Most domestic and international commentary on Indonesia’s 14 February elections has focused on the presidential race. But on the same day, Indonesians will also vote for legislators at district, provincial and national levels. Almost 10,000 candidates will compete for the national legislature alone, in what will be the country’s sixth legislative election since the collapse of Suharto’s authoritarian regime in 1998.

Legislative elections are a vibrant affair in Indonesia. The streets are plastered with campaign posters months in advance of voting day, candidates hold gruelling rounds of public events, and they develop sophisticated social media campaigns. Most candidates and their (often very large) campaign teams also invest huge financial resources into distributing patronage, handing out everything from rice and cooking oil, to clothing and cash.

Voter turnout is relatively high in Indonesia compared to the regional and OECD averages, and Indonesians express strong and consistent support for their democratic system and legislative elections. At the same time, the average voter is sceptical about political parties and about the national legislature too: when polled, Indonesians regularly place parties and the national parliament, the DPR (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat/People’s Representaive Council) at the bottom of a list of institutions they trust. (The military and the president usually come out on top.)

So what do Indonesian voters believe their legislators should be doing, and what kind of parliament do they really want?

As part of a broader project on political representation in Indonesia, we conducted a nationally representative survey in June 2023 that measured how Indonesians perceive democratic representation, and how they feel about the composition of the parliament, whether it represents ordinary Indonesians, and the work that legislators do. The survey interviewed 1,200 respondents face to face, with a +/-2.9% margin of error.

The results were striking: most Indonesians express strong support for a more equitable parliament, and for legislative work that focuses on programmatic policies over particularistic projects. Here we offer a brief snapshot of some of our findings.

Do voters feel their legislature is broadly representative?

We began by asking respondents about the extent to which they feel elections are able to produce a parliament that reflects voters’ views and interests. Indonesians were divided: around 47% felt the parliament is broadly reflective of voters’ interests, and 45% disagreed (see Figure 1 below).

Figure 1: Does the DPR reflect voters’ views and interests?

When we dug deeper into the data, we found that class indicators, and in particular education, were correlated with a negative view of the DPR’s ability to reflect voters’ interests. For example, almost 60% of university educated Indonesians, and over 65% percent of Indonesians in the top income bracket (i.e. over 4 million rupiah/A$400 per month) felt the parliament was not playing its representative role.

Ironically, most legislators have a background akin to those who are more likely to criticise them, i.e. they are more likely to be well educated, wealthy and from an urban area. As political campaigns have become more expensive in Indonesia, upper class candidates have come to enjoy a strong electoral advantage. Yet it seems lower classes citizens are more likely to feel parliament broadly reflects voters’ interests.

One potential explanation is that elected politicians tend to cater to the needs of lower class voters. In general, legislators’ relationships with constituents develop through the provision of goods and services (food, cash, access to hospital beds and to other services), often on a highly personal basis. Lower class citizens need this sort of assistance more than upper class Indonesians, who are less dependent on legislators to act as brokers in their dealings with the state. In turn, upper and middle class voters interact far less with legislators, either during or between campaign periods.

What do voters think legislators should be doing?

We then asked respondents what they believe are legislators’ two most important tasks. Each of the options were designed to reflect distinct ways voters might conceive of representation. Options #1 and #3 in Figure 2 (below) capture the notion that representatives should work above all to meet constituents’ concrete needs. We expect this to be a popular choice, because it reflects the clientelistic relationships that we know DPR members develop with their constituents in Indonesia. Options #2 and #4 capture a programmatic or policy-oriented understanding of legislative function and, in turn, representation.

Figure 2: What are legislators’ primary tasks? (Choose up to two)

Again the answers were varied, with respondents divided between seeing DPR members’ most important task as arranging government assistance for constituents, or seeing their primary role as encouraging policies and regulations for the welfare for the citizenry more broadly. Around a third of participants viewed development projects as representatives’ primary tasks, and a similar number believed  their elected representatives should be delivering on parties’ programmatic promises.

What should the DPR look like?

What about the composition of the DPR? Do Indonesians feel that Indonesia’s key social groups are adequately reflected in the makeup of national parliament?

This question speaks to scholarly work that examines support for descriptive representation: the idea that voters want to be represented by members of their own group, whether that be based on gender, ethnicity, religion, class or some other identity category. Applied to the country as a whole, it suggests that the legislature should comprise a mix of individuals from such groups that mirrors the composition of the broader community: as a representative body, it should “look like” the country it represents. The logic is that political representatives who are themselves from a specific group will best advocate for that groups’ rights, interests and needs.

Our survey asked Indonesians a series of questions to gauge how important this form of representation is to them, and whether they wanted a DPR that looked different along descriptive lines.  We asked them to agree or disagree to the following statements:

1. In the DPR, only members of the lower to middle class (such as farmers or laborers) are able to effectively represent the views and interests of the lower middle class.
2. In the DPR, only female legislators are able to effectively represent the views and interests of women.
3. In the DPR, only legislators who are religious minorities (Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians) are able to effectively represent the views and interests of minority religious group.

Figure 3: Descriptive representation

The results are striking: Indonesians overwhelmingly support the descriptive representation of class interests, which is noteworthy given that (as mentioned above) Indonesia’s national legislature  consists of almost entirely upper class individuals whose occupational backgrounds are increasingly concentrated in the private sector.

The idea that only women can truly represent women also received strong support. When it came to religious minorities the responses were more divided, suggesting an ambivalence within Indonesia’s majority Muslim population toward to the idea that non-Muslims’ needs are best met through political representation.

As a follow up, we then asked whether respondents thought the number of legislators from these groups needed to be increased. The results again show very strong support for increasing the number of lower to middle class people in national parliament, with over 80% in favour, and for increasing women’s representation too. There is far less support for increasing the non-Muslim presence in parliament.

Figure 4: Increasing descriptive representation

Conclusion

Our survey suggets many Indonesians share a desire for a more egalitarian parliament, where lower class citizens and women are better represented. Indonesians also believe legislators should first and foremost be developing policies and regulations that serve the welfare of the population more broadly (although patronage-centred understandings of representation also have wide support).

This public atttitude contrasts with Indonesia’s current reality. Most legislators are wealthy, and many come to politics after a career in business, and use their political influence to further their financial interests. The rising cost of politics means such candidates have an electoral advantage, as do incumbents who can use government programs and parliamentary funds to support their campaigns. Despite potential underlying demand for change, there are few opportunities for this ‘supply side’ constraint to shift in the near future: barriers to entry for independent candidates are high, and political parties continue to seek well-resourced candidates who can underwrite their own campaigns.

And while our survey finds support for women’s representation, female candidates are less likely to have the economic resources needed to compete, and they face considerable headway from patriarchal attitudes holding that men are better suited to public leadership roles. Still, this unmet public desire for a different kind of legislature—one that includes a wider spectrum of people and interests—is significant and potentially more pervasive than either scholars or politicians have understood.

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Numerous business figures are occupying pivotal roles in each Indonesian presidential candidate’s campaign teams. Arsjad Rasjid, the chairman of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce, or KADIN—Indonesia’s largest and most influential business association—is leading Ganjar Pranowo’s campaign. Rosan Roeslani, a businessman and former Indonesian ambassador to the United States, heads Prabowo’s team. Thomas (Tom) Lembong, a businessman and former minister of trade during President Jokowi’s first term, is key member of Anies Baswedan’s team.

The participation of business leaders in politics is not a new phenomenon. Previously, figures like Jusuf Kalla, Surya Paloh, and Hasyim Djoyohadikusomo have been key players in political parties—in the case of these men, inGolkar, Nasdem, and Gerindra respectively. The notable difference in the current scenario is that Arsjad, Rosan, and Tom are not affiliated with any political party; they are independent businessmen with stakes in publicly listed companies. Other younger business figures like Erick Thohir and Sandiaga Uno are involved with PAN and PPP respectively, but their participation is mostly behind closed doors, rather than as visible, active members. Both seem limit the display of their involvement with the parties.

Conducting business in Indonesia often necessitates active engagement with the government, with support from executive authorities being a crucial factor. Poor relations with the regime can impede business operations—as evidenced by Prabowo Subianto’s admission in a 2023 interview that his business stagnated due to limited access to executive power, possibly exacerbated by his years in opposition. Similarly, Surya Paloh’s business faced regulatory challenges under Jokowi’s administration after his Nasdem Party pledged support for Anies Baswedan’s presidential candidacy.

In separate interviews for my research conducted in Jakarta during 2018–19, one businessman in the mining explosive services sector mentioned that the government took over a major contract of his in favor of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) because the government saw the business group he belonged to as being a part of the previous government of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Another entrepreneur in environmental and waste management revealed that his company was blocked from securing contracts with SOEs, as other private business groups with closer government ties were preferred.

Political parties often serve as a means for businessmen like Surya Paloh and Prabowo to renegotiate their relationships with the regime, benefiting their enterprises. Businessmen outside political party structures also engage in donations to political parties for political connections and assurances.

More recently, however political parties are not the only avenue for building these connections.  Businessmen without direct party affiliations are increasingly comfortable participating in electoral politics. The perceived risks to their businesses if their supported candidates lose seems minimal, even without the backing of political parties. What enables this scenario?

My research has suggested that the risks for businessmen engaging in electoral politics are minimal for two reasons. Firstly, increasingly influential organisations outside formal political institutions have become new vehicles for political lobbying. Some of these organisations have gained considerable political power over the last decade.

Secondly, the strategic distribution of corporate equity and appointment of board and management has become an important way for business figures to manage political risks. My research illustrates how ownership of politically-exposed companies has been diversified among multiple businessmen and politicians, highlighting the evolving landscape of business–politics interplay in Indonesia.

It is important to note that for politicians, involving businesspeople in their campaign teams can also offer valuable benefits, such as access to capital and enhanced managerial efficiency. Businesspeople are often skilled managers and adept problem-solvers, qualities that can significantly contribute to the effectiveness of a political campaign. It’s important to recognise that the relationships between businessmen and politicians are multifaceted and not solely defined by financial and monetary interests.

KADIN and HIPMI as political tools

Business–politician connections are increasingly being established through social platforms such as alumni associations of universities and schools, religious groups, professional bodies, and business associations.

Two notable organisations that facilitate these connections are the Indonesia Chamber of Commerce (KADIN) and the Indonesia Youth Entrepreneur Association (HIPMI).

The current chairman of KADIN, Arsjad Rasjid, is on a leave of absence to lead Ganjar’s campaign. Roesan Roslani, a former KADIN chairman, leads Prabowo’s campaign. Bahlil Lahadalia, the minister of investment and a key figure in Prabowo’s campaign, previously chaired HIPMI. Sandiaga Uno, also a former chairman of HIPMI (2005–08), plays a notable role in political circles. The current chairman of HIPMI, Ackbar Himawan Buchari, is actively backing the Prabowo-Gibran campaign.

In contrast, Anies Baswedan’s team does not feature significant figures from KADIN or HIPMI, though, Novita Dewi, the campaign’s secretary general, was once an active member of HIPMI. A member of HIPMI in Surabaya stated in an interview with me that “it’s important for us to maintain a harmonious relationship with the government. President Jokowi leans towards supporting Prabowo, but the president appears to be accepting of limited support for Ganjar.”

My sources have also mentioned that KADIN and HIPMI, which both have strong ties to Jokowi’s government, are discreetly contributing to Anies’ team to avoid conflicts with the current administration, as Anies is perceived as an opponent to Jokowi’s regime.

KADIN and HIPMI have become vital networking hubs for businessmen seeking political support. These organisations maintain ongoing communication with key governmental departments such as the Ministry of Investment, the Coordinating Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Coordinating Ministry of Investment and Maritime Affairs, and even with police and military establishments. These communications are important to secure supports such as permits, licenses, and access to government projects.

Members of HIPMI and KADIN often have affiliations with political parties as well. While these organisations are not the only avenues for businessmen to secure political support outside of political parties, they stand out due to their institutional strength and significant political influence.

Ownership diversification and well-connected executives

In the realm of business and politics, the intertweaving of ventures and ownership has created a robust network of trust and relationships. This is evident in various instances where business ownerships are shared between businessmen and politicians, or those who hold dual political and corporate roles.

These collaborations are often facilitated through two methods of corporate actions. The primary method includes share transactions and acquisitions, where one company acquires or purchases shares of another. The second method involves appointing commissioners or executives with strong political connections.

A notable example of the first method occurred in 2018, ahead of the 2019 election. At that time, Saratoga Capital, owned by Sandiaga Uno, Prabowo Subianto’s running mate, sold its shares to Luhut Pandjaitan’s firm Toba for US$9 million. Luhut was a supporter of Jokowi’s reelection. This transaction, while legal, highlighted the strategic distribution of shares during politically sensitive times.

Another example of complex ownership structures is PT Adaro, one of Indonesia’s largest coal producers. It is partly owned by Garibaldi Thohir and by Saratoga Capital, linked to Sandiaga Uno. The intricate ownership network provided a safety net for the involved businessmen during the 2019 election, where Sandiaga and Erick Thohir (Garibaldi’s brother) were found on opposing sides.

The coal and mining sector presents some of the most illustrative examples of complex ownership structures. A report by Project Multatuli reveals how ownership is distributed among groups that, despite having diverse political affiliations, share common commercial interests.

The second method, appointing well-connected commissioners or executives, is exemplified by Rukun Rahardja, company owned by Happy Hapsoro, the husband of senior PDI-P figure Puan Maharani and a PDI-P financier, is supporting Ganjar Pranowo in the presidential election. His company has commissioners like Arsjad Rasjid and Rachmat Gobel, a Nasdem politician supporting Anies Baswedan. The unique aspect here is that the company’s stakeholders are active politicians supporting different presidential candidates.

