, as Joko Widodo, or Jokowi,
has moved from small-town mayor to presidential frontrunner. Jokowi’s election last September as governor of Jakarta, and his subsequent rise to the top of
the presidential-election opinion polls, threatens to open the way for himself and
other alternative candidates to contest and win elections. This section examines
the evidence for such a ‘Jokowi effect’.
Calls for ‘new’ or ‘alternative’ candidates are common in Indonesia, yet these
terms are dificult to deine. In this article, they do not refer to independent or
anti-party candidates, much as parties have established obstacles to the entry of
reform-minded individuals into politics. Instead, new or alternative candidates
are those unlikely to have held a senior position in politics or government during the authoritarian era, or to have run for or held ofice at the level of politics
that they are contesting, or to have a background that may raise doubts over their
commitment to democratic good governance. They are often able to make their
case for ofice by drawing on their success in a previous position of leadership or
responsibility.
Jokowi’s win in the Jakarta elections has been widely covered but is worth
revisiting.9 A furniture businessman by trade, Jokowi, now 52, entered politics in
2005, as a successful Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (Partai Demokrasi
Indonesia – Perjuangan, PDI–P) candidate for mayor of Solo, a city of around
550,000 people in Central Java. Famed for, among other things, his consultative
style in relocating street vendors and squatters away from streets and public
spaces (McLeod 2008: 202–3; Phelps et al. 2013), Jokowi won a second term in
2010, receiving 90% of the vote. From there he entered the Jakarta gubernatorial
election with running mate Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (known as Ahok), a Chinese
Indonesian national parliamentarian, and the support of two parties, Megawati’s
PDI–P and Prabowo’s Greater Indonesia Movement (Gerindra) party. Running on
a reform-image platform and presenting themselves as men of the people, Jokowi
and Ahok beat incumbent Fauzi Bowo in two rounds. One editor put it as it being
the irst time in a long time that people have seen themselves relected in a politician.10 In the process, the pair saw off an identity-based campaign warning voters
against choosing the Chinese Indonesian Protestant Ahok.
When Jokowi won, in September 2012, most commentators outlined various
beneits that Gerindra frontman Prabowo Subianto would gain from Jokowi’s
victory. First, in imagining Megawati and Prabowo to be rivals for the presidency, various authors noted that Prabowo remained well ahead of Megawati in
a recent opinion poll. A single poll of course does little to illustrate the effect of
the Jakarta election, yet its result led PDI–P igures to comment that they would
not be attracted to a future coalition with Gerindra (Kompas, 26/9/2012). Second,
observers suggested that Prabowo’s support for Ahok would help him win support among Chinese Indonesians, who had been dismayed by Prabowo’s apparent
links to the 1998 Jakarta riots. These riots targeted Chinese Indonesian property,
and rioters raped an unspeciied but signiicant number of Chinese Indonesian
9 For a detailed discussion of the 2012 Jakarta elections, see Hamid (2012).
10 Author’s interview with Nezar Patria, July 2013.
Indonesian politics in 2013: the emergence of new leadership?
293
FIGURE 1 Poll Results: Jokowi versus Prabowo
(%)
35
32.5
28.6
30
Jokowi
22.6
25
20
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17.7
15
13.3
10
15.1
15.6
14.2
Prabowo
5
0
Kompas, Dec-2012
CSIS, Apr-2013
LIPI, May-2013
Kompas, Jun-2013
Sources: Kompas, 27/8/2013; CSIS (2013); LIPI (2013).
women (Coomaraswamy 1999: 15–16; Fealy 2013: 107). Last, it was presumed that
Prabowo’s support for Jokowi and Ahok could help him clean up his image more
generally, and distance himself further from his poor human-rights record and
his status as a Soeharto-era establishment igure. In any case, surveys suggest
that many members of the voting public are not aware of Prabowo’s past (Tempo,
24/9/2012).
Far from riding to the presidency on Jokowi’s popularity, Prabowo has sunk to
second in the polls, behind Jokowi himself. Various surveys from reputable polling agencies show Jokowi comfortably ahead of Prabowo, regardless of whether
respondents were asked to name their preferred presidential candidate or to
choose from a restricted ield of candidates. Kompas polling suggests that Jokowi
has increased his advantage over Prabowo since December 2012 (igure 1) (Kompas, 26/8/2013).
Why are Jokowi and Prabowo the frontrunners? Within Indonesia, they are
seen as being the antitheses of current president Yudhoyono, considered by many
domestically to be stiff, cautious and indecisive. Prabowo, in contrast, is perceived as a irm leader, Jokowi as a problem-solver who interacts directly with
the people.11
At a party level, PDI–P also appears to have gained more than Gerindra from
Jokowi’s victory. PDI–P is certainly more popular than Gerindra – although this
was also true before Jokowi was elected, with at least one poll suggesting that
the margin would widen further if PDI–P were to name Jokowi as its presidential
candidate (CSIS 2013).
PDI–P has also been able to marshal Jokowi to campaign for its gubernatorial
candidates in other provinces – almost half of Indonesia’s provinces held guber11 Author’s interviews, Jakarta, July 2013.
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natorial elections in the 12 months following his victory. Jokowi has campaigned
for PDI–P candidates across Java, as well as in North Sumatra and Bali.
It is questionable how strong the Jokowi effect has been in these gubernatorial elections, either in increasing the number of successful PDI–P candidates or
in enabling a new type of candidate to run. The clearest effect was in West Java,
where PDI–P paired female national member of parliament Rieke Diah Pitaloka
with anti-corruption campaigner Teten Masduki. The pair even used the same
distinctive chequered shirts that had been the signature of Jokowi and Ahok’s
Jakarta campaign. They did not win, though, in fact gaining a slightly lower proportion of the vote than the PDI–P candidate ive years earlier (albeit in a larger
ield). In Central Java, PDI–P shunned its incumbent vice-governor, Rustriningsih, for Ganjar Pranowo, a young second-term national member of parliament,
who swept to victory against the incumbent. Overall, incumbents have dominated gubernatorial elections since Jokowi’s success in Jakarta, winning 10 of the
next 12 gubernatorial elections. Voters are either not being offered new candidates
or not choosing them.
Yet the success of incumbent governors does not mean that there are no promising new leaders emerging at the local level. Tri Rismaharini, for example, elected
in 2010 as the female mayor of Surabaya, has gained particular attention (Jakarta
Globe, 23/9/2013). She was named by news magazine Tempo as one of its seven district heads of the year in 2012; her reputation derives from her urban-regeneration
programs and her efforts to reduce levels of prostitution (Tempo, 16/12/2012; Viva
News, 25/10/2012). But in assessing the overall pattern of political leadership, we
need to balance such cases against other trends mapped out by political scientist
Michael Buehler (2013), of wealthy bureaucrats dominating local elections and
of powerful families establishing themselves in local politics. Such elected oficials may include individuals committed to improving democratic governance
among their ranks, but their success means that most local leaders are drawn from
the established elite (Mietzner 2010), whereas the chance of reformists emerging
would increase if leaders were drawn from a wider cross-section of the population. Jokowi’s experience in Solo and Jakarta shows that new leaders can emerge
and succeed, but this still appears to be more of an exception than a rule. If evidence is limited for a so-called Jokowi effect on local politics, what can we expect
to see during the national elections next year?
THE 2014 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS: NEW CANDIDATES?
Jokowi’s rise in the polls has given a new signal to political parties and political
elites of whom the public might elect. It also poses questions of whether Jokowi’s
evident popularity affects the calculations of other parties or clears the way for
alternative candidates to emerge. Yet neither Jokowi’s own party (PDI–P) nor any
other has nominated Jokowi as its presidential candidate, and nor has he said
deinitively that he wants to run.
The 12 parties that will take part in the April 2014 legislative elections have
adopted three different strategies for selecting their presidential candidates. First
is that of the early movers, the four parties that have already announced their
candidates, mostly before Jokowi’s emergence. Of these, only Golkar and Gerindra have a realistic chance of securing a nomination, and neither has proposed a
democratic reformist. For the other two early movers, Hanura and the National
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Mandate Party (Partai Amanat Nasional, PAN), announcing a presidential candidate looks like a bid for a vice-presidential slot.
Golkar’s candidate is Aburizal Bakrie, the party’s chairperson and key inancier. Bakrie is said to have been instrumental in forcing out Sri Mulyani Indrawati
as inance minister in 2010, at which point Tomsa (2010: 314) noted that he was
‘widely regarded as a key obstacle to democratic reform in Indonesia’. Bakrie’s
great public black mark is the Lapindo mudlow disaster, a blowout in a gas drilling operation, part-owned by a Bakrie family company, that submerged a large
swathe of East Java under volcanic mud (McMichael 2009). Voters have been consistently cold to Bakrie, with his support in single digits. Yet he remains Golkar’s
oficial presidential candidate, and the party’s mid-teens popularity in opinion
polls makes it likely that he will be able to run.
Prabowo and his party, Gerindra, have the opposite problem. Prabowo is second in the polls, but Gerindra’s popularity remains mired in single digits. With
Gerindra’s low share of the vote, it is not inconceivable that Prabowo could miss
out on a presidential nomination in 2014. He and his supporters certainly seem
wary of this eventuality, launching an abortive Constitutional Court challenge to
the nomination threshold last year, and failing in their attempt to convince the
DPR to lower the threshold (Antara News, 1/10/2012).
