Indonesian Politics in 2014: Democracy’s Close Call

Abstract

Indonesian democracy experienced a near miss in 2014, when Jakarta governor Joko Widodo (Jokowi) defeated former general Prabowo Subianto by a margin of 6.3% in the presidential election. Both candidates were populists who rose to prominence in the context of public disillusionment with incumbent president Yudhoyono; Prabowo, however, condemned Indonesia's democratic system and promised to take Indonesia in a more authoritarian direction. We trace democracy's close call through five phases: the dying months of Yudhoyono's presidency, the rise of populist alternatives, the parliamentary elections of April 2014, the July presidential campaign, and the aftermath. We attribute the strength of Prabowo's campaign to superior organisational and financial support, while Jokowi's victory rested upon strong identification with him among poor and rural voters. Also determining the outcome was the fact that public satisfaction with democracy remained strong, undermining the effectiveness of Prabowo's authoritarian-populist message. Nevertheless, democracy's future remains uncertain, given that Prabowo and his supporters now control a sufficiently large number of parliamentary seats to continue promoting a rollback of democratic reforms.

Demokrasi Indonesia nyaris mengalami kegagalan di tahun 2014 ini saat gubernur Jakarta Joko Widodo (Jokowi) mengalahkan Prabowo Subianto dengan marjin hanya 6.3% pada pemilu presiden. Kedua kandidat merupakan calon populis yang muncul menjawab kekecewaan publik terhadap presiden sebelumnya, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Meski demikian, Prabowo mengutuk sistem demokrasi Indonesia dan berjanji akan membawa negeri tersebut ke arah rezim yang lebih otoriter. Kami menjajaki nyaris runtuhnya demokrasi Indonesia ini melalui lima fase: bulan-bulan terakhir pemerintahan Yudhoyono, munculnya alternatif-alternatif populis, pemilu legislatif pada April 2014, kampanye presiden selama bulan Juli, dan peristiwa-peristiwa sesudahnya. Kami menilai kekuatan kampanye Prabowo terletak pada keahlian organisasi dan dukungan dana yang dimilikinya dan kemenangan Jokowi terletak pada sosok Jokowi yang identik dengan masyarakat pemberi suara dari golongan miskin dan orang-orang pedesaan. Selain itu, hal yang juga menjadi faktor penentu kemenangan adalah besarnya penghargaan publik terhadap demokrasi, yang berhasil mengurangi keampuhan pesan otoriter-populis yang disampaikan dalam kampanye Prabowo. Namun demikian, masa depan demokrasi Indonesia masih tak menentu seiring fakta bahwa Prabowo dan pendukungnya kini menempati sebagian besar kursi di parlemen dan terus berupaya merongrong reformasi-reformasi demokratik.

Keywords:

• elections
• democracy
• political parties
• populism
• presidency

JEL classification:

• D72
• D73

Notes

¹ For the specific purposes of this article, we are following Winters’s (2011, 6) definition of oligarchs as ‘actors who command and control massive concentrations of material resources that can be deployed to defend or enhance their personal wealth and exclusive social position’. There has been much debate on the political role of oligarchs in post-Soeharto Indonesia: see the various contributions in Ford and Pepinsky’s (2014) book.

² In the months leading up to the 9 April legislative election, one of the authors (Aspinall) travelled through 14 provinces and interviewed about 100 candidates for legislative office, as part of a large research project on money politics run in conjunction with the University of Gadjah Mada. As part of this project, 50 researchers were located in 20 provinces, interviewing a total of about 1,500 legislative candidates and campaign workers. It was the near-unanimous view of all the candidates interviewed by Aspinall, and of the researchers engaged in the project after they concluded the fieldwork, that vote-buying was more intense in 2014 than in 2009 and earlier elections. This greater intensity was evident in the proportion of candidates who engaged in the practice, the sums distributed to individual voters and communities, and total expenditures on the practice by contestants. For elaboration see Aspinall 2014b.

³ The video can be seen at http://youtu.be/S9pfcbCzprU.

⁴ After being abused on social media for his stance on the matter, Yudhoyono issued an emergency regulation on 2 October that reinstated the direct elections. However, parliament had yet to approve this regulation at the time of writing.