Beside commissioners, an example of an executive position linking politically opposed business figures is Justarina Sinta Marisi Naiborhu, once an executive at Luhut’s Toba and a family member Luhut, who moved to a senior position at Kalimantan Industrial Park Indonesia (KIPI), a significant green industrial park project owned by Garibaldi Thohir. Justarina, it seems, is not only a good manager, but also well-connected with key politicians.

It’s worth noting that family members are not typically the preferred choice of politicians for executive roles in private corporations. Instead, politicians often recommend individuals for executive positions based on trust established through various previous interactions and engagements.

Having a trusted individual at the executive level benefits politicians by allowing them to influence corporate decisions, such as vendor selection and procurement. For businessmen, employing well-connected executives aids in navigating the complexities of permitting and licensing procedures that often are as political as they are technical.

Executives with both political connections and managerial skills are rare, as not many individuals possess both these competencies. Figures like Sandiaga Uno, Rosan Roslani, Arsjad Rasjid, and Tom Lembong are part of a select group who excel in managerial skills while also maintaining political connections.

The primary function of well-connected executives and commissioners is to serve as a bridge between political and business interests. They play a crucial role in maintaining open channels of communication and fostering relationships within the corporate sphere, independent of formal political institutions.

Conclusion

For risk-averse businessmen, involvement in electoral politics is often viewed as a high-risk endeavor. Traditionally, they have relied on their position within political parties to mitigate these risks.

However, in recent times, robust institutions like KADIN and HIPMI, along with strategies such as diversifying ownership and employing specific corporate recruitment tactics, have emerged as alternative means for securing political assurance in both the business and political realms.

Businessmen can used either or both of the above strategies, making sure to make deals with the right actors within HIPMI and KADIN, and/or making transactions with the right politicians in asset diversification.

These approaches facilitate the development of connections and relationships within the political sphere, enabling businesspeople to participate in political activities with a degree of independence from traditional political party structures.

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On 29 January, the Indonesia Institute at the Australian National University hosted an online roundtable featuring ANU-based scholars to discuss the outlook for Indonesia’s 2024 presidential and legislative elections. Moderated by the Institute’s chair Dr Eve Warburton, speakers canvassed the state of the race, the issues of democratic quality and policymaking that are at stake in the conduct and outcome of the elections.

About the speakers

Greg Fealy is an Emeritus Professor at ANU. He is a scholar of Indonesian politics and history, who specialises in Islam. He has written extensively on the politics and culture of major Islamic parties and organisations such as Nahdlatul Ulama, PKS and Hizbut Tahrir, as well as jihadist groups.

Navhat (Nava) Nuraniyah is a PhD scholar at the Department of Political and Social Change, ANU. Her research focuses on how Islamist opposition movements respond to political repression in Indonesia.

Fakhridho Susrahadiansyah Bagus Pratama Susilo (Fakhridho Susilo) is a research associate of KiPHRAH. He holds a PhD in Policy and Governance from the Crawford School of Public Policy, the Australian National University. He is the recipient of the 2022–2023 Fox International Fellowship at Yale University, Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies.

[Moderator] Eve Warburton is a senior lecturer at the Department of Political and Social Change in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. She is also Director of the ANU Indonesia Institute.

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At the 2019 presidential election, Indonesia’s Islamist groups were at the peak of their influence. They banded together with Joko Widodo’s then rival, Prabowo Subianto, to orchestrate one of the most polarising presidential campaigns in Indonesia’s history. Though they have been battered by government repression since Widodo’s reelection in 2019, Islamist groups are now regrouping behind Anies Baswedan and Muhaimin Iskandar in the 2024 presidential race.

In the course of my doctoral research into Indonesia’s Islamist opposition movements in the Jokowi years, I have been following Islamist activists, both virtually and on the ground, as they campaign on behalf of Anies and Muhamin’s candidacy. I have been struck by how much more timid these Islamist groups’ campaign rhetoric is compared with 2019. Gone are the days when their volunteers would go around from house to house to spread internet-sourced propaganda accusing their political rival of being a Chinese communist agent who was bent on abolishing Islam from public life and was conspiring to assassinate Muslim leaders—things they said about Jokowi in 2019. They no longer describe the election in apocalyptic terms, where one candidate is portrayed as an evil force while the other is hailed as the saviour that could salvage Indonesia from impending doom.

Instead, Islamist activists in Anies’ team and from affiliated volunteer groups have chosen to emphasise his commitment to what they call “ethical politics” (an Islamist euphemism for governance based in Islamic morality), his concrete achievements as governor of Jakarta between 2017 and 2022, and his promise to restore the freedoms and justice that have been eroded under Jokowi. Islamists’ campaign style, in other words, has shifted from being one characterised by passionate ideological agitation to a more level-headed programmatic style, reflecting the overall decline in ideological polarisation during Jokowi’s second term.

But does that mean that Islamists have abandoned their ideological beliefs and goals, or does it simply reflect political expediency? I argue that Indonesian Islamists’ rhetorical moderation is primarily an adaptation to the three key political realities of the late Jokowi years.

Firstly, state repression has made Islamists cautious about embracing overtly sectarian campaigning. Secondly, with Islamists having aligned behind the candidacy of the Anies and Muhaimin, and keeping their options open with a reconciliation with Prabowo Subianto in a potential second round of the presidential election, they have sought not to alienate pluralist Muslim voters linked to traditionalist groups like NU.

Third, unlike in the aftermath of the mass mobilisations against the alleged blasphemy of former Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, there isn’t a religiously-charged issue around which a dynamic of polarisation can arise. The issues of Rohingya and Israel–Palestine conflict have featured in the 2024 campaign, but these issues do not divide Indonesians neatly along Islamic–nationalist lines, and offer only limited potential for the reactivation of ideological passions in the short term.

De-risking religious rhetoric

I limit my analysis to non-violent Islamist groups such as FPI—relaunched, after the ban of the Front Pembela Islam/Islamic Defenders’ front in 2020, as the Front Persaudaraan Islam/Islamic Brotherhood Front—and the self-styled “Alumni” of the 212 movement activists that led the protests against former Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama in 2016–17. These groups share relatively moderate goals and methods compared to jihadist extremists. They pursue an Islamisation of society and the state not via revolution but through gradualist tactics like proselytisation, education, social services, advocacy, and political participation. They will enthusiastically drum up intolerant sectarian sentiments (which they genuinely hold) when it benefits them, but remain ready to tone it down when their survival is at stake. For this community of non-jihadist Islamists, the goal is to win power first, then work on the religio-political reform later.

In 2024 as in 2019, direct engagement in electoral politics is part and parcel of this strategy. On 27 September 2023, Anies and Muhaimin visited the FPI leader Rizieq Shihab, as if to secure his blessing, just before they officially registered their candidacy. Once Anies’ candidacy was confirmed, he recruited Yusuf Martak, a close confidant of Rizieq, as one of the co-chairs of his success team.

Islamists have made it clear that they are not giving a blank cheque to Anies. In exchange for their support, they required Anies and Muhaimin to sign a 13-point “Integrity Pact” which, among other things, affirmed the candidates’ commitment to back the Islamist agenda of combatting secularism, communism, and religious blasphemy (for them, a code word for the perceived growth in the power and “arrogance” of Indonesia’s Christian minority). The agreement also stipulated that Anies and Muhaimin would enforce public morality based on Islamic norms and improve ordinary people’s economic circumstances by stopping a purported inflow of mainland Chinese workers.

Following the same formula as in 2019, in November 2023 FPI and its affiliates organised a Conference of Religious Scholars (Ijtima Ulama) in order to give their choice of candidate the stamp of religious authority. The 2023 Ijtima resulted in a religious recommendation by “Grand Imam” Rizieq Shihab to vote for Anies and his running mate Muhaimin. The idea is to leverage the grassroots network of FPI and the Brotherhood of 212 Alumni (Persaudaraan Alumni 212, or PA212) to organise campaign activities and the distribution of campaign materials in support of Anies. As of late 2023, the resurrected FPI boasted branches in 23 out of 38 provinces, while formal PA212 structures have been established in all districts in the 10 most populous provinces; both sped up their expansion of local branches with a view to mobilising voters for the 2024 election. That said, it is unclear how many members either organisation actually has—local FPI activists often double up as PA212 executives.

Although the “Integrity Pact” between FPI and the Anies campaign and the Ijtima Ulama’s endorsement of Anies exhibit some of the sectarian and xenophobic tone that characterised Islamist activism in the 2019 election, my on-the-ground observation of FPI-linked campaign events suggests they have cooled down their divisive religious narratives for 2024.

A typical campaign in Central Java, for instance, would attract between 50 to a few hundred people, though the number might be higher in FPI strongholds such as Banten and Greater Jakarta. Many such campaign events that I observed were simple (held in mosques, Islamic pesantren boarding schools, or other free venues) and mostly funded by volunteers and donations from local candidates seeking to win the sympathy of Islamist constituencies. Attendees at these events receive free T-shirts, posters, mugs and other merchandise, but I have not witnessed any exchange of monetary gifts (as has been reported in other candidates’ campaigns). This is not surprising given Anies has reported the lowest amount of campaign funds among the three presidential candidates.

What was more striking to me was the relative lack of religious zeal and apocalyptic narratives that were ubiquitous in 2019. Speaking at a pro-Anies volunteers meeting in Solo on 9 January, the secretary general of PA212 Uus Solihuddin told the volunteers to de-emphasise lofty ideology and focus more on concrete programmatic policies. Whereas in the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election Islamist leaders relied on intimidation and fear-mongering to coerce Muslims to vote for Anies (such as threatening to not perform funeral prayers for recently deceased Muslims who supported “infidel” candidates), Islamists are now carefully avoiding any statements that can be construed as smear campaign, misinformation or sectarian incitement. As PA212’s secretary-general instructed the assembled volunteers,

Stay clear of black campaigns! Focus on promoting the vision and mission of Amin (Anies and Muhaimin), make it viral by using plain, easily accessible language. Don’t talk about lofty ideas. Just talk about cheap groceries (sembako). Because let’s face it, most Indonesian people are not at that [intellectual] level yet. Engage the people by saying things like: do you want better healthcare? Do you want cheap electricity? Do you want a driver’s license that applies for a lifetime—no need to renew it every five years? Then you can reinforce the message by telling them that these are the recommendations of our ulama who have signed an agreement with Anies.

The caution around “black campaigns” reflects Islamists’ fear of persecution and arrest, a critical factor that explains the shift away from sectarian narratives. (Alfian Tanjung, another Islamist cleric who was present at the meeting in Solo described here, had been imprisoned from 2017 to 2020 after being convicted of criminal defamation for calling Jokowi and PDI–P “lackeys” of the Indonesian Communist Party/PKI).

SAFEnet, an NGO that advocates for freedom of online expression, reported in 2022 that the arrest of opposition activists under Indonesia’s Electronic Information and Transactions Law (UU ITE) has increased by 26%; most were charges with defaming  state officials and institutions. Islamists are arguably the most targeted category of all opposition activists. The fact that Rizieq Shihab is on parole until June 2024, following his release from prison in July 2022, is a living reminder of the great risks they are facing: as one activist put it, “any tiny mistake could send Habib Rizieq back to prison, that’s why we need to be careful.”

Yusuf Martak similarly told a group of pro-Anies volunteers in Klaten and Solo that they should emphasise his concrete achievements in combating social ills in Jakarta, such as closing down a major brothel and a restaurant chain that gave free promotional beers to anyone named Muhammad. It was suggested that promoting his accomplishments in public morality and infrastructure development would be more effective and less risky than invoking overtly Islamist jargon (e.g. “infidels”, “shari’a”) that are closely associated with radicalism.

Maintaining moderate support

Last but not least, Islamists felt compelled to tone down their religious zeal in order to appease the moderate, traditionalist Muslim base of Anies’ running mate, Muhaimin Iskandar.

Islamists were initially disappointed by the appointment of Muhaimin as Anies’ running mate because of his pluralist Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) background, his implication in historical corruption cases, and his attendance at a 2023 Coldplay concert in Jakarta that was protested by FPI on the grounds that the band has shown support for LGBT people. Yet once Rizieq Shihab issued the instruction for the FPI rank and file to support Anies, they fell into line.

Many within Muhaimin’s NU milieu perceive Anies as a “Wahhabi”—a reference to the ultrapuritan brand of Sunni Islam associated with Saudi Arabia, which has become a slur among Muslim moderates in Indonesia—due to his modernist background and close relationship with the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera/PKS). This is in the context of an internal rift within NU: the organisation’s chairman Yahya Cholil Staquf and most of its national board have sided with Prabowo, while influential NU kyai (traditionalist religious leaders), including NU’s former chair Said Aqil Siradj, have backed Muhaimin and his party PKB. In East Java, a number of kyai from Yahya’s camp exhorted their followers to not vote for Anies, saying that he secretly conspired with the banned transnational organisation Hizbut Tahrir and FPI to replace the Indonesian republic with a caliphate.

To allay those suspicions, FPI and the 212 activists have included references to “the preservation of the Unitary Republic of Indonesia (NKRI) and Pancasila” in their Integrity Pact with Anies. In fact, FPI and PA212 have followed a trend set recently by government agencies and NU institutions of beginning their formal gatherings by singing the national anthem.

Islamists are also calibrating their campaigning with a view to the possibility of reconciling with Prabowo Subianto, with some leading figures in FPI and PA212 already planning to shift allegiance to Prabowo should Anies fail to enter the second round. As one senior activist from FPI put it:

We are now campaigning for Anies, yes. But we shouldn’t attack the other side overzealously. I don’t think it’s right to throw a smear campaign at Prabowo. After all, he and [his party] Gerindra have done a lot for us. Anies promised us lots of things, but in the end he gave more money and positions to NU. Despite Prabowo’s betrayal, it was Gerindra politicians who defended us, gave us legal assistance when our members got criminalised. Gerindra advocated for the KM50 cause [the police shootings of 6 FPI members in 2020] in parliament. So we shouldn’t offend Prabowo too much, he’s our best option if there is a second round.