The second strategy is that of the wait-and-sees, seven parties who have stated
that they will announce their candidates only after the legislative elections.
With the exception of PDI–P, these parties’ deferral of their decision suggests
that they will receive insuficient votes to be the senior member of a nominating
coalition, and that they lack a charismatic igure who has a chance of winning
the presidential vote. All of the Islamic parties except for PAN are in this group
(and PAN would not look out of place here, either), relecting their continuing
decline. Islamic parties polled roughly 38% of the vote in Indonesia’s irst two
post-Soeharto elections, but then only 29% in 2009, as outlined by Feillard and
Madinier (2011: 223–6). They suggest two reasons for the parties’ declining support: the capture by secular parties of political Islam’s campaign themes, and the
weak links between the very large Islamic organisations Nahdlatul Ulama and
Muhammadiyah and the parties that claim to represent them, with these links
further weakened by scandals.12
Islamic parties could receive still fewer votes next year; the only party to
improve its share in 2009 – the Prosperous Justice Party (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera,
PKS) – has been severely damaged by the lurid Beefgate scandal (New York Times,
16/5/2013; Tempo, 10/2/2013; Tempo, 17/2/2013). The scandal concerns PKS’s
control of the Ministry of Agriculture, which administers beef-import quotas,
with the implication being that PKS has manipulated this process in an effort to
build an electoral war chest. Beefgate has seen the PKS president stand trial and
has drawn in other senior party igures as witnesses, while illing the papers with
tales of bribes, lavish gifts to beautiful women and the seizure of cars from the
party’s parking lot. Under the weight of the scandal, the party’s support dropped
from 8% in 2009 to less than 3% in mid-2013.
The odd party out among the wait-and-sees is PDI–P. It is the highest-ranked
party in opinion polls, and in Jokowi it has the most popular presidential
12 On the role of Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah in politics, see also Jung (2008).
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candidate – if it chooses to nominate him. PDI–P may win enough votes to be
able to nominate a candidate in its own right in 2014, and it will certainly be at
least the senior player in a coalition. Despite his popularity with voters, however, Jokowi does not enjoy universal support within PDI–P. Some senior igures
would prefer a Megawati–Jokowi ticket, although these igures appear to be losing ground within the party.13 Jokowi’s opponents cite his inexperience, arguing
that Megawati has superior qualities as a leader.14 It is hard to escape the impression, though, that many of Jokowi’s opponents fear that they will lose their positions of inluence within the party if it comes under new leadership.
At any rate, the decision is Megawati’s – at PDI–P’s 2010 congress, the party
handed her the authority to choose its presidential candidate (Tempo, 15/9/2013).
Megawati has opted for Jokowi once before, when she endorsed him as a Jakarta
gubernatorial candidate despite her (now deceased) husband Tauik Kiemas
wanting PDI–P to support Fauzi Bowo (Kompas, 12/3/2012). Guessing at Megawati’s intentions, however, has become akin to reading runes: press reports have
noted details such as Jokowi being in the same car as Megawati at various events
and making frequent and extended visits to Megawati’s residence (Okezone,
9/6/2013; Detik News, 6/9/2013). Jokowi was also given a prominent role at the
party’s national meeting in September 2013, adding to media speculation that he
will be PDI–P’s candidate.
Last, we come to Yudhoyono’s PD Party, which inds itself in crisis, despite its
nine years as the president’s party. Recent polls put PD’s support at between 7%
and 11%, well below its 2009 result of 21% and far from suficient to nominate a
presidential candidate. The slump relects disquiet with corruption scandals that
have consumed prominent PD igures, as well as with Yudhoyono’s performance
as president and his failure to groom a successor. PD has responded to its predicament by holding an eight-month candidate convention to settle on its presidential
contender, which began in mid-September.
Unlike the conventions of political parties in the US, the PD’s convention will
not involve a popular vote. Rather, three survey institutes will twice poll the popularity of the 11 candidates – who are all male – after which the party’s High
Council, chaired by Yudhoyono, will select the winner. The 11 hopefuls include
Yudhoyono’s son-in-law and recently retired general Pramono Edhie Wibowo;
trade minister Gita Wirjawan and state enterprises minister Dahlan Iskan, both
multimillionaires; and genuine left-ield candidates such as former presidential
spokesperson Dino Patti Djalal and public intellectual Anies Baswedan.15 Lacking
both cash and a high proile, the latter pair face great obstacles to success. But the
convention could foreseeably produce a candidate like Gita Wirjawan or Dahlan
Iskan, who would present themselves as reformists in the presidential race.
What, then, might the ield of candidates look like after April’s legislative elections? Of the three to four slots available, we may assume that one slot will go to
Golkar, which at this stage means to Bakrie, and another to PDI–P, probably to
13 Author’s interviews by email with PDI–P igures, September 2013.
14 Author’s interview with senior PDI–P igure, July 2013.
15 The 11 candidates are Anies Baswedan, Dino Patti Djalal, Endriartono Sutarto, Hayono
Isman, Marzuki Alie, Irman Gusman, Gita Wirjawan, Ali Masykur Musa, Dahlan Iskan,
Pramono Edhie Wibowo and Sinyo Harry Sarundajang (Kompas, 31/8/2013).
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Indonesian politics in 2013: the emergence of new leadership?
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Jokowi. That leaves only one to two free spots, which could be one or both of PD’s
candidates, or Prabowo, or, at the very outside, an Islamic-coalition candidate.
So it is still possible that Jokowi’s rise may not spur other parties to change their
candidates. The PD convention aside, the best that the clutch of other alternative
candidates may be able to do will be to run as vice-presidential candidates.
If such a ield emerged, Jokowi would have a good chance of winning. His
strengths include his skill as a communicator and his strong journalistic appeal,
which would negate the media resources of some of his rivals. Moreover, even
if he turns out to be a mediocre governor, the time period until the elections is
probably too short for this to become evident. His win in Jakarta, where PDI–P
has done poorly in elections, shows that he is popular independent of the party,
meaning that the risk of PDI–P becoming ensnared in a corruption scandal prior
to the elections is less of a threat to him, except that such a scandal might weaken
PDI–P’s position in a nominating coalition.
Nor do direct cash transfers look set to be decisive in the 2014 elections. Prior to
the 2009 election, the government paid $1.4 billion in direct cash transfers, some
of which was to compensate for fuel-price rises, which Mietzner (2009a) argues
was central in the electoral success of Yudhoyono’s PD party. This year, the government has again given cash transfers to the poor, to offset a fuel-price rise in
June 2013 from Rp 4,500 to Rp 6,500. Yet the DPR has approved only roughly
half of what was paid ive years ago, when adjusted for inlation, and this money
will be disbursed over a shorter time period than before (Viva News, 13/6/2013).
PDI–P has opposed these transfers, as it did prior to 2009, but although PDI-P igures interviewed by the author were wary of the cash transfers’ potential impact,
they appeared conident of their party’s prospects.16
A NEW PRESIDENT, ENTRENCHED OBSTACLES
Having an alternative igure as the frontrunner for president is in itself a big
change in Indonesian politics, regardless of the eventual composition of the
presidential race. Yet the prospect of a reformist president raises the question of
whether a new leader could tackle some of the entrenched problems in the Indonesian political system, such as corrupt law enforcement, the incomplete rule of
law over the military, and violent religious intolerance.
Corrupt law enforcement
Indonesia’s law-enforcement and judicial institutions are blighted by brazen corruption. There is abundant evidence that corruption is rife in the police and in the
prosecutor’s ofice, and also in the courts.17 Police and prosecutors have shown
little appetite for tackling the problem – leaving the KPK to take on these institutions, often with only belated and half-hearted support from the president.18
16 Author’s interviews with PDI–P igures, June–July 2013.
17 For details of law-enforcement and judicial corruption in Indonesia, see Dick and Butt
(2013) and Butt and Lindsey (2010). The religious courts (Sumner and Lindsey 2010) and –
until the scandal detailed below – the Constitutional Court have generally been considered
to be exceptions to this overall pattern.
18 On prior confrontations between the KPK and the police, see Mietzner (2012) and Jansen (2010).
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This year alone, the chief justice of the Constitutional Court has been arrested
for bribery; a Supreme Court judge has been dismissed for falsifying a verdict,
after it initially appeared he would be allowed to resign (Tempo, 25/11/12; Kompas, 12/12/2012); the national head of trafic police has been convicted of corruption and money laundering; and a former head of the criminal-detective
branch has gone to prison for corruption. In addition to these high-level cases,
there have been routine revelations of other law-enforcement and judicial corruption scandals. For example, a low-ranking police oficer in Papua was arrested in
May 2013, after it was discovered that $130 million had passed through his bank
account (Kompas, 15/5/2013). In another case, a police oficer came to national
police headquarters carrying almost $20,000 in cash, which was suspected to be a
bribe to gain promotion. He was not charged, and the national police spokesperson said that it was natural for someone of his rank to have that amount of money
(Detik News, 27/6/2013). Subsequently, in July, the KPK apprehended a Supreme
Court clerk who was on a motorcycle taxi and carrying roughly $7,000 in cash,
also suspected to be a bribe (Detik News, 25/7/2013). These cases contribute to
the very negative views within Indonesia of law-enforcement and judicial institutions, as captured in surveys of corruption perceptions (for one example, see Dick
2013: 9–10).