Palestine and Rohingya offer limited scope for polarisation

Anti-Rohingya incitement has intensified on social media since late 2023. One video that went viral on Tiktok purported to show how Rohingya asylum seekers in Aceh threw away food that had been donated to them by local villagers. Another alleged that Rohingya asylum seekers in Malaysia had demanded land, warning viewers that they might want to take over local people’s land in Aceh too. This online incitement culminated in an incident in which hundreds of university students in Aceh raided a refugee shelter and forced the Rohingya to leave. Rights activists and social media experts contended that the online hate speech was too systematic to be organic; the newspaper Koran Tempo quoted a source who stated that some elements within state security forces hired the student mob in order to sow crisis.

Some Islamist groups believe that a backlash against Rohingya asylum seekers has been engineered to discredit Islamists, who had long conducted humanitarian fundraising for Rohingya victims of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. The online content that has framed Rohingya as lesser Muslims with sinful habits was therefore like a slap in the face to Islamists.

While it remains mysterious how the anti-Rohingya campaign came about, or who was behind it, the issue has become a point of contention between the presidential candidates. Anies has struck a sympathetic note, saying that Indonesians have a humanitarian duty to help Rohingya Muslims who have come asking for protection. Prabowo, on the other hand, has asserted that it is unfair to impose such a burden on Indonesia, and that the United Nations ought to be responsible. Ganjar Pranowo, meanwhile, has given a vague comment that neither accepts nor rejects the asylum seekers.

Some pro-Anies Telegram channels have spread a counter-narrative that the Acehnese student leader who coordinated the attack on Rohingya was a youth member of Prabowo Subianto’s Gerindra party, and that Prabowo has sanctioned the discrimination against one of the world’s most persecuted Muslim minorities. The Rohingya issue has not flared up significantly, with the government swiftly providing an alternative shelter for those displaced by community protests in Aceh.

The Palestine issue has meanwhile become fertile ground not only for Islamists’ electoral campaigning but also for their long-term expansion and recruitment. The issue is also a “safe” one, because the government is more tolerant of Islamist mobilisation on foreign conflicts—especially given Indonesia’s official support for Palestinian freedom—than local ones. In December 2023, for the first time in five years the government allowed FPI to hold the 212 Reunion Rally at Jakarta’s Monas square, on the condition that it was focused on Palestine.

Some Islamist sources told me that when their pro-Anies events were prohibited by PDI-P district and village heads in rural West Java, for instance, they got around the restrictions by conducting a Palestine solidarity roadshow. They said that even some PDI–P strongholds could accept them and were willing to donate money if the clerics focused on the plight of Palestine and offering religious counselling to the villagers. Many lay PDI-P sympathisers volunteered their phone numbers to Islamist clerics after being told that they could get free online counselling and unlimited supplies of “holy water”, only to find themselves bombarded with Anies campaign materials through WhatsApp. The Palestine issue remains significant for Islamist revival beyond the election, having wide appeal that cuts across partisan cleavage, and it provides Islamists with ample opportunities for fundraising and outreach to new audiences.

In Indonesia’s outer islands, however, the Israel–Palestine conflict carries more divisive potential. On 25 November 2023, violent clashes broke out between the Muslim Solidarity Front (Barisan Solidaritas Muslim) and a Christian group named Manguni Brigade in Bitung, North Sulawesi. BSM was holding a pro-Palestine rally on the street when they ran into a convoy of Makatana Minahasa Christians who were also on their way to a cultural parade. Some of the Christians carried Israeli flags, which triggering an altercation with BSM that devolved into a brawl that killed one person and injured two others.

In video footage that circulated on social media, several people from Manguni Brigade dressed in traditional war attire were seen chasing BSM members; a number of local Muslims joined another fight that broke out in the city centre later that night. The video footage also showed the Manguni Brigade burning Palestinian flags and destroying an ambulance that belonged to BSM. Islamist online channels quickly spread the videos and talked about jihad against the “Christian Zionists”. Rizieq Shihab also issued a statement demanding that the government punish the Zionist supporters who attacked Muslims in Bitung.

While the local conflict was swiftly managed by local authorities, its effects have lingered and bled into the election. Pro-FPI social media accounts circulated pictures of the Manguni Brigade leader wearing a Prabowo T-shirt; in one picture, he was seen posing with Jokowi with the caption in the version shared by Islamists remarking that “this is the reason Manguni Makasiouw isn’t banned after causing riot in Bitung, likely protected by Jokowi”. Another video showed a big Israeli flag being waved at a PDI–P rally for Ganjar Pranowo. In Central and West Java, some Islamist activists have been preparing to deploy their Laskar (security or paramilitary organisations) to guard polling stations against intimidation and fraud they allege is being planned by the “pr o-Zionist red thugs” (preman merah, a reference to PDI-P’s party colours).

Despite Islamists’ attempts to use the Rohingya and Palestine issues to activate the latent sectarian tensions in Indonesian society, the debate around these issues do not neatly slice the electorate along the Islamist vs pluralist lines. In the case of Israel–Palestine conflict, Indonesians regardless of their religious inclinations are overwhelmingly pro-Palestine. The issue is not as divisive as in the West. The anti-Rohingya issue has to some extent taken on a political turn, with Anies’ Islamist supporters advocating the rights of Rohingya refugees, while Prabowo has cast them as a potential threat to Indonesians’ economic interests. As Prabowo said while visiting Aceh on 24 November 2023: “now let’s say we want to help the Rohingya. How can we help, our own people are short of food. Around 20% of our children are malnourished.”

These two issues are therefore unlikely to cause deepening polarisation. However, the Palestine issue particularly provides a fertile ground for Islamists to revive and expand their appeal (not least because the government tolerates Islamist propaganda on foreign rather than domestic affairs), hence its usefulness will outlast the election.

Conclusion

My observation of the election campaign in urban and rural Java reveals a much calmer picture than the previous presidential race. Unlike in 2019, people did not complain as much about an emotionally draining election, marked by identity politics, that affected their personal relationships with family and friends.

Islamist groups themselves have decided to “cool down” divisive campaign narratives for various strategic reasons—without necessarily abandoning their long-term ideological agenda. This has partly to do with the importance of not alienating the moderate traditionalist Muslims, especially in East Java, that form an important part of the Anies–Muhaimin ticket’s electoral coalition. The stigmatisation of radicalism has also contributed to Islamists’ strategic avoidance of ideological messaging. Indeed, Jokowi’s anti-radicalism policy and counter-polarisation efforts by NU and other pluralist groups have pushed Islamists to the fringe, at least for the time being. Moreover, Islamists have seen that Jokowi’s social assistance programs have contributed to his high approval ratings, fostering a belief that Indonesian people care more about their economic wellbeing than ideology—hence the Islamists’ pivot to bread and butter issues when campaigning for Anies.

Finally, the lowering intensity of ethnoreligious tension and partisanship suggests that post-election riots like those seen in May 2019 are unlikely. However, the violent Christian–Islamist clash in Bitung reminds us that there is potential for isolated local conflicts between supporters of different candidates in the lead up to the election and its aftermath.

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The post Indonesian Islamists’ pragmatic pivot in 2024 appeared first on New Mandala.

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In Indonesia’s 2019 presidential election, the flow of support from Islamic groups to the two presidential tickets was distinctly polarised. Conservatives rallied behind Prabowo Subianto and Sandiaga Uno, whereas Nahdlatul Ulama (NU)—the country’s biggest Islamic organisation, which claims to represent up to 90 million Muslims—unequivocally endorsed Joko Widodo (Jokowi) and Ma’ruf Amin. A growth in partisan polarisation among Indonesian Islamic organisations had been evident since the 2014 presidential election, when many NU followers solidifyied their support for Jokowi. It only grew stronger in 2019, when Maruf Amin, NU’s supreme leader (rais aam), was nominated as Joko Widodo’s running mate.

In contrast, the 2024 presidential election exhibits the opposite trend. Islamic groups’ support for the current presidential candidates are primarily being driven by political opportunism instead of by stark ideological differences.

Our research substantiates observations of a de-polarisation in 2024 through analysis of an original database recording the religious affiliations of each candidate’s national campaign team (tim sukses/“success team”) members. In contrast to the 2019 presidential election, the composition of religious figures represented in each tim sukses during this year’s presidential election reflects how ideological divisions—while they still exist—have weakened considerably.

Islamic support by the numbers

Based on numerous media reports detailing the officially-announced lineup of tim sukses, we are able to map out how different Islamic organisations and their leaders are dividing their loyalties between the 2024 candidates. The Anies Baswedan—Muhaimin Iskandar (branded as AMIN) coalition boasts 49 affiliated Islamic figures, constituting 29% of their total tim sukses members. The Prabowo Subianto–Gibran Rakabuming Raka coalition has 69 Islamic figures, accounting for 27% of their total, while the Ganjar Pranowo–Mahfud MD coalition trails with the lowest percentage at 20%, comprising only 8 Islamic figures.

The absolute number of Islamic figures on the Ganjar–Mahfud team is much lower than the other tickets, because Ganjar’s presidential candidacy is primarily backed by the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI–P), which also dominates the composition of Ganjar-Mahfud tim sukses. While Ganjar is also supported by one Islamic party, the United Development Party (PPP), there are only a handful of PPP figures among the ranks of his tim sukses, likely because it is a small party which only barely meets the Indonesia’s 4% parliamentary threshold. As Ganjar’s primary political supporter, PDI-P has kept a tight grip on his presidential campaign and has ensured that a majority of his tim sukses come from its own ranks.

By contrast, both AMIN and Prabowo–Gibran coalitions have more Islamic-oriented supporting parties to fill out their tim sukses. AMIN is supported by the National Awakening Party (PKB), which is affiliated with NU, and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) which is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood-influenced Tarbiyah movement. AMIN’s vice-presidential candidate, PKB Chairman Muhaimin Iskandar, is the great-grandson of the founder of NU Bisri Syansuri, adding to his charismatic appeal among NU figures.

Prabowo and Gibran’s Islamic party support comes from the National Mandate Party (PAN)—which is loosely linked with Muhammadiyah—and the Indonesian People’s Wave Party (Partai Gelora), a new party established by several former PKS leaders.

Religious figures affiliated with NU dominate the list of tim sukses members of Anies and Prabowo. Within AMIN’s coalition, 24 out of 49 members are affiliated with NU, the Prabowo–Gibran coalition claims 18 out of 69 and the Ganjar–Mahfud coalition has 4 out of 8. In stark contrast, the representation of Muhammadiyah, the second largest Islamic organisation in Indonesia, has relatively meagre representation. Only two members of the AMIN and Ganjar–Mahfud campaigns teams are affiliated with Muhammadiyah.

The representation of Islamic figures affiliated by the Tarbiyah movement, the forebear of the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), is noteworthy. They comprise 16 members of AMIN’s tim sukses, surpassing those from Muhammadiyah.

From the composition of each respective tim sukses, we can see how traditionalist Islamic groups, (represented by NU) merge with modernist (represented by Muhammadiyah) and conservative Islamist groups (represented by Tarbiyah/PKS). Both AMIN and Prabowo–Gibran coalitions have tim sukses that unite NU and Tarbiyah figures.

Our analysis also reveals that the inclusion of religious figures in the tim sukses is not solely influenced by the support of coalition parties, but also by the personalistic relationships forged between candidates and these religious figures. This dynamic is evident in the diverse support garnered from NU-affiliated figures for various presidential candidates. The AMIN team, for instance, has successfully secured endorsement from numerous NU kyai in Central and East Java provinces on account of the longstanding relationships between these kyai and PKB and—more specifically—Muhaimin.

Many kyai who are backing AMIN are owners of large Islamic boarding schools (pesantren induk) which usually have a large network of students (santri) in dozens of smaller pesantren. It is this extensive kyai–santri network that is being sought by the tim sukses of each candidates, since each of them consist of tens of thousands prospective voters who might decide a candidate’s political fortunes within a given pesantren’s locality.

The AMIN team’s mobilisation among NU ranks seems to be paying off. According to the latest survey released by Indikator Politik Indonesia on 18 January, Anies’ support in East Java increased by 9.3 percent from 1 December 2023 to 6 January 2024. However, Prabowo still has a commanding lead in the province with 48.2% support, Ganjar 24.5%, and Anies 21.7%.

In the Prabowo–Gibran coalition, NU kyai supporting the pair are those who have previously endorsed and established relationships with either Prabowo or Jokowi in previous elections. A pivotal endorsement for Prabowo–Gibran comes from Habib Luthfi bin Yahya, the supreme leader of the Jam’iyyah Ahli Thariqah al-Mu’tabarah al-Nahdliyah, the main association of Sufi Order (tariqa) to which most NU clerics are affiliated. Notably, Habib Luthfi also holds a position as a member of President Jokowi’s Council of Presidential Advisors.

The eclipse of Muhammadiyah by NU

The pragmatic and opportunistic nature of religious figures inclusion in each candidate’s tim sukses have created pressures within both NU and Muhammadiyah to allow their respective clerics and activists to back one of the presidential candidates, while also retaining their status as politically neutral religious organisations. Long divided into multiple factions based on personal allegiances to influential kyai, NU’s support during this year’s election is equally divided among the three presidential candidates. While NU’s national leadership (Pengurus Besar Nahdlatul Ulama, or PBNU) has officially taken a neutral position, most prominent NU clerics and activists have pledged their endorsement toward one of the candidates.

Meanwhile, Muhammadiyah activists are torn between its leadership’s official position to retain neutrality and their own desires to publicly support presidential candidates. Many of them see the 2024 election as crucial for the future of the 111-year-old Islamic organisation, as it is seen to be losing political influence vis-à-vis other organisations like NU.