In early October, Indonesia was gripped by the arrest of Akil Mochtar, the
chief justice of the Constitutional Court, on charges of bribery and money laundering. Akil was apprehended at his house, along with a member of parliament
from Golkar, a businessman and more than $200,000 in foreign currency (Kompas,
3/10/2013). The corruption commission alleges that the money was a bribe relating to a local electoral dispute in Kalimantan; the commission is also investigating
a second district-level electoral dispute, in Banten, handled by Akil, for which it
has blacklisted the governor, Ratu Atut Chosiyah, from travelling overseas and
arrested her brother for bribery (Tempo, 27/10/2013). Akil’s arrest is noteworthy
for three reasons: the Constitutional Court was previously regarded as one of
the most important clean institutions formed under democratic rule; the court
makes inal and binding decisions on Indonesia’s laws; and, because the court
hears electoral disputes, a diminution of its standing among the community and
political elite poses a potential risk to the orderly conduct of next year’s elections
and the acceptance of the results. In response, President Yudhoyono issued emergency legislation in mid-September to establish a seven-year grace period before
political party members can be appointed to the court; the bill also altered the
selection process for Constitutional Court judges, and introduced a new oversight
mechanism for the court (Kompas, 18/10/2013). It is unclear whether the DPR will
approve or reject this emergency bill.
Prior to Akil’s arrest, the biggest case of the past 12 months was a confrontation
between the police and the KPK in October 2012, over the commission’s investigation of Djoko Susilo, the national head of trafic police, for marking up contracts to procure driving simulators. When the KPK took up the case, the police
tried to block it from seizing documents, sought to take over the investigation
and then withdrew 20 seconded detectives from the commission. When Susilo at
last submitted to questioning, the police responded by raiding KPK headquarters
the same night, aiming to arrest a seconded detective over the shooting death
of a criminal suspect years earlier, in 2004. The arrest was averted only when a
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299
group of prominent citizens formed a ‘fence of legs’ in front of the commission,
after which Djoko Suyanto, Indonesia’s coordinating minister for political, legal
and security affairs, reportedly ordered police to withdraw (Kompas, 6/10/2012).
Meanwhile, the KPK’s parliamentary opponents sought to amend the KPK law to
weaken the commission’s powers, by requiring it to obtain court permission for
wiretaps and by removing its authority to prosecute cases (Kompas, 8/10/2012,
16/10/2012).
Yet the KPK prevailed, when President Yudhoyono stepped in several days
later. Having allowed the confrontation between the police and the KPK to
develop prior to the aborted raid on KPK headquarters, the president ordered
the police to let the KPK investigate Susilo, criticised the timing and manner of
the police move against the KPK investigator, and told the DPR to desist (Istana
Negara, 8/10/2012). The KPK pressed on, and Susilo was sentenced to 10 years in
prison in September 2013 (Kompas, 3/9/2013). The case thus stood as a victory for
the KPK, albeit one that must have reminded the commissioners of their tenuous
position when taking on the police.
Another very prominent police corruption case concerned Susno Duadji, a former chief of the national crime investigation agency, who led when prosecutors
came to his house, in April 2013, to take him to prison. Susno had been sentenced
in 2011 to three and a half years’ jail for embezzlement and for accepting a bribe
during his tenure as West Java police chief (Suara Pembaruan, 3/5/2013). This conviction followed his being caught, on tape, by the KPK, soliciting a bribe in 2009,
which, like the Susilo case after it, triggered an all-out confrontation between the
police and the KPK (Jansen 2010). Despite his chequered past, Susno was a registered candidate for the Islamic Crescent Star Party (Partai Bulan Bintang, PBB)
for the 2014 elections. When the prosecutors came to his house, Susno refused
to cooperate, and instead headed to the police headquarters in West Java to seek
protection from Tubagus Anis Angkawijaya, the provincial police chief, who duly
granted it. In a national embarrassment, Susno became a celebrity fugitive for
nine days and even paused to address the nation on YouTube.19 In the video,
Susno insists that clerical errors in the Supreme Court decision on his case meant
that he had not been convicted of a crime, let alone would he need to serve a
sentence. The embarrassment for law-enforcement authorities ended only when
Susno turned himself in. As he was no longer able to run for parliament, his spot
on the PBB ticket went to his daughter (Jakarta Globe, 22/5/2013). Tubagus was
also quietly removed a month later, after less than a year in his post (Kompas,
8/6/2013).
Yudhoyono has been reluctant to involve himself in such cases, in what is
admittedly a complex and interest-laden area of law-enforcement reform. He set
up an anti-legal maia task force in 2009, but it has faded from sight. To make
progress, a new president would need to put more political weight into efforts to
clean up law enforcement, by backing the KPK and demanding results from the
country’s top law-enforcement appointees. Such moves would tread on inluential toes but could only be popular with the voting public.
19 Available at .
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The military and the rule of law
Two high-proile attacks in March 2013 showed that the Indonesian military is
still willing to engage openly in violence when it believes that its interests have
been harmed – and that it demands the right to manage investigations and trials
involving military personnel, even if they are clearly guilty of civilian crimes.
Such attacks trigger renewed calls to transfer the authority to try these cases to the
civilian courts, but that reform stalled in Yudhoyono’s irst term (Investor Daily,
14/5/2012; Mietzner 2009b: 311).
In the irst attack, around 75 soldiers burnt down a district police station in
Ogan Komering Ulu, in South Sumatra, killing a civilian and injuring ive police,
after a policeman had shot one of their colleagues two months earlier. That policeman was eventually sentenced in a civilian court to 13 years for murder. The
twelve soldiers who stood trial in a military court received sentences ranging
from a few months to four years. The head of the military court said that these
sentences showed that no soldier was above the law.
Then, just two weeks later, soldiers from Kopassus, Indonesia’s special-forces
unit, forced their way into the Cebongan prison, in Yogyakarta, and shot dead
four prisoners being held for killing a Kopassus member at a nightclub several
days earlier. Amid intense public scrutiny the army formed an investigative team
to take control of the case from the police. Yet the team’s indings read like a
damage-control exercise, or even a justiication of the killings, rather than a genuine report. The team’s head described the attack as relecting the strength of the
Kopassus soldiers’ esprit de corps and their desire to defend their unit’s honour,
and repeatedly referred to the slain men as ‘thugs’.
This approach to the case continued in the military trial, in which the prosecutor cited as an ameliorating factor in his sentencing request that ‘not all of the
community criticise this act: in particular, the Yogyakarta community feel they
have beneited from the accused’s actions’ (Detik News, 31/7/2013), on account of
the slain men being thugs. The court handed down custodial sentences of eleven,
eight and six years to the three soldiers accused of being the main perpetrators,
with the other nine soldiers each receiving sentences of less than two years.
So how did civilian authorities respond to the military’s handling of the attacks
in South Sumatra and Cebongan? Yudhoyono commented publicly on both cases,
but his statement on Cebongan was decidedly equivocal: he waited two weeks
to comment, and then he echoed the military’s justiication of the killings, while
also making it clear that the perpetrators were to be punished. A new law on
the military court remains off the agenda, consistent with scholars’ judgements
that Yudhoyono has had little appetite for broader military reform (Mietzner
2009b; Crouch 2010: 177). Honna (2013: 186) sees the current incomplete military
reforms as relecting a grand bargain between civilian and military leaders, in
which the military disengages from politics whereas ‘civilian leaders respect [the
military’s] institutional autonomy and overlook its lack of accountability’. The
military’s institutional autonomy includes a territorial command structure and a
diminished but continuing ability to raise off-budget funds (Aspinall 2010). These
resources do not mean that the military is in a position to conduct a coup (Crouch
2010: 176–7) – except perhaps in a crisis (Aspinall 2010: 24–5) – but they do make
it a powerful adversary for civilian leaders. A new president may be wary of confronting a challenge of this magnitude, unless he or she was particularly determined to restart military reform.
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Violent religious intolerance
A new president will also face the familiar problem of violent religious intolerance (Hamid 2012; Fealy 2011). Over the past 12 months, Yudhoyono has continued the previous trend of ineffective leadership on this issue, whether for fear
of the electoral consequences, or because of his shortcomings as a leader, or for
other reasons. He has occasionally made irm statements, including bemoaning
the failure of security agencies to be impartial in their enforcing of the law, but
he has not imposed consequences on state agents who have acted contrary to his
directives. In fact, he has allowed Suryadharma Ali, the minister for religion, to
champion the cause of intolerance. In July, for example, Suryadharma told Tempo
magazine that Syiah Muslims driven from their village in Madura, in East Java, in
a violent confrontation in 2012 would need to be ‘enlightened’ before they could
return, and that anyone could return as long as their understanding of Islam did
not clash with existing understandings (Tempo, 27/7/2013).
Despite these failings of leadership, Yudhoyono travelled to New York in May
to receive the World Statesman Award from the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, an organisation that aims to promote peace and tolerance and resolve ethnic
conlict. This trip became a lightning rod in Indonesia for dissatisfaction with the
president’s leadership on this issue.
One encouraging recent development involved Jokowi and his vice-governor,
Ahok. One of Jokowi’s early reforms has been to use an open selection process
in reappointing Jakarta’s ward and sub-district heads. One of his new appointments, a Christian ward chief in the majority Muslim area of Lenteng Agung, has
met with protests on the basis of her religion. Both Jokowi and Ahok have backed
the oficial, with Jokowi saying that oficials should be judged only on results.
Ahok has been more outspoken, countering a statement from Gamawan Fauzi,
the Home Affairs Minister, to the effect that Jokowi should consider replacing
the oficial, by suggesting that the minister should study the constitution (Tempo,
27/9/2013; Kompas, 26/9/2013).
Indonesia has long been short of unequivocal statements on this subject – and
the actions to match – and Jokowi and Ahok’s support for the Lenteng Agung
ward chief sets a good precedent against which to measure Jokowi’s performance
should he be elected president. Countering violent religious intolerance will be a
central quality-of-democracy issue for any reformist president.
Political support
The above deiciencies of Indonesia’s democracy are far from an exhaustive list.
A survey of the past 12 months could equally have focused on Aceh and Papua,
or on the lack of meaningful progress on past human-rights abuses.20 These problems await the new president, who may have to address them as a novice politician with minority parliamentary support.
All of Indonesia’s democratically elected presidents, Yudhoyono included,
have countered their lack of parliamentary support by forming a rainbow coalition encompassing most of the large parties in parliament (Diamond 2009; Sherlock 2009; Tomsa 2010). This has not been effective in locking in support for the
government agenda. Indeed, most observers lamented Yudhoyono’s decision not
to form a more narrowly representative cabinet after his decisive win in 2009.
20 On Aceh, see International Crisis Group (2013); on Papua, see IPAC (2013).
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A popular mandate would be the main asset of any reformist president. Popular pressure can force action – it has inluenced the government’s approach to
tackling the aforementioned problems. In indicating the role that public pressure
has played in recent years, Mietzner (2012: 219) cites a shift in the role of civilsociety activism since 2005 – from pressing for new reforms to defending existing
democratic arrangements – as one of the signs of democratic stagnation. A new
leader would need to marshal anew civil-society and broader public pressure in
favour of his or her policies; rather than seeking the very broad political support
of an extensive coalition, a new president may be better off forming a capable cabinet. At worst, we would see how much can be achieved when a popular leader
supported by new entrants to the political system lends his or her political weight
to particular causes.
CONCLUSION
This article has attempted to determine what effect Jokowi’s rise has had on Indonesian politics ahead of next year’s elections, and whether a new president could
tackle some of the entrenched defects of Indonesia’s democracy. There are two
reasons to expect Jokowi’s emergence at a national level to have inluenced Indonesian politics: if his success in Jakarta has signalled that other reformist candidates can harness widespread disillusionment as political capital to gain election,
and if his leading position in polls ahead of the presidential elections has spurred
other political parties to seek new candidates to defeat him should he gain the
PDI–P nomination.
At this stage, there is limited evidence for either manifestation of a Jokowi effect.
The success of incumbents in the year since Jokowi’s victory suggests that voters
in the regions have not been offered or are not choosing a new style of candidate,
at least at the gubernatorial level. Nationally, half or more of the ield of presidential candidates could be establishment igures such as Bakrie and Prabowo, albeit
with their chances of winning diminished.
Nor is it certain precisely what Jokowi’s agenda would be if he were elected.
Not having secured his party’s nomination, he has refrained from commenting
on national or foreign-policy issues, lest he be seen assuming to be PDI–P’s candidate. His reticence carries the advantage of enabling the dissatisied to project
their hopes onto him, but over time it is likely to emerge that he does not share
all of their views. Yet no matter their level of commitment to reform, Jokowi or
another reformist president would face enormous dificulties in trying to restart
reforms. Already this has led some pessimists to conclude that next year’s elections will not effect change.
Nevertheless, Jokowi’s emergence and the likelihood that he or another reformimage candidate will win in 2014 have changed discussions of Indonesian politics.
The question of whether a novice, reformist president would be able to capitalise
on his or her popular mandate to overcome some of the entrenched deicits of
Indonesia’s democracy is much more enticing than that of whether an already
lawed democratic system would be suficiently resilient to withstand the efforts
of an authoritarian-era president to wind back reforms. Whatever the other effects
of Jokowi’s emergence, that shift in focus will stand as an inluential change in
Indonesian politics in the past year.
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REFERENCES
Aspinall, E. (2010) ‘The irony of success’, Journal of Democracy 21 (2): 20–34.
Buehler, M. (2013) ‘Married with children’, Inside Indonesia 112 (April–June).
Butt, S. (2011) ‘Anti-corruption reform in Indonesia: an obituary?’, Bulletin of Indonesian
ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20
Indonesian politics in 2013: the emergence of new
leadership?
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To cite this article: Dave McRae (2013) Indonesian politics in 2013: the emergence
of new leadership?, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 49:3, 289-304, DOI:
10.1080/00074918.2013.850629
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2013.850629
Published online: 05 Dec 2013.
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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Vol. 49, No. 3, 2013: 289–304
INDONESIAN POLITICS IN 2013:
THE EMERGENCE OF NEW LEADERSHIP?
Dave McRae*
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Lowy Institute for International Policy, Sydney
The rise of Joko Widodo (Jokowi) from small-town mayor to presidential frontrunner asks again whether new, alternative leaders could enter Indonesian politics in
the 2014 elections. This article surveys Jokowi’s impact on Indonesian politics over
the past 12 months, and examines whether his election as Jakarta governor, and his
evident popularity, has opened the way for alternative candidates at local level, or
if it has changed parties’ calculations for the presidential election. The article concludes by considering whether a new leader could tackle some of the entrenched
defects of democracy in Indonesia, given that he or she may have only minority
support in the parliament. The article focuses in particular on corrupt law enforcement, the military and the rule of law, and violent religious intolerance.
Keywords: elections, democracy, alternative candidates, corruption, religious intolerance, military reform
INTRODUCTION
In 2013, as next year’s legislative and presidential elections draw near, there has
been a dramatic change of tone in the discussion of Indonesian politics. For some
years, expert analysis of Indonesian politics has focused on stagnant reform and
democratic regression, as efforts to address the problems of democracy in Indonesia have slowed markedly, while conservatives have attempted to wind back
certain reforms. This focus has shifted conspicuously over the past 12 months
with the election of Joko Widodo, ubiquitously known as Jokowi, to the position
of Jakarta governor. Before Jokowi’s election and subsequent rise to presidential frontrunner, widespread voter disillusionment and dropping voter turnouts
stood as evidence of the defects of Indonesian democracy. A new optimism would
now cast this disillusionment as political capital for Jokowi or a like-minded rival
candidate to win the presidency next year.
Asked in mid-2013 about whether and why the 2014 elections are important,
Indonesian interlocutors’ answers centred on change. Among their responses:
the elections could be the irst time since reformasi that there will be a change of
generation in Indonesian politics, and with an alternative candidate there would
* I would like to thank Ed Aspinall, Greg Fealy, Peter McCawley, Ross McLeod and Marcus Mietzner for their insightful feedback and helpful advice. Thanks also to Philips Vermonte for his role as discussant at the 2013 Indonesia Update conference.
ISSN 0007-4918 print/ISSN 1472-7234 online/13/030289-16
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2013.850629
© 2013 Lowy Institute for
International Policy
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be an excellent chance of change. A civil-society igure imagined new access to
decision-makers under a new government.1
But will this optimism be leeting? How great an impact will Jokowi’s rise have
on Indonesian politics leading into next year’s elections? Will he even be able to
run as a presidential candidate? This article discusses these questions, surveys the
prospects for a changing of the guard and considers whether a new leader could
tackle some of the entrenched defects of democracy in Indonesia.
STAGNATION
The conclusion that democratic reform in Indonesia has stalled, stagnated or
even regressed has become pervasive, including in recent political updates in this
journal.2 The reasons are numerous and familiar. Most of the central reforms to
establish a democratic order in Indonesia were concluded during the irst six to
seven years of post-Soeharto rule, circa 2005 (Mietzner 2012). Since then, far fewer
pieces of reformist legislation have been passed. In fact, under democratic rule the
Indonesian legislature (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR) has passed only around
30 laws on average per year,3 many of which have been budgetary bills or bills
to create new districts and provinces. Some recent legislation has also been criticised as regressive, such as a new mass-organisations law enacted in 2013. Civilsociety groups have expressed their concern that this law reactivates Soeharto-era
controls on societal organisations, which had not been enforced under democratic
rule (although they had never been repealed) (Wilson and Nugroho 2012; Human
Rights Watch, 17/7/2013).4 A government draft of legislation to end the direct
election of district heads would also be a regressive step if enacted; returning to
indirect elections would remove the direct accountability of local leaders to voters.