Muhammadiyah has in the past enjoyed significant patronage from post-reformasi Indonesian presidents, particularly under Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), during whose first term Muhammadiyah figures held five cabinet portfolios. Today, however, Muhammadiyah’s representation in the government is reduced to just one minister in Jokowi’s second-term cabinet—the Coordinating Minister of Human Development and Cultural Affairs, widely considered an unimportant and not especially lucrative position.

This is in contrast to NU, which is represented not only by Vice President Ma’ruf Amin but also an additional four ministers, including the Minister of Religious Affairs. In addition to the cabinet, NU affiliated figures also dominate in appointments of top-echelon civil service positions, especially at the Religious Affairs Ministry, which has the authority to regulate all things related to Muslim affairs, including religious pilgrimage and  pesantren education. With an annual budget of 63 trillion Rupiah (US$4 billion), it has the fourth largest budget of all Indonesian ministries, making it very lucrative for NU.

Muhammadiyah activists are spooked by the rapid decline in the organisation’s social base. In a September 2023 article, pollster Denny JA found that only 5.7% of his August 2023 survey respondents self-declared themselves as Muhammadiyah followers, while in 2005, more than 9.4% of respondents did so—a decline of 40% over an 18-year period. Other analysts have attributed this decline to a growing number of Muhammadiyah cadres (particularly the young) joining more religiously conservative Islamist groups like Tarbiyah/PKS, Hizb-ut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI), and various Salafi-leaning groups.

Due to these factors, there is a growing perception within its ranks that Muhammadiyah is losing out to NU in the competition for political favour and patronage during the Jokowi years. Thus the organisation, despite its officially neutral position, seems eager to cultivate relations with all three 2024 presidential candidates.

This can be seen clearly in its decision to host a series of presidential candidate fora at Muhammadiyah University campuses in Solo, Malang, and Surabaya between 21 and 24 November 2023.  During these forums,  Muhammadiyah leaders asked the candidates whether they plan to award cabinet positions to Muhammadiyah cadres. Both Anies Baswedan and Prabowo Subianto have indicated they might do so, with Prabowo giving hints that at least two ministries—education and health—might be allocated to Muhammadiyah cadres.

Conclusion

To conclude, the non-ideological political manoeuvres of Indonesian Islamic organisations and parties in backing the three presidential candidates in the 2024 election, irrespective of past ideological differences between them, further proves the assertion that Indonesian politics continues to move away from ideological competition. Instead, Islamic groups and parties, along with their nationalist counterparts, are placing more emphasis on political opportunism as the primary drivers of forming these presidential support coalitions.

This means that concerns over the politicisation of Islam, and identity politics, which dominated the 2019 presidential election, have largely dissipated during the 2024 contest. Islamic parties and organisations are more concerned with gaining political appointments and patronage opportunities from whomever is elected as the new Indonesian president. This seems more urgent among groups that appear to have lost political influence like Muhammadiyah. It has been incentivised to regain influence through more extensive engagement with presidential candidates so as to not lose out to groups with more representation at the centre of power, like NU. Whether this engagement will be successful or not remains to be seen.

The post From polarisation to opportunism: organised Islam and the 2024 elections appeared first on New Mandala.

This post was originally published on New Mandala.

Editor’s note: this article is based on the author’s Political Update paper presented at the 2023 ANU Indonesia Update Conference, the full version of which appears in the December 2023 edition of the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies.

••••••••••

In 2023, as the second term of Joko Widodo (Jokowi) concludes and the 2024 election looms, elements of his ruling coalition have renewed strategies of accommodation, co-optation, legal challenge, repression, and coercion to restrict the prospects of open political contestation. Examined in totality, these tactics directly target the core institutional and political wins of Indonesia’s reformasi movement: regular elections, human rights, rule of law and judicial activism, regional autonomy and anti-corruption. The inability of oppositional and protest movements to resurrect and rebuild a national coalition to curtail the elite rollback of reformasi indicates that they are exhausted as a salient political force.

Surveying this narrowed field of political contestation in the twilight of the Jokowi administration, I am struck by the extent to which the previously untouchable institutions of reformasi have been subject to elite rollback. What contestation there is appears primarily generated by internal splits between this ruling coalition. This political narrowing, I argue here, is driven not only by Jokowi’s desire to see the 2024 presidential elections proceed on terms favourable to his own political interests, but also out of a broader political imperative to foreclose conflicts arising from the contradictions and inequalities inherent in Indonesia’s middle-income status.

Critically, while millions of Indonesians have been lifted out of poverty since the Asian Financial Crisis, that social mobility has not has not translated into economic security. While Indonesia’s middle and upper classes continue to benefit disproportionately from economic growth, over 40% of the Indonesian electorate are “precariously non-poor”. Continued social mobility for this “aspirational middle class” is contingent on the Indonesian government’s commitment to, and ability to deliver, core rights and quality services, in particular around labour, housing, health, and education.

But how do governing coalitions appease voters for benefits that are only likely to emerge in the medium term? More importantly, given the predatory interests that block reforms in key sectors, can successive governments ever develop the political coalitions to deliver quality services to Indonesia’s working poor? I argue that Indonesia’s democratic decline is a function of the new political imperatives of Indonesia’s middle-income status.

All the president’s men

On display in 2023 has been Jokowi’s power to (re)shape the terms on which the 2024 presidential elections are fought, due in part to his soaring personal popularity as his term comes to an end. Whereas former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono slunk out of office in 2014 on approval rates of 49%, Jokowi’s approval ratings are the highest since he entered office in 2014, hovering between 75–85% throughout 2023. The president’s vigilance on inflation rates and his expansion of social welfare programs in the lead up to the election have given rise to an unexpected economic bounce fuelled by consumer spending.

The effect of this popularity has been that Jokowi has been able to embed his personal and policy interests into the presidential race. Proposals to extend the presidential term beyond the “previously sacrosanct” two-term limit only dissipated once Jokowi turned his influence towards the presidential nomination process, using political nepotism to secure his interests.

The president has shored up his family dynasty by promoting the political careers of his sons, Gibran Rakabuming Raka and Kaesang Pangarep. Jokowi and his wife Iriana were instrumental in ensuring Gibran would claim the vice-presidential nomination on a Prabowo ticket. Jokowi has also helped manoeuvre his youngest son Kaesang, a YouTuber turned catering entrepreneur, to become the chair of the Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI) in early October 2023. Over Jokowi’s second term, PSI shifted from being an overtly “millennial” party with secular progressive credentials to the guardian of the president’s legacy and of “Jokowisme”. Kaesang’s takeover of PSI finally gives Jokowi a party vehicle that is unencumbered by rival powerbrokers and can advance his interests in the political system, should it enter parliament in 2024.

Coercion by criminalisation

A second arena in which we have witnessed a narrowing field of democratic political contestation has been in the harnessing of Indonesia’s law enforcement agencies to pursue political figures—whether opposition, or nominal allies—on fresh and resurrected corruption charges.

An important instrument in this project has been the Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, or KPK). The KPK was established in 2002 as a fundamental demand of the reformasi movement, and over the period of Indonesia’s democratic reform it became a prized institution of legal activism. After numerous failed attempts, parliament suddenly passed crippling amendments to the KPK Law in September 2019 and installed Firli Bahuri, a police general aligned to intelligence tsar and PDI-P party stalwart Budi Gunawan, as its chairman.

The fruits of the KPK’s political co-optation were seen in the agency’s once-celebrated  investigatory powers being harnessed to influence party coalition formation ahead of the 2024 presidential nomination.

When former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan first announced his intention to contest the presidency in late 2022, he was supported by the NasDem Party, a Jokowi coalition member, as well as by opposition parties PKS and Partai Demokrat. Initial polling was positive, with Anies running a close second to Ganjar in a hypothetical three-way presidential race.

But a series of high-profile corruption scandals pursued by the KPK and the attorney general’s department irreversibly weakened the Anies Baswedan coalition. In September 2022, the KPK announced it had opened a corruption investigation into the then governor of Papua, Lukas Enembe, a major revenue raiser for Partai Demokrat. By June 2023, the KPK had also put the then agriculture minister Syahrul Yasin Limpo, a senior NasDem politician, under investigation, raiding his homes and the ministry. Two days before PKB party chairman Muhaimin Iskandar was announced as Anies’ running mate in September 2023, the KPK summoned Muhaimin to discuss a corruption case within the Ministry of Manpower, which Muhaimin had led during the SBY government from 2009 to 2014.

Firli also continually circulated rumours of corrupt conduct on Anies’ part relating to a Formula E electric vehicle grand prix organised under his governorship. The Formula E affair became a full-blown crisis in mid-2023 when Firli terminated Brigadier General Endar Priantoro’s secondment from the Indonesian National Police (Polri) to the KPK as its investigations director, after Endar allegedly refused to indict Anies, citing a lack of evidence. As the conflict escalated, Polri chief Listyo Sigit Prabowo, a key Jokowi ally, issued a directive returning Endar to his position at the KPK.

This early tussle between Polri and the KPK suggested conflicting strategies within the ruling coalition over the tactics of criminalisation. In recent weeks, tensions between the police and the KPK have boiled over again as Polri pursue Firli Bahuri on charges of blackmailing Syahrul Yasin Limpo, forcing Firli to temporarily step down as KPK head. The timing here is instructive: as Jokowi has consolidated his support behind the Prabowo ticket—instead of that of his nominal PDI-P party colleague, Ganjar Pranowo—Firli Bahuri’s criminalisation project has been brought to heel.

Though the outcomes of the 2024 elections are still uncertain, there is space for critical debate over how competitive Indonesia’s elections really are, given the level of intervention in the nomination process, let alone the election itself. With Jokowi’s support now consolidated behind a single candidate, all eyes will be on the extent to which the President’s considerable resources, authorities and financiers will be leveraged for the Prabowo–Gibran campaign. Ultimately, 2024 will be remembered as the election that took place in part on the narrow terms, and in line with the interests of, the outgoing president.

Failure to launch: street-based social movements

Why have these efforts to narrow political contestation been so potent in their effects? Where are the sources of dissent and opposition that were once so characteristic of Indonesia’s democracy?

Writing in 2022, Ken Setiawan argued that Indonesia’s democracy still shows signs of “democratic resilience”, as evidenced by the ability of women’s organisations to agitate effectively for the long-delayed Law on the Eradication of Sexual Violence. But the early years of Jokowi’s second term has also seen a string of attempts by civil society, particularly Indonesia’s student movement, to reject technocratic policy-based engagement, in favour of reigniting the kinds of street-based protests movements that characterised reformasi. The #ReformasiDikorupsi (#ReformCorrupted) protests triggered by a suite of regressive legislative moves were some of the largest Indonesia has seen in decades, with up to 50,000 students across 40 cities in 18 provinces.

But why did these protests fail to reassert the political power of reformist movements? Certainly, conflicts about tactics among the university-based Student Executives Bodies (Badan Eksekutif Mahasiswa, or BEM), which played a key role in coordinating the protests, weakened the movements. But the student protests were also confronted with extraordinary levels of repression. In the 2019 mobilisations, 719 were injured and five high-school aged protesters were killed. Protests against the Omnibus Law on Job Creation in 2022 saw nearly 7,000 student protestors arrested. Intelligence counter-operations gave credibility to government accusations that the students had been infiltrated by violent terrorists and anarchists, muddying the moral waters for the students’ cause. Finally, pressured with sanctions by the education ministry, university leadership threatened to expel students who took part in anti-government protests.

Oppositional movements have been further handicapped by the Jokowi administration’s effective disorganisation of the activists and prominent professionals capable of mobilising public opinion. As the distain of the #ReformasiDikorupsi campaigners made clear, many former 1998 activists, such as Teten Masduki and Budi Arie Setiadi, have abandoned the movement for well-positioned careers in or supporting the Jokowi administration. There, they have been an important presidential mouthpiece to Indonesia’s progressive social forces, translating Jokowi’s political intent and disarming civil society in its efforts to counter the government’s agenda.

Kanjuruhan as an emblem of weakened civil society

These factors help to explain the inability of oppositional and protest movements to respond on a national scale even when massive and potentially triggering events occur. One such event was the Kanjuruhan Stadium tragedy. In October 2022, 135 men, women and children died when a joint command of Malang police and national police (Polri) tactical officers (Korps Brigadir Mobil, or Brimob) shot tear gas into an overcrowded stadium of families and supporters, generating international media scrutiny. It was the second-deadliest stadium disaster in football history.

Tens of thousands of protesters took to East Java’s streets in the weeks and months after the livestreamed tragedy, calling for justice and police accountability. As Indonesia reeled in shock, protesters across the country gathered in tearful solidarity for the victims. Photos of banners calling for justice in international football stadiums in Munich and Dortmund immediately went viral. In Malang, demonstrators expected that the intense pressure would culminate in nationwide demonstrations that “would tear up the pavement in protest for Kanjuruhan”, as one journalist on the ground related to me.

Jokowi’s inner circle quickly recognised that if left unmanaged, the Kanjuruhan incident could bring forth another violent spell of anti-government protests. The president’s trusted inner circle ran a concerted campaign to control the fallout. Stifling calls for the police chief to stand down, Jokowi toured the stadium, shifting the blame to the country’s ageing sports infrastructure. Erik Thohir, minister for state-owned enterprises and Jokowi’s favoured candidate for head of the Football Association of Indonesia (PSSI), flew to Geneva to orchestrate a visit by FIFA president Gianni Infantino to Jakarta. The national police chief, Listyo, immediately transferred the Malang and East Java chiefs to Jakarta, blaming football hooliganism for the police response.

Commissioners on Indonesia’s National Police Commission (Kompolnas), once imagined as Indonesia’s police oversight body, leapt to the force’s defence, contesting every detail of the event put forward by civil society. Meanwhile, witnesses and victims’ families were subject to harassment by local police and intelligence officers. When digital media platform New Naratif released a viral video forensically dissecting the actions of the officers on the pitch, journalists found their WhatsApp online messaging accounts hacked.