Another feature of the stagnation has been attempts to weaken impressive new
institutions, in particular the Anti-Corruption Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, KPK). The DPR also weakened Indonesia’s corruption court, in
2009, when it legislated to situate anti-corruption courts in all provincial capitals rather than maintain a central anti-corruption court in Jakarta.5 This change
required the mass recruitment of judges, spurring doubts over their quality (Butt
2011, 2013). Five corruption-court judges have been convicted or made suspects
in bribery cases during the past year, and anti-corruption campaigners continue
1 Author’s interviews, Jakarta, June–July 2013.
2 See, for example, Hamid (2012), Fealy (2011), Tomsa (2010), but also Mietzner (2012)
3 Kawamura (2010), and the list of legislation at .
4 Islamic organisation Muhammadiyah requested a judicial review of 25 articles of the law
in October 2013 (Viva News, 10/10/2013).
5 The DPR took this step in response to a decision in 2006 by the Constitutional Court,
which ruled that the arrangement of some corruption cases being heard at the corruption
court and others in the regular courts constituted an inequality before the law and gave the
DPR three years to remediate it (Butt 2013: 19).
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Indonesian politics in 2013: the emergence of new leadership?
291
to complain of the short sentences and higher acquittal rate – albeit up from zero
– since the court was decentralised.6
Additionally, political parties have established barriers to new candidates seeking to enter politics. Parties have lost some control of exactly who gets into the
DPR, because of changes to the electoral system prior to the 2009 elections which
allocated seats based on the number of votes received, rather than on who is highest on a party’s candidate list. These alterations have opened up the political system to a degree, as has requiring one of every three candidates to be female. But
the cost of running for ofice remains prohibitive for many Indonesians: most DPR
members whom I interviewed estimated that they will spend around $100,000 on
their campaign for re-election in 2014 (or, in one case, considerably more). Gaining a spot on a party list is an additional expense (Hadiz 2011: 120).
Nor has allowing independent candidates to contest elections for local heads
of government signiicantly diversiied the range of candidates winning executive positions in the regions. Gaining a party nomination often involves a steep
inancial cost and therefore excludes candidates who are unable to pay. Non-party
candidates also face onerous and costly requirements to contest elections, because
they must gather signatures from 3.0% to 6.5% of voters.7 Only a small proportion
of independent candidates win elections, with the obstacles to success including
their lack of political parties’ campaign structures.8
For the presidential election, the Indonesian constitution grants authority only
to political parties to nominate candidates, and the parties have set a threshold to
do so of 20% of seats or 25% of valid votes in the preceding general election. In
2009, this produced a choice between three establishment candidates: the admittedly popular incumbent president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono; the incumbent
vice-president, Jusuf Kalla; and former president Megawati Sukarnoputri.
For much of the past year, this restrictive nomination process looked as though
it would produce an uninspiring, even anti-democratic set of candidates for 2014.
An election last year between the top four parties’ candidates would most likely
have been a contest between Megawati, already defeated twice in direct presidential elections; Aburizal Bakrie, a business tycoon; Prabowo Subianto, a former
general dismissed from the military after the fall of Soeharto, who at the time was
his father-in-law; and a yet-to-be-determined Democratic Party (Partai Demokrat,
PD) successor to Yudhoyono. Polling suggested that Prabowo would have won.
This situation – a stalled reform process, with the real prospect of an
authoritarian-era igure as Indonesia’s next president – produced widespread
disillusionment. Kompas, Indonesia’s largest newspaper, ran frequent articles on
leadership and the need for new candidates, which relected the mood at the time.
For its part, the prominent polling institute Lembaga Survei Indonesia (2012)
observed early last year that none of the established presidential candidates was
a ‘leader of integrity with empathy for the people’, and mused whether there was
really no other candidate who could meet such criteria.
6 See Indonesia Corruption Watch (2013).
7 On the middlemen that this requirement has created, see Buehler (2013).
8 Supriyanto (Suara Merdeka, 25/7/2011) found that only eight independent candidates
succeeded in the hundreds of elections in the irst two years in which they were able to
participate.
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THE JOKOWI EFFECT: FROM SMALL-TOWN MAYOR TO
PRESIDENTIAL FRONTRUNNER
The mood of disillusionment has changed, though, as Joko Widodo, or Jokowi,
has moved from small-town mayor to presidential frontrunner. Jokowi’s election last September as governor of Jakarta, and his subsequent rise to the top of
the presidential-election opinion polls, threatens to open the way for himself and
other alternative candidates to contest and win elections. This section examines
the evidence for such a ‘Jokowi effect’.
Calls for ‘new’ or ‘alternative’ candidates are common in Indonesia, yet these
terms are dificult to deine. In this article, they do not refer to independent or
anti-party candidates, much as parties have established obstacles to the entry of
reform-minded individuals into politics. Instead, new or alternative candidates
are those unlikely to have held a senior position in politics or government during the authoritarian era, or to have run for or held ofice at the level of politics
that they are contesting, or to have a background that may raise doubts over their
commitment to democratic good governance. They are often able to make their
case for ofice by drawing on their success in a previous position of leadership or
responsibility.
Jokowi’s win in the Jakarta elections has been widely covered but is worth
revisiting.9 A furniture businessman by trade, Jokowi, now 52, entered politics in
2005, as a successful Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (Partai Demokrasi
Indonesia – Perjuangan, PDI–P) candidate for mayor of Solo, a city of around
550,000 people in Central Java. Famed for, among other things, his consultative
style in relocating street vendors and squatters away from streets and public
spaces (McLeod 2008: 202–3; Phelps et al. 2013), Jokowi won a second term in
2010, receiving 90% of the vote. From there he entered the Jakarta gubernatorial
election with running mate Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (known as Ahok), a Chinese
Indonesian national parliamentarian, and the support of two parties, Megawati’s
PDI–P and Prabowo’s Greater Indonesia Movement (Gerindra) party. Running on
a reform-image platform and presenting themselves as men of the people, Jokowi
and Ahok beat incumbent Fauzi Bowo in two rounds. One editor put it as it being
the irst time in a long time that people have seen themselves relected in a politician.10 In the process, the pair saw off an identity-based campaign warning voters
against choosing the Chinese Indonesian Protestant Ahok.
When Jokowi won, in September 2012, most commentators outlined various
beneits that Gerindra frontman Prabowo Subianto would gain from Jokowi’s
victory. First, in imagining Megawati and Prabowo to be rivals for the presidency, various authors noted that Prabowo remained well ahead of Megawati in
a recent opinion poll. A single poll of course does little to illustrate the effect of
the Jakarta election, yet its result led PDI–P igures to comment that they would
not be attracted to a future coalition with Gerindra (Kompas, 26/9/2012). Second,
observers suggested that Prabowo’s support for Ahok would help him win support among Chinese Indonesians, who had been dismayed by Prabowo’s apparent
links to the 1998 Jakarta riots. These riots targeted Chinese Indonesian property,
and rioters raped an unspeciied but signiicant number of Chinese Indonesian
9 For a detailed discussion of the 2012 Jakarta elections, see Hamid (2012).
10 Author’s interview with Nezar Patria, July 2013.
Indonesian politics in 2013: the emergence of new leadership?
293
FIGURE 1 Poll Results: Jokowi versus Prabowo
(%)
35
32.5
28.6
30
Jokowi
22.6
25
20
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17.7
15
13.3
10
15.1
15.6
14.2
Prabowo
5
0
Kompas, Dec-2012
CSIS, Apr-2013
LIPI, May-2013
Kompas, Jun-2013
Sources: Kompas, 27/8/2013; CSIS (2013); LIPI (2013).
women (Coomaraswamy 1999: 15–16; Fealy 2013: 107). Last, it was presumed that
Prabowo’s support for Jokowi and Ahok could help him clean up his image more
generally, and distance himself further from his poor human-rights record and
his status as a Soeharto-era establishment igure. In any case, surveys suggest
that many members of the voting public are not aware of Prabowo’s past (Tempo,
24/9/2012).
Far from riding to the presidency on Jokowi’s popularity, Prabowo has sunk to
second in the polls, behind Jokowi himself. Various surveys from reputable polling agencies show Jokowi comfortably ahead of Prabowo, regardless of whether
respondents were asked to name their preferred presidential candidate or to
choose from a restricted ield of candidates. Kompas polling suggests that Jokowi
has increased his advantage over Prabowo since December 2012 (igure 1) (Kompas, 26/8/2013).
Why are Jokowi and Prabowo the frontrunners? Within Indonesia, they are
seen as being the antitheses of current president Yudhoyono, considered by many
domestically to be stiff, cautious and indecisive. Prabowo, in contrast, is perceived as a irm leader, Jokowi as a problem-solver who interacts directly with
the people.11
At a party level, PDI–P also appears to have gained more than Gerindra from
Jokowi’s victory. PDI–P is certainly more popular than Gerindra – although this
was also true before Jokowi was elected, with at least one poll suggesting that
the margin would widen further if PDI–P were to name Jokowi as its presidential
candidate (CSIS 2013).
PDI–P has also been able to marshal Jokowi to campaign for its gubernatorial
candidates in other provinces – almost half of Indonesia’s provinces held guber11 Author’s interviews, Jakarta, July 2013.
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natorial elections in the 12 months following his victory. Jokowi has campaigned
for PDI–P candidates across Java, as well as in North Sumatra and Bali.
It is questionable how strong the Jokowi effect has been in these gubernatorial elections, either in increasing the number of successful PDI–P candidates or
in enabling a new type of candidate to run. The clearest effect was in West Java,
where PDI–P paired female national member of parliament Rieke Diah Pitaloka
with anti-corruption campaigner Teten Masduki. The pair even used the same
distinctive chequered shirts that had been the signature of Jokowi and Ahok’s
Jakarta campaign. They did not win, though, in fact gaining a slightly lower proportion of the vote than the PDI–P candidate ive years earlier (albeit in a larger
ield). In Central Java, PDI–P shunned its incumbent vice-governor, Rustriningsih, for Ganjar Pranowo, a young second-term national member of parliament,
who swept to victory against the incumbent. Overall, incumbents have dominated gubernatorial elections since Jokowi’s success in Jakarta, winning 10 of the
next 12 gubernatorial elections. Voters are either not being offered new candidates
or not choosing them.
Yet the success of incumbent governors does not mean that there are no promising new leaders emerging at the local level. Tri Rismaharini, for example, elected
in 2010 as the female mayor of Surabaya, has gained particular attention (Jakarta
Globe, 23/9/2013). She was named by news magazine Tempo as one of its seven district heads of the year in 2012; her reputation derives from her urban-regeneration
programs and her efforts to reduce levels of prostitution (Tempo, 16/12/2012; Viva
News, 25/10/2012). But in assessing the overall pattern of political leadership, we
need to balance such cases against other trends mapped out by political scientist
Michael Buehler (2013), of wealthy bureaucrats dominating local elections and
of powerful families establishing themselves in local politics. Such elected oficials may include individuals committed to improving democratic governance
among their ranks, but their success means that most local leaders are drawn from
the established elite (Mietzner 2010), whereas the chance of reformists emerging
would increase if leaders were drawn from a wider cross-section of the population. Jokowi’s experience in Solo and Jakarta shows that new leaders can emerge
and succeed, but this still appears to be more of an exception than a rule. If evidence is limited for a so-called Jokowi effect on local politics, what can we expect
to see during the national elections next year?
THE 2014 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS: NEW CANDIDATES?
Jokowi’s rise in the polls has given a new signal to political parties and political
elites of whom the public might elect. It also poses questions of whether Jokowi’s
evident popularity affects the calculations of other parties or clears the way for
alternative candidates to emerge. Yet neither Jokowi’s own party (PDI–P) nor any
other has nominated Jokowi as its presidential candidate, and nor has he said
deinitively that he wants to run.
The 12 parties that will take part in the April 2014 legislative elections have
adopted three different strategies for selecting their presidential candidates. First
is that of the early movers, the four parties that have already announced their
candidates, mostly before Jokowi’s emergence. Of these, only Golkar and Gerindra have a realistic chance of securing a nomination, and neither has proposed a
democratic reformist. For the other two early movers, Hanura and the National
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Mandate Party (Partai Amanat Nasional, PAN), announcing a presidential candidate looks like a bid for a vice-presidential slot.
Golkar’s candidate is Aburizal Bakrie, the party’s chairperson and key inancier. Bakrie is said to have been instrumental in forcing out Sri Mulyani Indrawati
as inance minister in 2010, at which point Tomsa (2010: 314) noted that he was
‘widely regarded as a key obstacle to democratic reform in Indonesia’. Bakrie’s
great public black mark is the Lapindo mudlow disaster, a blowout in a gas drilling operation, part-owned by a Bakrie family company, that submerged a large
swathe of East Java under volcanic mud (McMichael 2009). Voters have been consistently cold to Bakrie, with his support in single digits. Yet he remains Golkar’s
oficial presidential candidate, and the party’s mid-teens popularity in opinion
polls makes it likely that he will be able to run.
Prabowo and his party, Gerindra, have the opposite problem. Prabowo is second in the polls, but Gerindra’s popularity remains mired in single digits. With
Gerindra’s low share of the vote, it is not inconceivable that Prabowo could miss
out on a presidential nomination in 2014. He and his supporters certainly seem
wary of this eventuality, launching an abortive Constitutional Court challenge to
the nomination threshold last year, and failing in their attempt to convince the
DPR to lower the threshold (Antara News, 1/10/2012).
The second strategy is that of the wait-and-sees, seven parties who have stated
that they will announce their candidates only after the legislative elections.
With the exception of PDI–P, these parties’ deferral of their decision suggests
that they will receive insuficient votes to be the senior member of a nominating
coalition, and that they lack a charismatic igure who has a chance of winning
the presidential vote. All of the Islamic parties except for PAN are in this group
(and PAN would not look out of place here, either), relecting their continuing
decline. Islamic parties polled roughly 38% of the vote in Indonesia’s irst two
post-Soeharto elections, but then only 29% in 2009, as outlined by Feillard and
Madinier (2011: 223–6). They suggest two reasons for the parties’ declining support: the capture by secular parties of political Islam’s campaign themes, and the
weak links between the very large Islamic organisations Nahdlatul Ulama and
Muhammadiyah and the parties that claim to represent them, with these links
further weakened by scandals.12
Islamic parties could receive still fewer votes next year; the only party to
improve its share in 2009 – the Prosperous Justice Party (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera,
PKS) – has been severely damaged by the lurid Beefgate scandal (New York Times,
16/5/2013; Tempo, 10/2/2013; Tempo, 17/2/2013). The scandal concerns PKS’s
control of the Ministry of Agriculture, which administers beef-import quotas,
with the implication being that PKS has manipulated this process in an effort to
build an electoral war chest. Beefgate has seen the PKS president stand trial and
has drawn in other senior party igures as witnesses, while illing the papers with
tales of bribes, lavish gifts to beautiful women and the seizure of cars from the
party’s parking lot. Under the weight of the scandal, the party’s support dropped
from 8% in 2009 to less than 3% in mid-2013.
The odd party out among the wait-and-sees is PDI–P. It is the highest-ranked
party in opinion polls, and in Jokowi it has the most popular presidential
12 On the role of Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah in politics, see also Jung (2008).
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candidate – if it chooses to nominate him. PDI–P may win enough votes to be
able to nominate a candidate in its own right in 2014, and it will certainly be at
least the senior player in a coalition. Despite his popularity with voters, however, Jokowi does not enjoy universal support within PDI–P. Some senior igures
would prefer a Megawati–Jokowi ticket, although these igures appear to be losing ground within the party.13 Jokowi’s opponents cite his inexperience, arguing
that Megawati has superior qualities as a leader.14 It is hard to escape the impression, though, that many of Jokowi’s opponents fear that they will lose their positions of inluence within the party if it comes under new leadership.
At any rate, the decision is Megawati’s – at PDI–P’s 2010 congress, the party
handed her the authority to choose its presidential candidate (Tempo, 15/9/2013).
Megawati has opted for Jokowi once before, when she endorsed him as a Jakarta
gubernatorial candidate despite her (now deceased) husband Tauik Kiemas
wanting PDI–P to support Fauzi Bowo (Kompas, 12/3/2012). Guessing at Megawati’s intentions, however, has become akin to reading runes: press reports have
noted details such as Jokowi being in the same car as Megawati at various events
and making frequent and extended visits to Megawati’s residence (Okezone,
9/6/2013; Detik News, 6/9/2013). Jokowi was also given a prominent role at the
party’s national meeting in September 2013, adding to media speculation that he
will be PDI–P’s candidate.
Last, we come to Yudhoyono’s PD Party, which inds itself in crisis, despite its
nine years as the president’s party. Recent polls put PD’s support at between 7%
and 11%, well below its 2009 result of 21% and far from suficient to nominate a
presidential candidate. The slump relects disquiet with corruption scandals that
have consumed prominent PD igures, as well as with Yudhoyono’s performance
as president and his failure to groom a successor. PD has responded to its predicament by holding an eight-month candidate convention to settle on its presidential
contender, which began in mid-September.
Unlike the conventions of political parties in the US, the PD’s convention will
not involve a popular vote. Rather, three survey institutes will twice poll the popularity of the 11 candidates – who are all male – after which the party’s High
Council, chaired by Yudhoyono, will select the winner. The 11 hopefuls include
Yudhoyono’s son-in-law and recently retired general Pramono Edhie Wibowo;
trade minister Gita Wirjawan and state enterprises minister Dahlan Iskan, both
multimillionaires; and genuine left-ield candidates such as former presidential
spokesperson Dino Patti Djalal and public intellectual Anies Baswedan.15 Lacking
both cash and a high proile, the latter pair face great obstacles to success. But the
convention could foreseeably produce a candidate like Gita Wirjawan or Dahlan
Iskan, who would present themselves as reformists in the presidential race.