Driving the protestors’ optimism was that the Kanjuruhan massacre had occurred in a dangerous moment of unprecedented public scandal for the Indonesian police. August 2022 had seen Inspector General Ferdy Sambo, a two-star general heading up Polri’s internal affairs bureau (Propam), arrested for ordering the execution of his adjutant Brigadier Nofriansyah Yosua Hutabarat, by fellow aide Richard Elizer Pudihang Lumiu, after Yosua was alleged to have been sexually involved with Sambo’s wife, Putri Candrawathi.

As the Sambo drama unfolded, a series of social media leaks and rumours emerged linking the general to everything from a secret unofficial hit squad to a major online gambling consortium . A number of human rights organisations such as Amnesty International reasserted demands for root and branch police reform. But for the clutch of NGOs working closely with Polri to aid the police’s technical implementation of the Law on the Eradication Against Sexual Violence—2022’s major progressive victory—speaking out on Kanjuruhan was incredibly challenging.

Concurrently, digital media reporters observed how, as the Sambo trial ramped up, traffic on the Kanjuruhan articles shrunk. Journalists’ attempts to reignite public interest in the disaster dwindled as the Sambo trial increasingly transfixed the nation. Meanwhile, the early allegations implicating Sambo in wider structures of institutional violence and corruption never re-emerged in the public eye. Instead, the trial assumed a soap opera storyline in which Sambo was presented as the quintessential “bad apple”, and his wife the scheming victim. Yosua was the upstanding officer, son and husband, and Richard the penitent accused begging for public redemption.

The climax of the trial came when the court handed down a stunning sentence of death to Sambo for the premeditated murder of Yosua. The courtroom drama had a direct and depleting effect on calls for accountability in Kanjuruhan. The anticipated public protests in solidarity with Kanjuruhan never materialised and the public demands for justice for Malang simply ebbed away. This meant that while Sambo was publicly excoriated (and less than six months later, his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment) the structural impunity that led to the Kanjuruhan tragedy was effectively preserved.

The political economy of the middle-income trap

For many familiar with Indonesian politics, the idea that Indonesia’s democracy is experiencing a marked decline is not new. After all, the social groups aligned with reformasi have long been marginalised, and scholars have charted diverse drivers for Indonesia’s democratic decline: the weaponisation of state institutions to assail opponents; the rise of a polarising Islamic populism and the government’s heavy-handed efforts to weaken it; a fragmented civil society beset by divisions on issues of religious ideology; the longstanding weakness of the organised left; and the Indonesian public’s own ambivalence about liberal democratic norms amid deep-rooted and growing social inequality.

But the debate about the drivers of Indonesia’s contemporary democratic regression has neglected the underlying structural drivers of democratic decline. I argue that the narrowing of political contestation in the Jokowi era is the ruling coalition’s response to a political problem inherent to Indonesia’s much-vaunted middle-income status.

We are often reminded that since the fall of authoritarianism and the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, tens of millions of people have been moved out of poverty. But what have the poor moved into? The past 20 years have seen the dramatic expansion of what Hall Hill has called Indonesia’s “precariously non-poor”, an economic group who are no longer poor but who also have not yet prospered.

The World Bank alternatively refers to this socio-economic stratum as Indonesia’s “aspiring middle class”—a term that is something of a misnomer. For this group, the economic security of middle-class status is still out of reach, raising doubt over the extent to which it is truly “aspirational”. The Bank argues that this group’s continued social mobility depends on the government’s ability to deliver better services (and arguably, although this goes unmentioned by the Bank, better labour conditions).

These are immense tasks for any administration, let alone one experiencing Indonesia’s current political and economic challenges. At 44% of the Indonesian population, this “precariously non-poor” are arguably Indonesia’s largest voting cohort yet, their “vast and disparate” features mean they are unable to appreciate their common political interests. The aspirational but vulnerable nature of Indonesia’s working poor is front of mind for President Jokowi, who has made improving government services—including public transport infrastructure, the expansion of social welfare, access to health and higher-quality education—the signature policies of his administration.

But upgrading reforms such as these require an institutional sophistication and temporal horizon that are far more difficult in complexity than the previous transition from low to middle income status. More importantly, as the political scientists Richard F. Doner and Ben Ross Schneider argue, the middle-income trap lies in the necessity for “extraordinary collective action and coalition building” across deep social cleavages and inequalities for “benefits that will only emerge in the medium or long term”.

In Indonesia, there are immense barriers to establishing the political pacts required to forge such reforms. The Indonesian state has been moulded to protect oligarchic interests, and faces a challenge in shifting these interests in service of “better government services”, as the World Bank puts it. Consider education, a sector critical to the socio-economic mobility of the precariously non-poor. Research by Andrew Rosser, Phil King and Danang Widoyoko has examined the prospect of quality reforms in Indonesia’s education bureaucracy, concluding that despite urgent shifts in policy to upgrade education quality, the inability of the political elites to challenge vested interests means that contestation “has been settled in favour of predatory elites”.

Such is the fragmentation of the “aspiring middle class” that poor government services and the lagging pace of reform only becomes problem for rule when parts of this “dangerous class” become political mobilised. This occurred during Prabowo’s 2014 and 2019 presidential campaigns, as Jokowi’s challenger spoke darkly of corrupt elites stealing away the economic opportunities of the Indonesian people.

This is not to suggest that Prabowo’s ultra-nationalist populism offered elements of the precariously non-poor an alternative vehicle for their interests, but that he effectively “politicised” their inequality within a framework of ultra-nationalist populism.

The political consequences of inequality were not lost on Jokowi or his political coalition. In an interview in his first six months of office, Jokowi admitted that at 0.43, Indonesia’s Gini coefficient for income inequality—the fastest rising in the region—was “for me…dangerous”.

This predicament is deeply implicated in the administration’s second-term political strategy. While Jokowi tried to deal with inequality by promoting various social welfare measures and pursuing economic growth, he also tackled the political problem: namely, the political candidacies and movements that sought to mobilise inequality as an issue. As such, critical to the maintenance of Jokowi’s rule was the 2019 co-optation of Prabowo into Jokowi’s government and a concerted legal and social purge of so-called “Islamist” forces, dismantling the mobilisational structures of the opposition. These strategies have left Indonesia without a coherent opposition, consolidating the ruling coalition and giving it free rein to reverse the key victories of reformasi.

Thus, what has broadly been understood in the literature as “democratic decline” can best be interpreted as a set of political dynamics set in motion by the underlying necessity to politically manage the aspirations of the precariously non-poor, and keep them harnessed to the government’s model of national development. Whatever regime takes power in the future, managing the aspirations of Indonesia’s new precarious non-poor will be a fundamental project of rule for many years to come.

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Before the election of Joko Widodo as Indonesia’s president in 2014, Indonesian politics was regarded by many observers as being marked by relatively negligible levels of polarisation. This depolarisation flowed from the collusive practices of party elites, which neutralised ideological differences by incorporating opposition parties into the cabinet and preserving wide access to rents. While parties’ backgrounds had ideological components, their behaviour in parliament was most consistent with a patronage logic. Without clear partisan lines at the elite level around which voters might build political identities, polarisation within the electorate seemed unlikely to emerge.

That changed over the course of Widodo (Jokowi)’s first term, especially during the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election and its aftermath. Polarisation, its causes, and its consequences quickly became a major focus of scholars of Indonesian politics as the mobilisation of voters on ideological appeals seemed to become a more prominent element of Indonesian politics.

Yet in Jokowi’s second term this polarisation seemed to dissipate, as the one-time standard bearer of Widodo government opponents, Prabowo Subianto, was coopted into the president’s cabinet, and the government’s struck at hardline Islamic groups’ ability to mobilise. Instead of polarisation, the reversion to the collusive mean—and the potentially anti-democratic implications of a government “counter-polarisation” effort—emerged as the more dominant story.

That the atmosphere of partisanship seemed to emerge and dissipate with such ease during the Jokowi years prompts us to revisit questions that scholars grappled with in 2019 about what lay behind it.

Ross Tapsell’s careful studies of Indonesian media suggested that as Indonesian news became increasingly obsessed with “berita hoaks”—fake news—and fears of polarisation, the concerns of Indonesia’s educated, online elite were being projected onto the nation as a whole. Eve Warburton saw the divide differently: in her analysis, social media chatter “reflect[ed] the terms on which the election was actually being fought”—voters really did disagree in fundamental ways about the political figures, questions of tolerance, and regime goals that were at stake in the national election.

Can the polarisation that emerged during the Jokowi years be attributed to deep and abiding differences in political outlooks among voters? Or was it the result of ephemeral partisanship mobilised in a top-down fashion by elites at the ideological poles? If these dynamics exist in combination, is there reason to believe that the sources of polarisation are there waiting to be mobilised again?

In a new article published at the Journal of East Asian Studies, we bring original survey research to bear on these questions. Our starting point was that if polarisation in Indonesia was driven by divergent political attitudes within the electorate, such differences would not be driven by left–right ideological divides or by longstanding party loyalties, given the relative marginality of economic ideology in structuring politics, and the very low rates at which voters identify with parties.

Instead, we turn to the concept of resentment, which has proven a powerful predictor of political polarisation over cultural issues in other major democracies. We designed a survey that sought to measure the prevalence and the electoral effects of key types of resentment that existing scholarship has proposed as central features of Indonesian politics: resentment of Chinese-Indonesian and non-Muslim minorities, resentment of Java, and resentment based on urban–rural divides.

Our results show that resentful attitudes are concentrated among sections of the electorate, and that there is a consistent relationship between resentment and support for the presidential candidacy of Prabowo Subianto in 2019. This suggests that years of polarised vote returns have their roots in longstanding and perhaps permanent cleavage lines.

At the same time, our study also suggests that resentments can come and go. Once-fundamental divides, like the bitter conflicts over Java’s demographic weight and consequent domination of politics, appear to be in terminal decline. But resentments around the status of Indonesia’s Chinese and non-Muslim minorities appear to have a permanent place in the political landscape—and if anything appear most pronounced among the younger voters, whose political socialisation is increasingly occurring through social media. As Indonesia looks beyond the Widodo presidency, our research suggests that resentment towards Chinese and non-Muslim minorities looks to be a potential target of political candidates’ mobilisational efforts in the years to come.

The what and where of resentment

In political terms, resentment involves a belief that out-groups are receiving symbolic or material benefits that should rightfully have been given to more-deserving in-groups.

Resentment studies in public opinion began with the study of racial resentment in the United States. Recognising that surveys that framed race in biological terms might not elicit honest answers, political scientists Donald Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders developed an index of what they called “racial resentment.” Their framework avoided measuring overt racial animus and instead approached racial attitudes in terms of beliefs about deservingness, merit, and fairness.

In its original formulation, the racial resentment index consisted of four questions, coded according to an agreement scale. A representative question asked whether respondents agreed that “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.” Respondents who agreed were scored as having higher levels of racial resentment, something which other scholars have shown is predictive of their political preferences. Recently, scholars have proposed other forms of resentment, including those based on gender and place, as predictors of a similar set of political beliefs and attitudes.

Resentment is, in short, a portable construct: far from being limited to racial division in the United States, resentments can form around many different social identity lines. In extending the resentment framework to the Indonesian context, we drew on existing scholarship to identify four foci of resentment.

The first two of these are what we label mobilised resentments: that is, those that have been actively appealed to by political campaigns in recent years. These are, respectively, religious resentment—more specifically resentment of Indonesia’s minority Christian population—and resentment directed at ethnically Chinese Indonesians.

Both of these resentments have a long history in Indonesian politics and have featured prominently in major political campaigns. Many Indonesians believe that Chinese Indonesians have access to unearned material resources, part of a broader view that the several million ethnically Chinese residents of Indonesia are synonymous with the handful of Suharto-era tycoons.

In addition to these mobilised resentments, we identify two latent resentments: that its, those that whose expression has been more muted in electoral politics. These are, first, resentment of the island of Java, and second, a more generic resentment of better-off places, which we term, “regional resentment.”

Accounts of Indonesia’s politics in the years close to independence nearly always noted that tensions between Java and the so-called Outer Islands were a highly salient dimension of politics. While the balance between Java and the Outer Islands was contested in the past, it is less common today for national political figures to mobilise around the Java–Outer Island divide. Because of its long history in Indonesian politics, however, resentment of Java may remain a feature of public opinion.

In addition to resentment at the cultural and economic preponderance of Java specifically, we also tested inter-regional resentment more generally. While Indonesia’s post-New Order decentralisation reforms have reduced inter-regional inequality, overall inequality between regions remains high. These conditions suggest that regional resentment ought to be an important political force in places that might have a claim on being disadvantaged—and that these should be present not only in the Outer Islands, but also in poor regions of Java.

Measuring resentment

We developed a survey instrument to measure levels of the four resentments in the Indonesian voting age population that drew upon the methods originally used to capture racial resentment in the US context.

In a nationally representative survey of 1,520 voting-aged Indonesians fielded in February 2019 by Indikator Politik Indonesia, respondents were asked to respond on a five-point scale—from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”—to a set of statements that captured resentful attitudes.

For example, we probed resentment of Chinese-Indonesians with statements like “Chinese-Indonesians have more opportunities in life than pribumi [non-Chinese Indonesians]” and “Chinese-Indonesians have too much influence in Indonesian politics”. Resentment against religious minorities was gauged with statements such as “In Indonesia, Muslims are treated unfairly by members of other religions”, while propositions such as “too many people from Java hold important posts or are influential in the central government” and “the local government should pay more attention to people from here than they do to newcomers and transmigrants” were considered to signify anti-Java and inter-regional resentment respectively.

We compared the results of resentful feelings between members of out-groups and in-groups. On the Chinese questions, we compared the responses of Chinese–Indonesians to non-Chinese Indonesian Indonesians (often referred to in Indonesia by the politically-charged term pribumi), between Muslims and non-Muslims on the question of religious resentment, and between residents of Java and residents of other islands on questions of Java resentment, and between residents of local government area capitals with those from those in the hinterland.