What, then, might the ield of candidates look like after April’s legislative elections? Of the three to four slots available, we may assume that one slot will go to
Golkar, which at this stage means to Bakrie, and another to PDI–P, probably to
13 Author’s interviews by email with PDI–P igures, September 2013.
14 Author’s interview with senior PDI–P igure, July 2013.
15 The 11 candidates are Anies Baswedan, Dino Patti Djalal, Endriartono Sutarto, Hayono
Isman, Marzuki Alie, Irman Gusman, Gita Wirjawan, Ali Masykur Musa, Dahlan Iskan,
Pramono Edhie Wibowo and Sinyo Harry Sarundajang (Kompas, 31/8/2013).
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Jokowi. That leaves only one to two free spots, which could be one or both of PD’s
candidates, or Prabowo, or, at the very outside, an Islamic-coalition candidate.
So it is still possible that Jokowi’s rise may not spur other parties to change their
candidates. The PD convention aside, the best that the clutch of other alternative
candidates may be able to do will be to run as vice-presidential candidates.
If such a ield emerged, Jokowi would have a good chance of winning. His
strengths include his skill as a communicator and his strong journalistic appeal,
which would negate the media resources of some of his rivals. Moreover, even
if he turns out to be a mediocre governor, the time period until the elections is
probably too short for this to become evident. His win in Jakarta, where PDI–P
has done poorly in elections, shows that he is popular independent of the party,
meaning that the risk of PDI–P becoming ensnared in a corruption scandal prior
to the elections is less of a threat to him, except that such a scandal might weaken
PDI–P’s position in a nominating coalition.
Nor do direct cash transfers look set to be decisive in the 2014 elections. Prior to
the 2009 election, the government paid $1.4 billion in direct cash transfers, some
of which was to compensate for fuel-price rises, which Mietzner (2009a) argues
was central in the electoral success of Yudhoyono’s PD party. This year, the government has again given cash transfers to the poor, to offset a fuel-price rise in
June 2013 from Rp 4,500 to Rp 6,500. Yet the DPR has approved only roughly
half of what was paid ive years ago, when adjusted for inlation, and this money
will be disbursed over a shorter time period than before (Viva News, 13/6/2013).
PDI–P has opposed these transfers, as it did prior to 2009, but although PDI-P igures interviewed by the author were wary of the cash transfers’ potential impact,
they appeared conident of their party’s prospects.16
A NEW PRESIDENT, ENTRENCHED OBSTACLES
Having an alternative igure as the frontrunner for president is in itself a big
change in Indonesian politics, regardless of the eventual composition of the
presidential race. Yet the prospect of a reformist president raises the question of
whether a new leader could tackle some of the entrenched problems in the Indonesian political system, such as corrupt law enforcement, the incomplete rule of
law over the military, and violent religious intolerance.
Corrupt law enforcement
Indonesia’s law-enforcement and judicial institutions are blighted by brazen corruption. There is abundant evidence that corruption is rife in the police and in the
prosecutor’s ofice, and also in the courts.17 Police and prosecutors have shown
little appetite for tackling the problem – leaving the KPK to take on these institutions, often with only belated and half-hearted support from the president.18
16 Author’s interviews with PDI–P igures, June–July 2013.
17 For details of law-enforcement and judicial corruption in Indonesia, see Dick and Butt
(2013) and Butt and Lindsey (2010). The religious courts (Sumner and Lindsey 2010) and –
until the scandal detailed below – the Constitutional Court have generally been considered
to be exceptions to this overall pattern.
18 On prior confrontations between the KPK and the police, see Mietzner (2012) and Jansen (2010).
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This year alone, the chief justice of the Constitutional Court has been arrested
for bribery; a Supreme Court judge has been dismissed for falsifying a verdict,
after it initially appeared he would be allowed to resign (Tempo, 25/11/12; Kompas, 12/12/2012); the national head of trafic police has been convicted of corruption and money laundering; and a former head of the criminal-detective
branch has gone to prison for corruption. In addition to these high-level cases,
there have been routine revelations of other law-enforcement and judicial corruption scandals. For example, a low-ranking police oficer in Papua was arrested in
May 2013, after it was discovered that $130 million had passed through his bank
account (Kompas, 15/5/2013). In another case, a police oficer came to national
police headquarters carrying almost $20,000 in cash, which was suspected to be a
bribe to gain promotion. He was not charged, and the national police spokesperson said that it was natural for someone of his rank to have that amount of money
(Detik News, 27/6/2013). Subsequently, in July, the KPK apprehended a Supreme
Court clerk who was on a motorcycle taxi and carrying roughly $7,000 in cash,
also suspected to be a bribe (Detik News, 25/7/2013). These cases contribute to
the very negative views within Indonesia of law-enforcement and judicial institutions, as captured in surveys of corruption perceptions (for one example, see Dick
2013: 9–10).
In early October, Indonesia was gripped by the arrest of Akil Mochtar, the
chief justice of the Constitutional Court, on charges of bribery and money laundering. Akil was apprehended at his house, along with a member of parliament
from Golkar, a businessman and more than $200,000 in foreign currency (Kompas,
3/10/2013). The corruption commission alleges that the money was a bribe relating to a local electoral dispute in Kalimantan; the commission is also investigating
a second district-level electoral dispute, in Banten, handled by Akil, for which it
has blacklisted the governor, Ratu Atut Chosiyah, from travelling overseas and
arrested her brother for bribery (Tempo, 27/10/2013). Akil’s arrest is noteworthy
for three reasons: the Constitutional Court was previously regarded as one of
the most important clean institutions formed under democratic rule; the court
makes inal and binding decisions on Indonesia’s laws; and, because the court
hears electoral disputes, a diminution of its standing among the community and
political elite poses a potential risk to the orderly conduct of next year’s elections
and the acceptance of the results. In response, President Yudhoyono issued emergency legislation in mid-September to establish a seven-year grace period before
political party members can be appointed to the court; the bill also altered the
selection process for Constitutional Court judges, and introduced a new oversight
mechanism for the court (Kompas, 18/10/2013). It is unclear whether the DPR will
approve or reject this emergency bill.
Prior to Akil’s arrest, the biggest case of the past 12 months was a confrontation
between the police and the KPK in October 2012, over the commission’s investigation of Djoko Susilo, the national head of trafic police, for marking up contracts to procure driving simulators. When the KPK took up the case, the police
tried to block it from seizing documents, sought to take over the investigation
and then withdrew 20 seconded detectives from the commission. When Susilo at
last submitted to questioning, the police responded by raiding KPK headquarters
the same night, aiming to arrest a seconded detective over the shooting death
of a criminal suspect years earlier, in 2004. The arrest was averted only when a
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group of prominent citizens formed a ‘fence of legs’ in front of the commission,
after which Djoko Suyanto, Indonesia’s coordinating minister for political, legal
and security affairs, reportedly ordered police to withdraw (Kompas, 6/10/2012).
Meanwhile, the KPK’s parliamentary opponents sought to amend the KPK law to
weaken the commission’s powers, by requiring it to obtain court permission for
wiretaps and by removing its authority to prosecute cases (Kompas, 8/10/2012,
16/10/2012).
Yet the KPK prevailed, when President Yudhoyono stepped in several days
later. Having allowed the confrontation between the police and the KPK to
develop prior to the aborted raid on KPK headquarters, the president ordered
the police to let the KPK investigate Susilo, criticised the timing and manner of
the police move against the KPK investigator, and told the DPR to desist (Istana
Negara, 8/10/2012). The KPK pressed on, and Susilo was sentenced to 10 years in
prison in September 2013 (Kompas, 3/9/2013). The case thus stood as a victory for
the KPK, albeit one that must have reminded the commissioners of their tenuous
position when taking on the police.
Another very prominent police corruption case concerned Susno Duadji, a former chief of the national crime investigation agency, who led when prosecutors
came to his house, in April 2013, to take him to prison. Susno had been sentenced
in 2011 to three and a half years’ jail for embezzlement and for accepting a bribe
during his tenure as West Java police chief (Suara Pembaruan, 3/5/2013). This conviction followed his being caught, on tape, by the KPK, soliciting a bribe in 2009,
which, like the Susilo case after it, triggered an all-out confrontation between the
police and the KPK (Jansen 2010). Despite his chequered past, Susno was a registered candidate for the Islamic Crescent Star Party (Partai Bulan Bintang, PBB)
for the 2014 elections. When the prosecutors came to his house, Susno refused
to cooperate, and instead headed to the police headquarters in West Java to seek
protection from Tubagus Anis Angkawijaya, the provincial police chief, who duly
granted it. In a national embarrassment, Susno became a celebrity fugitive for
nine days and even paused to address the nation on YouTube.19 In the video,
Susno insists that clerical errors in the Supreme Court decision on his case meant
that he had not been convicted of a crime, let alone would he need to serve a
sentence. The embarrassment for law-enforcement authorities ended only when
Susno turned himself in. As he was no longer able to run for parliament, his spot
on the PBB ticket went to his daughter (Jakarta Globe, 22/5/2013). Tubagus was
also quietly removed a month later, after less than a year in his post (Kompas,
8/6/2013).
Yudhoyono has been reluctant to involve himself in such cases, in what is
admittedly a complex and interest-laden area of law-enforcement reform. He set
up an anti-legal maia task force in 2009, but it has faded from sight. To make
progress, a new president would need to put more political weight into efforts to
clean up law enforcement, by backing the KPK and demanding results from the
country’s top law-enforcement appointees. Such moves would tread on inluential toes but could only be popular with the voting public.
19 Available at .
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The military and the rule of law
Two high-proile attacks in March 2013 showed that the Indonesian military is
still willing to engage openly in violence when it believes that its interests have
been harmed – and that it demands the right to manage investigations and trials
involving military personnel, even if they are clearly guilty of civilian crimes.
Such attacks trigger renewed calls to transfer the authority to try these cases to the
civilian courts, but that reform stalled in Yudhoyono’s irst term (Investor Daily,
14/5/2012; Mietzner 2009b: 311).
In the irst attack, around 75 soldiers burnt down a district police station in
Ogan Komering Ulu, in South Sumatra, killing a civilian and injuring ive police,
after a policeman had shot one of their colleagues two months earlier. That policeman was eventually sentenced in a civilian court to 13 years for murder. The
twelve soldiers who stood trial in a military court received sentences ranging
from a few months to four years. The head of the military court said that these
sentences showed that no soldier was above the law.
Then, just two weeks later, soldiers from Kopassus, Indonesia’s special-forces
unit, forced their way into the Cebongan prison, in Yogyakarta, and shot dead
four prisoners being held for killing a Kopassus member at a nightclub several
days earlier. Amid intense public scrutiny the army formed an investigative team
to take control of the case from the police. Yet the team’s indings read like a
damage-control exercise, or even a justiication of the killings, rather than a genuine report. The team’s head described the attack as relecting the strength of the
Kopassus soldiers’ esprit de corps and their desire to defend their unit’s honour,
and repeatedly referred to the slain men as ‘thugs’.
This approach to the case continued in the military trial, in which the prosecutor cited as an ameliorating factor in his sentencing request that ‘not all of the
community criticise this act: in particular, the Yogyakarta community feel they
have beneited from the accused’s actions’ (Detik News, 31/7/2013), on account of
the slain men being thugs. The court handed down custodial sentences of eleven,
eight and six years to the three soldiers accused of being the main perpetrators,
with the other nine soldiers each receiving sentences of less than two years.
So how did civilian authorities respond to the military’s handling of the attacks
in South Sumatra and Cebongan? Yudhoyono commented publicly on both cases,
but his statement on Cebongan was decidedly equivocal: he waited two weeks
to comment, and then he echoed the military’s justiication of the killings, while
also making it clear that the perpetrators were to be punished. A new law on
the military court remains off the agenda, consistent with scholars’ judgements
that Yudhoyono has had little appetite for broader military reform (Mietzner
2009b; Crouch 2010: 177). Honna (2013: 186) sees the current incomplete military
reforms as relecting a grand bargain between civilian and military leaders, in
which the military disengages from politics whereas ‘civilian leaders respect [the
military’s] institutional autonomy and overlook its lack of accountability’. The
military’s institutional autonomy includes a territorial command structure and a
diminished but continuing ability to raise off-budget funds (Aspinall 2010). These
resources do not mean that the military is in a position to conduct a coup (Crouch
2010: 176–7) – except perhaps in a crisis (Aspinall 2010: 24–5) – but they do make
it a powerful adversary for civilian leaders. A new president may be wary of confronting a challenge of this magnitude, unless he or she was particularly determined to restart military reform.
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Violent religious intolerance
A new president will also face the familiar problem of violent religious intolerance (Hamid 2012; Fealy 2011). Over the past 12 months, Yudhoyono has continued the previous trend of ineffective leadership on this issue, whether for fear
of the electoral consequences, or because of his shortcomings as a leader, or for
other reasons. He has occasionally made irm statements, including bemoaning
the failure of security agencies to be impartial in their enforcing of the law, but
he has not imposed consequences on state agents who have acted contrary to his
directives. In fact, he has allowed Suryadharma Ali, the minister for religion, to
champion the cause of intolerance. In July, for example, Suryadharma told Tempo
magazine that Syiah Muslims driven from their village in Madura, in East Java, in
a violent confrontation in 2012 would need to be ‘enlightened’ before they could
return, and that anyone could return as long as their understanding of Islam did
not clash with existing understandings (Tempo, 27/7/2013).
Despite these failings of leadership, Yudhoyono travelled to New York in May
to receive the World Statesman Award from the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, an organisation that aims to promote peace and tolerance and resolve ethnic
conlict. This trip became a lightning rod in Indonesia for dissatisfaction with the
president’s leadership on this issue.
One encouraging recent development involved Jokowi and his vice-governor,
Ahok. One of Jokowi’s early reforms has been to use an open selection process
in reappointing Jakarta’s ward and sub-district heads. One of his new appointments, a Christian ward chief in the majority Muslim area of Lenteng Agung, has
met with protests on the basis of her religion. Both Jokowi and Ahok have backed
the oficial, with Jokowi saying that oficials should be judged only on results.
Ahok has been more outspoken, countering a statement from Gamawan Fauzi,
the Home Affairs Minister, to the effect that Jokowi should consider replacing
the oficial, by suggesting that the minister should study the constitution (Tempo,
27/9/2013; Kompas, 26/9/2013).
Indonesia has long been short of unequivocal statements on this subject – and
the actions to match – and Jokowi and Ahok’s support for the Lenteng Agung
ward chief sets a good precedent against which to measure Jokowi’s performance
should he be elected president. Countering violent religious intolerance will be a
central quality-of-democracy issue for any reformist president.
Political support
The above deiciencies of Indonesia’s democracy are far from an exhaustive list.
A survey of the past 12 months could equally have focused on Aceh and Papua,
or on the lack of meaningful progress on past human-rights abuses.20 These problems await the new president, who may have to address them as a novice politician with minority parliamentary support.
All of Indonesia’s democratically elected presidents, Yudhoyono included,
have countered their lack of parliamentary support by forming a rainbow coalition encompassing most of the large parties in parliament (Diamond 2009; Sherlock 2009; Tomsa 2010). This has not been effective in locking in support for the
government agenda. Indeed, most observers lamented Yudhoyono’s decision not
to form a more narrowly representative cabinet after his decisive win in 2009.
20 On Aceh, see International Crisis Group (2013); on Papua, see IPAC (2013).
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A popular mandate would be the main asset of any reformist president. Popular pressure can force action – it has inluenced the government’s approach to
tackling the aforementioned problems. In indicating the role that public pressure
has played in recent years, Mietzner (2012: 219) cites a shift in the role of civilsociety activism since 2005 – from pressing for new reforms to defending existing
democratic arrangements – as one of the signs of democratic stagnation. A new
leader would need to marshal anew civil-society and broader public pressure in
favour of his or her policies; rather than seeking the very broad political support
of an extensive coalition, a new president may be better off forming a capable cabinet. At worst, we would see how much can be achieved when a popular leader
supported by new entrants to the political system lends his or her political weight
to particular causes.
CONCLUSION
This article has attempted to determine what effect Jokowi’s rise has had on Indonesian politics ahead of next year’s elections, and whether a new president could
tackle some of the entrenched defects of Indonesia’s democracy. There are two
reasons to expect Jokowi’s emergence at a national level to have inluenced Indonesian politics: if his success in Jakarta has signalled that other reformist candidates can harness widespread disillusionment as political capital to gain election,
and if his leading position in polls ahead of the presidential elections has spurred
other political parties to seek new candidates to defeat him should he gain the
PDI–P nomination.
At this stage, there is limited evidence for either manifestation of a Jokowi effect.
The success of incumbents in the year since Jokowi’s victory suggests that voters
in the regions have not been offered or are not choosing a new style of candidate,
at least at the gubernatorial level. Nationally, half or more of the ield of presidential candidates could be establishment igures such as Bakrie and Prabowo, albeit
with their chances of winning diminished.
Nor is it certain precisely what Jokowi’s agenda would be if he were elected.
Not having secured his party’s nomination, he has refrained from commenting
on national or foreign-policy issues, lest he be seen assuming to be PDI–P’s candidate. His reticence carries the advantage of enabling the dissatisied to project
their hopes onto him, but over time it is likely to emerge that he does not share
all of their views. Yet no matter their level of commitment to reform, Jokowi or
another reformist president would face enormous dificulties in trying to restart
reforms. Already this has led some pessimists to conclude that next year’s elections will not effect change.
Nevertheless, Jokowi’s emergence and the likelihood that he or another reformimage candidate will win in 2014 have changed discussions of Indonesian politics.
The question of whether a novice, reformist president would be able to capitalise
on his or her popular mandate to overcome some of the entrenched deicits of
Indonesia’s democracy is much more enticing than that of whether an already
lawed democratic system would be suficiently resilient to withstand the efforts
of an authoritarian-era president to wind back reforms. Whatever the other effects
of Jokowi’s emergence, that shift in focus will stand as an inluential change in
Indonesian politics in the past year.
Indonesian politics in 2013: the emergence of new leadership?
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REFERENCES
Aspinall, E. (2010) ‘The irony of success’, Journal of Democracy 21 (2): 20–34.
Buehler, M. (2013) ‘Married with children’, Inside Indonesia 112 (April–June).
Butt, S. (2011) ‘Anti-corruption reform in Indonesia: an obituary?’, Bulletin of Indonesian