Our results show that across every area of resentment, our easily-coded “in-groups”—such as Java residents, residents of district capitals, and Muslims—show higher levels of resentment than members of corresponding “out-groups”: those living off Java, residents of rural districts, and non-Muslims. (While we lack a specific measure of Chinese Indonesians, we can estimate that this holds for Chinese-Indonesians too).

But we find that resentments are not evenly distributed across either the population as a whole or the in-group population. Age, gender and income all appear to correlate with different resentment scores—some subtle, some marked.

First, there is the question of the influence of income on resentment, an interesting one given the debate about voters’ grievances over socioeconomic inequality have been diverted into cultural resentment targeted at minorities. In analysing the anti-Chinese and anti-Christian mobilisation of the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial campaign, Ian Wilson has proposed that the resentments on display were epiphenomena of a class conflict triggered by the governor’s slum clearance policy.

In aggregate, resentment scores do not exhibit a strong linear trend as income increases (with the exception of resentment of Java, which decreases as income decreases). Yet absolute income levels are misleading: a particular income in one area doesn’t mean the same as in another. If resentment is connected to material grievances, it makes sense to compare respondents doing better and doing worse than others in the same area.

With this in mind, we compared the responses on our resentment measures between those who earnt more than the official local minimum wage versus those who earnt less. We find that aggregate resentment is mostly higher among respondents earning less than the provincial minimum wage, and that effect of earning below this threshold in increasing aggregate resentment is much larger for men than for women (with the exception of resentment of Java). We find this evidence suggestive of a partially material basis for resentment. Since this relationship is much stronger among men, however, it is reasonable to conclude that identity components play an important role in resentment.

Yet the effects of income appear not to be uniform across different foci of resentment. We found that respondents below the minimum wage for their province were more likely to report higher scores on religious resentment and resentment of Java—but not higher regional or anti-Chinese resentment. This is one small piece of evidence against the idea that resentment of ethnic Chinese distracts the poor from their reasonable material grievances, even as it bolsters somewhat the link between poor material circumstances and religious resentment. A key piece of that latter link is in the relatively low economic status of the membership of intolerant religious organisations like the now-banned Islamic Defender’s Front (FPI).

The effects of age on resentment scores are also an important focus, given that one of the signal features of the Indonesian electorate is its youth, with just over half of voters aged under 40. Two prominent effects of age stood out in our survey data: first, older voters are more likely to report higher Java and regional resentment scores, which makes sense because they remember the bygone divides of a bygone political era.

More interestingly, our results suggest that while there is only small variation in anti-Chinese sentiment across generational cohorts, it is in fact the youngest cohorts who are most likely to report anti-Chinese resentment. There are two likely reasons for this. The first is that the period in which young respondents were socialised into politics—the present—has been especially rich with anti-Chinese conspiracy theories. The second is that these cohorts have the greatest exposure to social media, where anti-Chinese conspiracy theories are abundant.

Resentment and the Prabowo vote

What does this mean for electoral politics? We find that each of the four resentments has predictive power for political affiliation, though magnitude of the relationship differs. To operationalise the relationship between resentment and political preferences, we look at the relationship between resentment scores and support for the presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto. We focus on support for Prabowo because his campaign most actively mobilised religious and anti-Chinese resentment.

We find that resentments are strongly predictive of political preferences (see Figure 2 above). Across all four measures, higher resentment was associated with greater probability of supporting Prabowo in the 2019 presidential election. This holds even after adjusting for respondents’ religion, ethnicity, age, income, education level, and province of residence. We find that with both measures, resentment is associated with preferences for Prabowo and the group of non-government parties that nominated him in 2019. The two currently mobilised resentments—of non-Muslims and of ethnically Chinese Indonesians—are much more strongly correlated with political preferences than the un-mobilised resentments of Java and regional disparities.

Conclusion

Exploring the demographics of resentment, we find that resentments are not a straightforward consequence of material concerns, and that high levels of each resentment measure are found in different demographic strata. We consistently found an association between resentment and support for the political right in Indonesia, measuring by both support for Prabowo’s populist political candidacy and by support for opposition parties. All of the resentments pointed in the same direction. We take this as evidence that partisan polarisation, as it was expressed in the 2019 election results, is rooted in longstanding— and perhaps permanent—cleavage lines.

The path of resentments left unmobilised, such as anti-Java and interregional resentments—suggest that the future of mobilised resentments depends on whether interventions or institutions push against these resentments. In the case of religious resentment, its close association with specific organisations means that it may be reduced as a political force by the ongoing crackdown on the FPI and other resentment-fostering organisations. Religious resentment will then become rarer, but it will remain a powerful predictor of political preferences.

Anti-Chinese resentment is not nearly so dependent on particular organisations. Having been central to two consecutive electoral cycles and pervading social media, this resentment has already shaped the politics of the youngest Indonesian voters. As they mature to become political candidates, they are likely to reach into the evergreen discourse of anti-Chinese sentiment, knowing that many in their cohort hold that resentment. This will be a powerful instrument of polarisation in the years to come.

However, the emergence of a new trend known as “counter-polarisation” after 2019, in which politicians and their parties undertake initiatives or manoeuvres in the name of reducing polarisation and easing intra-communal tensions, has an impact on the 2024 presidential race. The first and most visible example of this was Prabowo’s decision to join Jokowi’s cabinet as defence minister in October 2019, despite having campaigned sometimes angrily against his rival in the 2014 and 2019 presidential elections.

However, this does not mean that polarisation has vanished entirely. Anies Baswedan has filled the polarisation niche vacated by Prabowo by continuing to appeal to Islamist groups that have long been critical of Jokowi (and at the forefront of religious polarisation). Despite continued mobilisation of this polarising axis, the overall level of polarisation has dropped significantly because resentful nationalists and resentful Islamists are no longer being mobilised by the same campaign. Fear of polarisation has also led to changes in the regulations on political speech, with reducing polarisation being an important justification for the government and DPR’s decision to shorten the 2024 election campaign period.

Overall, polarisation appears to be decreasing. This demonstrates that, while polarisation in Indonesia has a mass base rooted in long-standing and permanent political cleavage lines, it does not divide society frontally if political elites do not exploit it for electoral purposes. Polarisation in Indonesia is not dead; it is simply resting.

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For historians of gender and sexuality, sources about queer history are often elusive. This is even more so in the context of Southeast Asia, where the type of source material that might be available in archives in the Global North is not always readily accessible. Much historical research on homosexuality in Europe, for instance, relies on extensive legal archives that detail court cases about relationships that were deemed illegitimate under moral legislation.

Historians interested in Southeast Asian locales often do not have this kind of material at their disposal. This is not always a matter of existence of archives: in pre-Independence Indonesia, for instance, same-sex relationships were not officially outlawed, even though Java was the scene of a much-publicised “homosexual scandal” among European men in the late 1930s.

Yet sometimes traces of the queer past show up in unexpected places. When I was doing archival research for my dissertation about girls’ education in the Dutch East Indies, this was certainly the case. There were only a few sentences, handwritten in an unassuming school notebook that was kept in a 14th century monastery, but they revealed a possible love affair between two Indonesian women in 1933.

A special friendship

I was skimming through the archives of a Roman Catholic sisters’ congregation at the Erfgoedcentrum Nederlands Kloosterleven, the Heritage Centre for Dutch Monastic Life. The Zusters van het Gezelschap van Jezus, Maria en Josef [Sisters of the Society of Jesus, Mary and Joseph] had opened several girls’ schools in the Minahasa region of Sulawesi in the early 20th century, and I was looking for information about the school curricula. In a visitation report, written by a Mother Superior who had travelled from the Netherlands to Indonesia for an inspection, I found the following reference:

“As far as concerns special friendships, just before my visit one case had been discovered by the Superior, of the Native Sister Dorithea with one of the boarding girls. We, the Superiors, found that the case was very serious and after consulting with the four of us, we concluded we should expel Sr. Dorithea.”

In religious women’s communities, there was often considerable anxiety about so-called “special friendships”. Leadership of monasteries were worried about the moral implications of romantic, and possibly sexual, relationships between women. Their main fear, however, was that close individual relationships, romantic or not, could undermine sisters’ and students’ loyalty to the community.

The friendship in question had developed between a sister of Indonesian descent and a girl who likely studied at the sisters’ hospital in the village of Tomohon to become a nurse. The sister, who was one of the first Minahasan women to join the order, was allowed to stay with the community only after the intervention of the local priest, who wanted to give her another chance. It is of course possible that the relationship between sister Dorithea and the student was indeed a very intense friendship that distracted them from their daily tasks at the hospital and the monastery. It is just as likely, however, that this was a lesbian relationship, especially judging from the response of the monastery leadership:

“The girl was sent away immediately. And as far as concerns Sister D.’s state of mind, she is terribly sorry, says that she deserves to be sent away and is asking for leave so she can do penance, and she promised me that something like this will never happen again.”

Obviously, the discovery of their relationship, whatever its nature, uprooted the lives of both sister Dorithea and the nursing student, who was expelled from school and may not have had the chance to follow secondary education again. Sister Dorithea was also in a vulnerable position, as many of her white peers doubted Indonesian women’s suitability as sisters in the first place. While the archive does not reveal any further information about either the sister or her friend, they clearly had to live with the consequences of their relationship.

Queer archives as resistance

Small archival findings such as these may seem insignificant: they reveal very little about actual queer women’s experience, and are easily written off as quaint remnants of a long-gone past. Yet, reclaiming history can be powerful in the context of the current backlash against LGBTQ+ communities in contemporary Southeast Asia. For today’s activists, knowing that there are many traces of a queer past in can be a source of solace and strength.

While LGBTQ+ people have become more visible in Indonesian society in recent years, there have been uncountable attempts, legal or otherwise, to further marginalise this already vulnerable group. The most prominent example of recent legislation that severely restricts the minority rights is the new Indonesian penal code, which effectively criminalises any sexual encounter outside the framework of heterosexual, state-sanctioned marriage. Upheld by President Joko Widono’s government as a necessary reform of Indonesia’s legal system, the new penal code has drawn sharp criticism from human rights organisations in Indonesia and beyond.

In public discourse, homophobic political and religious leaders have often attempted to frame LGBTQ+ Indonesians either as victims of an illness or as members of a dangerous movement intent on undermining the state. In many of these instances, homosexuality and gender-nonconformity are portrayed as somehow “new” to Indonesia, a foreign and modern invention that is now seeping into the framework of Indonesian society. The uncovering of stories about LGBTQ+ experiences from the past, however fragmentary, can be used as a tool for resisting these narratives.

Many Southeast Asian cultures have long traditions that rely on fluid performances of gender, and today’s queer community is actively preserving more recent queer histories as well. An inspiring example of how activists can reclaim local pasts is the expansive website Queer Indonesia Archive, a volunteer initiative that is “committed to the collection, preservation and celebration of material reflecting the lives and experiences of queer Indonesia.”

Since its establishment in 2020, the team of volunteers that run the website have done important work in digitising queer magazines from the Suharto era and beyond. The website also holds a collection of personal photographs, correspondence and print articles about topics such as queer nightlife in 1990s Jakarta and the early HIV crisis. It is a unique repository of queer Indonesian history that is usually hidden from the public eye.

This summer, Queer Indonesia Archive published the exhibition Letters from Ger, which traces the correspondence between a lesbian woman in 1960s Jakarta and an editor of the pioneering American lesbian magazine The Ladder. In the introduction to Ger’s story, Yulia Dwi Andriyanti described the letters as “a reflective journey about queer feelings and their role in opening up possibilities to contest a system that continually negates and erases queer identities and feelings. To embrace these possibilities, it is essential to acknowledge queer feelings from the very beginning.”

This is exactly where the power of queer history making lies. Making visible the experiences of queer people in the past is a form of resistance against a dominant discourse that aims to frame their very existence as a novel aberration. In one of her videos Kai Mata, a singer-songwriter who has repeatedly gone viral with her queer anthems, sings: pelangi juga bersinar di langit kita—rainbows also shine in our skies. Even an archival find of a few lines can remind us that this motto rings true for the past as well as today’s world.

The author would like to thank the QIA team for their help with this article.

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The Indonesia–China relationship has attained new dimensions over the past few years. The recent opening of the Jakarta–Bandung high speed rail (HSR)—a joint venture between Chinese and Indonesian state-owned enterprises—marks a significant milestone in bilateral relations.

The big-ticket project has overcome dissent to be embraced as an item of national pride. Indonesian government bodies are no longer shy about showing their closeness to Chinese counterparts, as political sensitivities become a thing of the past. State elites’ social media campaigns have recast Chinese capital as an important element in Indonesia’s highly-celebrated development plans—from investments in electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing and digital technology, the extension of the HSR route from Bandung to Surabaya and investments in the energy transition, to the controversial Rempang eco-city development.

Some observers, including Dewi Fortuna Anwar, have interpreted Indonesia’s improved relationship with China as an outcome of Jakarta’s hedging strategy and economic pragmatism. As a recent column in The Economist argued, the latter impetus is related to President Jokowi’s background as a businessman, who views the Indonesian national interest in narrow economic terms, and courts whoever will bring beneficial deals.

But the improved economic relationship is underpinned by more than economic pragmatism or individual leaders’ idiosyncrasies. It is China’s distinct modes of engagement that have been so appealing to Indonesian elites. Modes of engagement, in this context, should not be conflated with economic statecraft more generally, or especially with China’s use of coercive economic measures to get other countries to act according to its wishes. Rather, a wide range of political and economic components constitute modes of engagement—and among these components is a country’s overall approach to economic development.

What has been salient in the context of China–Indonesia relations is that China’s approach to development cooperation with Indonesia dovetails with Indonesian development strategies. More importantly, as I argue here, its approach has evidently provided leeway for Indonesian state elites to pursue not only development strategies on national interest grounds, but also to harness development for their political legitimation goals.

Institutional complementarities

Chinese approach to development cooperation is undergirded by particular institutional features: quick decision making; practical, longer-term financing horizons; and openness to cascading negotiations to accommodate host state leaders’ needs.

These features fit perfectly within the varied landscape of Indonesia’s political economy. Indonesia has sought to defend the liberal international economic order, such as through promoting free trade agreements, while at the same time defying WTO rulings against its unilateral imposition of mineral export bans. It commits to fostering private sector engagement in infrastructure, while making way for its state-owned enterprises to crowd out private investment. It invokes the importance of state developmentalism, but still maintains a conservative fiscal policy—something which has long been a stumbling block for the government to fund the development of capital-intensive industries like nickel downstreaming and battery production.

In short, Indonesia’s development problems have long been entangled in openness and economic nationalism, commodity booms and busts, technocracy and politics. In such a policy constellation, Indonesia requires development partners who have high risk tolerances, and who are flexible enough to deal with the swings of the political and policy pendulum. In this regard China has excelled, thanks to its loose fiscal policy and availability of “patient capital” characterised by greater risk tolerance and more willingness to weather policy volatility in the host country, compared to Western and private capital.

In the case of the Jakarta–Bandung HSR, despite controversies surrounding debt and profitability issues, what has been overlooked is that the salient feature of China’s development financing—giving leeway for state elites to make concessions through cascading negotiations—has ceded Indonesian top state elites political legitimacy.

In orthodox development practice, as easily traced in OECD or World Bank documents, country ownership in a development project has long been the first and utmost major principle. The bottom line is that the recipient or host country must have a direct stake in aid programming and sense of ownership at all stages. In practice, Indonesia has found that multilateral donors and Western governments try to control what gets on the development agenda and project scoping, and are reluctant to cede the agenda in their aid and investment programs to the Indonesian government as overtly as China is.

China’s financing modality, namely equity-based investments such as in the case of the Jakarta–Bandung HSR, regardless of ambiguity in its “business-to-business” financing terms, it is a fact that the Chinese consortium owns 40% of the project and they are also obligated to pay for any cost overruns. A superficial look at distribution of tangible costs and ownership supports the widespread impression that Indonesia is in the driver’s seat, in control of financing decisions and further project development, thus helping boost the political legitimacy of local state elites.

This is a crucial point given that economic nationalism has gained more ground in the country: China’s modes of engagement above all suit the current political climate. This can be sensed in Jokowi’s recent statement at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing in October 2023, where he remarked that one advantage of the BRI was that it offered “…a synergy that provides ownership for the host country to run its national project independently. A sense of ownership is very important for the sustainability of the project.”

Furthermore, at the heart of relations with China is a productivist logic that embraces state-led development, particularly in resource refining and infrastructure projects, with SOEs situated at the commanding heights of the economy. Such productivism holds a view that state strategic goals—although they may include problems of resource access, social, environmental, and political capital—can be understood as preconditions for long-term market-based economic growth that trickles down into tangible social benefits.

While Indonesian SOEs have been the backbone of the economy, they are also notorious for being inefficient, mismanaged, and for being cash cows for political groups. It is an open secret that SOE commissioners are usually the president’s close allies, and that corporate decision-making processes are not insulated from political intervention.

While many Western investors have fled the country in discontent with its resource nationalism and have shied away from engaging SOEs, Chinese companies came to fill the void. As a result, Chinese investments in Indonesia have extended to value-added activities that are now regarded as the cornerstone of national development. Jokowi and his political allies understand that, in contrast to the norm in the past, loans and state capital are being invested today in downstream sectors and infrastructure projects that can boost productivity and reduce dependency. These initiatives are perceived as a critical step in the ladder towards development.

Chinese capital has thereby given Jokowi leeway to create his own legacy, now distilled to the Golden Indonesia 2045 Vision for developed-country status and the broader goal of economic self-sufficiency.

The Morowali Industrial Park, a monument to mineral resources hilirisasi (downstreaming), and the Jakarta–Bandung HSR are just a half of the story. A series of new deals include the Rempang Eco City, a new industrial park to be home to a quartz sand processing plant and solar panel factory that is a joint venture between Chinese Xinyi Group and the Batam Indonesia Free Zone Authority; the China Power-backed 9 gigawatt hydroelectric plant being constructed along the Kayan River in North Kalimantan, meant to power a Chinese-affiliated green industrial park, Indonesia Strategis Industri; a U$1.1 billion electric vehicle (EV) battery factory with the Indonesian Battery Corporation, a joint venture between four major Indonesian SOEs and Korean conglomerates; and a recently-signed MoU between Indonesia’s state electricity company PLN and the State Grid Corporation of China that, along with seven other MoUs, brings total value of Chinese investments in green energy initiatives in Indonesia to U$54 billion.

Looking at this development, it is difficult not to get the impression that the economic interests of Chinese state elites and state companies are comfortably aligned with the Indonesian government’s growth strategy, and vice versa.

In turn, a Western developmental agenda—just and sustainable governance, social welfare and development reform—has been rendered insufficient in this regard. The Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) is a case in point. The US and Japan-led investment plan in energy transition in Indonesia has met political resistance, with the Indonesian government painting the program as representative of a new green colonialism:, as Erick Thohir, Minister for SOEs mentioned in a media interview, “we want this [climate goals] to fit our grand plan, the Indonesian blueprint, not the blueprint of other countries”.

The JETP deal for Indonesia, while expected to comprise U$20 billion in support, consists of less than 1% of grants, with the remainder being loans, something the Indonesian government believes would set a new loan trap for it and other developing countries. Critics of JETP see it as a mere talking shop that falls short on commitment. As senior cabinet minister and Jokowi’s right-hand man Luhut Pandjaitan lamented in a media interview shortly after a recent visit to Washington, “when I went to Washington last month, we explained it (JETP), they said yes, then I said, where the money is for green transition?…They are just talk”.

China’s financing modality in the energy arena—based on a “business-to-business” approach that directly engages PLN—is seen instead as a more feasible solution in Indonesia. China is indeed in a strategic position: with PLN, the monopoly holder of energy transmission and distribution, being the pivotal stakeholder in China–Indonesia cooperation on greening the energy grid, the project can be easily fast tracked.

Looking ahead

Operating under specific logic of accumulation, Chinese capital can have a distinct impact by helping develop domestic sectors that are otherwise unattractive to global private capital. Of course, this productive model might be more practical than Western-development paradigms, but it is no more participatory or inclusive. Some projects have perpetuated long-held grievances among local populations that see themselves marginalised and dispossessed by the manifestations of Indonesia’ state-led growth strategy.

Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights, for example, found alleged human rights violations carried out by joint forces of police, military, and public order officers as part of the efforts to make way for the Eco-City development in Rempang island. With the presidential race heating up, the “China card” might be played again. Yet, just as happened in many countries, the sentiment does not last long soon after a newly-elected leader comes to power. There will always be old answers to new problems, and China will always be around.

As of now, presidential frontrunner Prabowo Subianto—who once used the China issue to attack Jokowi in the 2019 presidential election—has made it clear that he will continue Jokowi’s foreign policy and key national projects. This implies that Chinese investments will continue to ramp up. While politicians are occupied with the Palestinian cause to appeal to Muslim voters, Prabowo showcased his recent meeting with the Indonesia–Zhejiang Chamber of Commerce via his personal Instagram account. On the other side, Prabowo’s opponent Ganjar Pranowo, , offered a rather neutral statement, promising that he would navigate the growing US–China rivalry if he is elected. Meanwhile the opposition-linked underdog candidate Anies Baswedan’s stance on Indonesia–China relations is still unclear, and his team have made fewer comments concerning China.

However, despite the differences in their public statements, it is interesting to see how China is no longer identified in a mere ideological context, but seen as a key development partner. It is still unclear what shaped this development. Is it partly because China’s public diplomacy works well? Or is it because the material interests of elite networks—with whom these three contenders are affiliated—are increasingly interlinked with China?

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Every year when the monsoon season in Bangladesh ends, risky journeys of Rohingya refugees take off en route to Malaysia. Not all passengers who embark from the refugee camps near the Bangladesh–Myanmar border reach their destination alive. In November 2023, five boats with more than 1,100 emaciated refugees arrived in different places along the coast of Aceh in northern Sumatra, Indonesia.

On two occasions local villagers at the landing sites have pushed the boats back to sea instead of providing much-needed help to the men, women and children after their hazardous journeys. Footage captured by BBC Indonesia in Muara Batu, North Aceh district, shows hundreds of tired-looking Rohingya migrants sitting on the beach.

Villagers are handing them plastic bags of food while telling them to return to boats, shouting, and threatening them with beatings. Another video published by Tribun Aceh shows Rohingya migrants being physically dragged back to their boat. The villagers had taken instant noodles and other food items to the refugee boat, which the passengers then threw in the water, demanding instead to be allowed to come on land. In late November, students in Aceh took to the street to speak out against the reception of Rohingya, thereby also alleging the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) for having conspiratorial motifs.

This behaviour stands in stark contrast to previous acts of kindness and hospitality extended to the Rohingya arriving in Acehnese waters in 2015 and 2020, which earned the locals international respect. According to Acehnese maritime customary law, fishermen are obligated to assist anybody in distress at sea. The ancient institution of Panglima Laot plays a crucial role in ensuring maritime safety and is built on reciprocity and mutuality. There is also the Acehnese tradition of peumulia jamee, honouring guests.

The recent hostile behaviour towards Rohingya was widely reported, with Indonesian media citing many disgruntled locals and, in the process, reinforcing negative stereotypes about the refugees. Some villagers complained about the lack of gratitude shown by previous Rohingya who had run away from the camps in Aceh where they were being hosted. Others pointed to the possible insults and intercultural misunderstandings if the Rohingya were to stay for long. Perhaps more crucially, the imprisonment of three Acehnese fishermen for people smuggling offences, who had rescued 99 Rohingya from drowning boat a year earlier, stirred up negative sentiments about these recently arrived refugees and towards those who facilitate their journeys.

Lalu Muhamad Iqbal, the spokesperson of the Indonesian Foreign Ministry, was quick to direct the blame for the arrival of the Rohingya to the smuggling networks “that are now abusing Indonesia’s kindness and seeking financial gain from refugees without caring about the high risks they are exposing them to”. Associating rescue at sea with the transnational crime of people smuggling is arguably a dangerous race to the bottom that may cost many innocent lives, as similar developments with rescue NGOs in the Mediterranean Sea have shown. The confiscation of rescue vessels and the arrest of rescuers limits the chances of survival for those at distress at sea.

The villagers’ rejection of the recent arrivals and depiction of these events in the media are being used to support the Indonesian authorities’ increasingly hostile position opposing the arrival of more Rohingya in Indonesia. A joint operation of local police, the navy, and the National Search and Rescue Agency (Basarnas) is now patrolling the coastal waters, supported by ordinary villagers and fishermen. Protecting borders is prioritised over saving lives.

This approach ignores the reasons for why Rohingya are risking their lives at sea in the first place. Rohingya who eventually land in Aceh start their hazardous journeys in Bangladesh, where close to a million people are currently languishing in squalid camps. The ethnic minority were forced to flee their home country Myanmar following brutal military crackdowns against them in August 2017, which many observers deem an act of genocide.

In 2019, Gambia filed a case in the International Court of Justice in The Hague (The Gambia v. Myanmar) with the support of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. The case alleges that Myanmar’s atrocities against the Rohingya violated various provisions of the Genocide Convention. The final verdict is expected in 2025.

Between 2012 and 2015, approximately 112,500 Rohingya travelled across the Andaman Sea with the help of smugglers. When regional authorities clamped down on smuggling networks in 2015, around 8,000 Rohingya were abandoned at sea by their smugglers for several weeks. The so-called 2015 Andaman Sea crisis was eventually resolved when Malaysia and Indonesia allowed the boats to disembark. Due to intensified border patrols in Bangladesh, the number of departing boats ceased briefly.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, several boats tried to reach Malaysia, but at least 22 were pushed back. 2022 and 2023 saw a dramatic increase in the number of boats arriving in Indonesia and Malaysia, leaving the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and NGOs struggling to provide shelter to the refugees. The recent influx of Rohingya in Southeast Asia is also driven by the ration cuts in the refugees camps in Bangladesh. With food rations allocated at as little as US$0.27 per person per day, crime in the camps is unsurprisingly on the rise—and so are irregular departures across the sea.

The latest arrivals in Indonesia have sparked old debates about its obligation toward refugees, as a non-signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. The foreign ministry’s Lalu Muhamad Iqbal claims that on account of that status Indonesia “has no obligation to accommodate refugees”. However, as signatory of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and other international laws, Indonesia is obliged to rescue people at distress at sea and bring them to the nearest place of safety. The UNHCR has reiterated its pleas for continued compassion and hospitality to support the disembarkation of additional boats that may be on the way.

Despite the disturbing scenes of rejection of refugees broadcast in the media, it is important to also stress that not all members of the local community reject the Rohingya. About 230 people have been taken to an unused plot of land by the residents of Kulam Village. Local authorities asserted that the community would safeguard the refugees and refrain from forcibly returning them to the ocean. However, humanitarian workers are facing pressure from various sides when carrying out their work with the Rohingya.

Given that the region has witnessed frequent arrivals of Rohingya for the last decade, the absence of proper refugee shelters highlights a longstanding problem in Aceh. Mukhtar Yusuf, a village chief, explained the logistical difficulties associated with hosting refugees for longer periods of time. If they remain at the local docks they can, for example, disturb the daily activities of local fishermen.

Despite some cautious criticism by local NGOs and human rights activists of the recent local rejections, it may also be indicative of fatigue among local solidarity networks. For the last ten years, the local population has been the initial responder taking responsibility for the stranded refugees at sea, including bringing them to shore, sometimes even against orders by the Indonesian military.

Ignorance of the suffering of stranded refugees at sea by the responsible Indonesian authorities shows a lack of governmental accountability. Presidential Regulation Number 125/2016 explicitly stipulates that the government has the authority to rescue foreign refugees who are stranded at sea. As an institution specifically assigned to carry out search and rescue activities, Basarnas is responsible for leading such activities, supported by the navy, police, ministry of transportation, maritime security agency (Bakamla), and other related government agencies.

However, rather than conducting search and rescue operations, the Indonesian navy and the maritime police have intensified patrols to detect foreign vessels in Indonesia’s territorial waters. Maritime police officer Iptu Zainurrusydi said that after detection “we are of course taking policies according to existing regulations”. While they have not admitted to conducting pushbacks, there are indications that Indonesia may be now be adopting the deterrence policies of neighbouring Malaysia and Thailand.

With the upcoming 2nd Global Refugee Forum to be held in Geneva on 13–15 December, it will be interesting to see how Indonesia explains its recent reluctance to rescue the Rohingya in distress at sea. It is reasonable to assume that instead of setting a good example, Indonesia will simply point to all the other signatory and non-signatory states around the world that see refugees as enemies to their sovereignty and behave in a similar way.

With the upcoming presidential and legislative elections in Indonesia in February 2024, there is also a risk that this recurring concern about refugees and national security could be exploited to generate a sense of threat and stir up fear and xenophobia.

Prabowo Subianto, one of the three presidential candidates, commented that while he is sympathetic toward the Rohingya plight, he is more concerned about the difficulties faced by the Acehnese hosting the refugees, and the potential impact on the Indonesian economy. Muhaimin Iskandar, running mate to Anies Baswedan, has vowed to pay attention to the plight of the Rohingya, though he did not specifically mention the refugees in Aceh. Other candidates have not yet commented on the issue.

The current lack of progressive ideas and humane solutions for the Rohingya has brought back previously mothballed ideas. One of the suggestions is to transfer the stranded Rohingya to a remote island in order keep them there until a more durable solution can be found, and to prevent social conflict with the locals during the presumably long wait.

Warehousing refugees on isolated islands is not an acceptable solution. This has already been evidenced by the Bangladesh experiment on the silt island of Bhasan Char in the Bay of Bengal, where more than 30,000 Rohingya are currently stuck in an island jail. Not only do they fear floods and storms, but they lack decent water supplies, schools and health care and basic freedom.

Given that the “sailing season” for Rohingya has just started, there is a high possibility that in the coming weeks more people will be heading to Indonesia and Malaysia in search for safety and a better life. As long as they cannot return to Myanmar and live there safely, all neighbouring state need to refrain from pushbacks.

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General Subiyanto went from Army Chief of Staff (Kasad) to TNI Chief in just less than a month.

Another was that his military career showcased an interesting track record, having held a number of positions that intersected with Jokowi’s political career. Agus was Commander of Surakarta Military District (Dandim 0735/Surakarta) in 2009–2011 when Jokowi was the mayor of the Central Java city, which is colloquially known as Solo. In 2020 to 2021, he served as a commander of Presidential Security Forces (Paspampres), which provide close personal protection to the president and other VIPs. The same situation happened before when Jokowi appointed Hadi Tjahjanto as TNI Chief back in 2017, a former commander of Adi Soemarno Air Base in Solo (2010–2011). The pattern also occurred in the appointment of Police Chief (Kapolri) Listyo Sigit Prabowo in 2021. Listyo served as Solo’s chief of police (Kapolres) in 2011 and Jokowi’s presidential adjutant in 2014.

The elevation of Agus Subiyanto has completed Jokowi’s concerted effort to cement his political power amidst the upcoming national elections in 2024. As an incumbent in his last year of presidency, Jokowi has gone the extra mile to ensure that he is surrounded only by trusted confidantes who have supported him and will remain loyal to him.

How do we explain the pattern of top military leadership appointments during Jokowi’s presidency? In what ways did the placement of the “president’s men” as top military leaders consolidate Jokowi’s influence over the military?

From mandala politik to personalistic relationships

In the early part of his first term, Jokowi was practically a lame duck president. Though he and then vice president Jusuf Kalla got a majority of votes in the 2014 elections and were supported by a massive number of volunteers, Jokowi soon realised that he must accommodate not only PDI-P, the political party that nominated him, but also other coalition parties.

A collision of interests between Jokowi and parties firstly appeared when Jokowi nominated, then cancelled, the nomination of Budi Gunawan as Police Chief. Budi had been reported to have a suspicious amount of money in his bank account, and the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) also announced him as a suspect in a graft case, but his nomination to lead the police force was strongly supported by PDI-P.

Jokowi’s relationship with PDI-P fell into crisis after Widodo cancelled Budi’s nomination after a public outcry. He reacted to the unstable political situation by forging a political alliance with the military, and to some extent the police. Jokowi consolidated support by appointing military figures over whom he could best assert his influence, establishing himself as the centre of influence or mandala politik.

This move was reflected in the appointment of Gatot Nurmantyo as TNI chief in 2015 and Tito Karnavian as police chief in 2016. Jokowi appointed these figures as their alternatives were deemed have relatively closer relations with PDI-P. Jokowi then strengthened his influence over the military by accommodating the expansion of the its role in non-defence affairs, such as signing MoUs of cooperation with various civilian ministries and state-owned enterprises, and to harness its ability to conduct so-called military operations other than war (operasi militer selain perang, or OMSP), particularly on counter-terrorism.

Another hit to Jokowi came during the massive 2016 rallies organised by Islamist groups that coalesced into the 212 Movement, which called for the arrest of Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, the successor of Jokowi as governor of Jakarta, on the charge of religious blasphemy. The problem for the president was that his TNI chief Gatot Nurmantyo seemed to side with the Islamist masses, though Gatot later denied such accusations. On other occasions, Gatot did not hesitate to criticise then defence minister Ryamizard Ryacudu, former army chief of staff, and the national police. Gatot’s maverick, if not erratic, behaviour as TNI chief made Jokowi anxious about whether he could exert full control over the armed forces. On top of that, Jokowi’s relationship with PDI-P remained unstable, due to the political tug of war between the president and party chair, former president Megawati Soekarnoputri.

Later in his first term, however, Jokowi’s relationship with the military and police leadership then started to change, as the president began to surround himself with generals who had long-standing relationships with him. He appointed Hadi Tjahjanto—whom Jokowi had known while he was mayor of Solo —as TNI chief in December 2017. The next two TNI Chiefs, General Andika Perkasa and Admiral Yudo Margono, did not have a long standing personal relationship with Jokowi; both, however, had extensively lobbied the president and PDI-P to secure their nomination. Jokowi also appointed Listyo Sigit Prabowo, another acquaintance of Jokowi since the president’s mayorship in Solo, as police chief in January 2021, and the recent appointment of General Subiyanto as TNI Chief has has brought back the Solo connection at the top of the military.

Another attempt of consolidating the president’s influence over the military is reflected in the routine reassignment, or mutasi, of army territorial commanders.

4 of the current 15 commanders of the army’s Regional Commands (a position known as Panglima Kodam, or Pangdam) are particularly relevant to discuss (see Table 1). In March 2023, Major Generals Mohamad Hasan and Novi Helmy Prasetyo were appointed, respectively, as Pangdam Jaya (Jakarta) and Pangdam Iskandar Muda (Aceh). Part of both men’s tour of duty, interestingly, include Surya Kencana Military Resort (Danrem 061/Surya Kencana) in Bogor, West Java, and service as the Paspampres group commander. Korem 061/Surya Kencana is located in Bogor, a city famous for its botanical gardens—and the palace where President Jokowi often works and holds meetings with foreign leaders and other VVIP guests. Next, Major General Tri Budi Utomo has been appointed Pangdam VI Mulawarman, stationed in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan. He is no stranger to Jokowi: Tri was Paspampres commander from August 2021 until June 2022. Last but not least, Major General Widi Prasetijono, current Pangdam IV/Diponegoro based in Semarang, overseeing Central Java and Yogyakarta provinces, once served as President Jokowi’s adjutant and Paspampres commander.

In tandem with Solo connection, tours of duty in Korem 061 Suryakencana, Bogor and in Paspampres seem to have given military officers an advantage in establishing personal connections with, and coming under tutelage of, the president.

Name	Current position (Period)	Solo connection  (Kodim 0735/Surakarta)	Korem 061/Surya Kencana	Paspampres	President’s adjutant
General Agus Subiyanto	TNI Chief, November 2023–present	Commander, 2009–2011	Commander, 2020	Commander, 2020–2021	–
Major General Mohamad Hasan	Commander of Jayakarta Regional Command (Pangdam Jaya), Jakarta, March 2023–present	–	Commander, 2018–2019	Group A Commander, 2016–2018	–
Major General Novi Helmy Prasetya	Commander of Iskandar Muda Regional Command (Pangdam Iskandar Muda), Aceh, March 2023–present	–	Commander, 2019–2020	Group D Commander, 2013–2015	–
Major General Tri Budi Utomo	Commander of Mulawarman Regional Command (Pangdam VI/Mulawarman), East Kalimantan, June 2022–present	–	–	Commander, 2021–2022 Group A Commander, 2018–2019	–
Major General Widi Prasetijono	Commander of Diponegoro Regional Command (Pangdam IV/Diponegoro), Central Java, April 2022	Commander, 2011–2012	–	–	Jokowi’s military aide, 2014–2016

In addition, the appointment of police Commissioner General Nana Sudjana as caretaker governor of Central Java province has raised eyebrows, since Nana previously served as the chief of Solo’s city police force (Kapolres)  in 2010–2011, while Jokowi was still mayor. Meanwhile, Central Java Police Chief Inspector General Ahmad Luthfi was the deputy police chief in Solo in 2011. The situation becomes more intriguing as Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the oldest son of Jokowi and current Mayor of Solo, is running as Prabowo Subianto’s vice presidential candidate and serves as the head of the pair’s campaign team for Central Java and Yogyakarta.

The military under Jokowi

Unwavering support from the military is vital for Jokowi for at least three reasons.

First, support from the military, especially in combination with the support of the police, can help Jokowi to preserve the domestic security stability that Jokowi requires in order to fulfil his economic ambitions.

Thousands of personnel, stationed at regional army territorial commands (Kodam) all over the archipelago, have been mobilised to build roads, bridges, and other facilities. This infrastructure development program is called “TNI Manunggal Membangun Desa” (TMMD), a community service that the Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mulyono (2015-2018) once said, “reflected the Indonesian Army’s identity as the army of Indonesian citizens.” The military has also been involved in agricultural projects, providing manpower, equipment, and logistics to open up new farming land in many locations. Moreover, more troops are currently deployed, either on official duty or in side job arrangements, to provide security services in industrial and mining areas as well as palm oil plantations designated by presidential regulations as “national vital objects” (obvitnas). In this sense, Jokowi has provided a convenient arena for the military to maintain its corporate interests in pursuing missions based on its territorial command structure.

Second, the military has been acting as a balancing power against Jokowi’s political opposition. As outlined above, Jokowi’s status as an outsider in national politics initially put him in a tight situation vis-a-vis his political opponents, including his own party, PDI-P. The appointment of retired military officers in many strategic civilian posts signals Jokowi’s intentions to establish a political alliance with the military. Military retirees, or purnawirawan, have been handy in synchronising the military agenda with the president’s interests.

Third, the consolidation of military support for Jokowi will come useful to support his electoral interests in the 2024 elections. President Jokowi himself initially stated he will intervene (cawe-cawe) the elections for the “good of the nation.” The appointment of Agus Subiyanto illustrates the importance of Solo connections as one of the president’s political machines in mitigating the risk of political conflict that ensue in the electoral competition ahead.

Such turbulence could take several forms. For instance, Jokowi might have to face a backlash as an outcome of his strained relationship with PDI-P. The appointment of those military officers can sharpen the distrust of the president’s political opponents towards him and heighten the doubt over the neutrality of security apparatus which is already under heavy scrutiny.

Stagnant transformation, reform regression

Jokowi’s politicking over the military poses at least three potential issues. First, it can distract the Indonesian military from doing its primary duty of national defence. This consequently creates a challenge for the pursuit of military modernisation and transformation. The development progress of TNI’s new defence structures itself, such as the Joint Defence Regional Command (Kogabwilhan), are not yet up to scratch. Kogabwilhan were established in 2019 in three different provinces—Riau Islands, East Kalimantan, and Central Papua—and are designed to integrate army, navy and air force resources. Furthermore, the delay in completing the Minimum Essential Force 2024 target has added another challenge in modernising the Indonesian military.

Second, Jokowi’s attempt to establish his own “gang” within the military can invite resistance from other groups within the armed forces. There is no doubt that Jokowi’s favouritism to those who share with him a Solo connection will sideline other potential figures. Such nepotism undermines the merit system within the TNI.

Third, Jokowi’s cultivation of the Solo connection has triggered doubt over the neutrality of the military as the 2024 elections approach. The main challenge for new TNI chief Agus is to convince the public that the TNI will remain politically neutral. A commitment to uphold TNI non-partisanship stance has been his signature policy since he was appointed as army chief of staff and, almost immediately afterwards, as TNI chief.

The problem is that given Agus’ long acquaintance with Jokowi, and the candidacy of Gibran Rakabuming Raka as Prabowo Subianto’s running mate, such promises ring hollow.

As the end of his presidency draws near, Jokowi’s grip on the military has consolidated. The ascendancy of General Agus Subiyanto as TNI Chief reflects the prominence of the Solo connection as factor in determining intra-TNI elite arrangements. This situation, nevertheless, brings certain risks of degrading military professionalism, inviting internal friction, and sowing public distrust about the TNI’s commitment to neutrality, not to mention the overall development of Indonesia’s defence capability.

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