Reformasi Reversal: Structural Drivers of Democratic Decline In Jokowi’s Middle-Income Indonesia

Abstract

This article surveys the marquee events in the year ahead of Indonesia’s 2024 election, finding that the field of democratic political contestation has further narrowed due to the criminalisation of political opponents, the end of the campaign against corruption, the decline of judicial activism, political recentralisation and the collapse of national protest movements. Examined in totality, this article argues not only that Indonesia’s reformasi movement is dead as a salient political force, but also that today’s political elites seek to roll back many of its core achievements. While elites continue to support national elections, those in 2024 will occur in the context of a weakened opposition and heavy presidential interference in the coalition formation of key candidates. Why has democratic contestation, including by oppositional and protest movements, contracted so noticeably under the two-term Joko Widodo (Jokowi) presidency? The article proposes a structural contribution to the continuing debate about Indonesia’s democratic decline, arguing that Indonesia’s middle-income status under Jokowi has been accompanied by dramatic changes to the country’s socio-economic makeup. Importantly, Indonesia’s electorate is now dominated by a massive number of ‘precariously non-poor’ whose dream of social mobility lies in the provision of quality government services and changes to the structure of labour. This article suggests that the intractable political challenge of managing this group’s aspirations for economic security in a context of lagging reform has set in train the demobilisation of the opposition, the consolidation of President Jokowi’s ruling coalition and the curtailing of political contestation. The project of managing the political economy of the middle-income trap will continue to dominate Indonesia’s political future regardless of which coalition will triumph in 2024.

Keywords:

• reformasi
• New Order
• elections
• middle income
• democracy
• corruption
• Jokowi

JEL classifications:

• D70
• D72
• D73
• D74
• D63
• P10
• P16
• R50

INTRODUCTION

In 2023, as the second term of Joko Widodo (Jokowi) concludes and the 2024 election looms, elements of the ruling coalition have renewed strategies of accommodation, co-optation, legal challenge, repression and coercion to restrict the prospects of open political contestation. These strategies include, as I discuss in this paper, aborted efforts to delay the coming election and the instrumentalisation of corruption cases to destabilise and reshape rival coalitions. In addition, political elites are aggressively, though not always successfully, turning to the Constitutional Court as a means to reshape electoral and party institutions in ways that entrench their advantage. The effect has been to reorganise the field of coalition formation in line with narrow elite, and particularly presidential, political interests. These strategies have played out in a landscape of political recentralisation as the central government winds back elements of fiscal and political power to Jakarta, and anti-regional autonomy discourses become increasingly persistent. Furthermore, the effects of the longue durée co-optation, repression and harassment of civil society through physical and legal coercion have expressed themselves in Jokowi’s second term in the failure of national broad-based coalitions for reform to meaningfully ignite¹.

The strategies used by the government to restrict challenge are not new. In 2018, on the cusp of Jokowi’s second presidential election, Power (2018) observed that the Jokowi government used legal threats to control opposition politicians, suppress and curtail opposition groups and employ the police and military as campaign instruments. In 2023, having co-opted opposition leader Prabowo Subianto and his supporters, and dismantled Islamist mobilisations, the ruling coalition’s use of those tactics has accelerated and become more audacious in scope and ambition, driven by a range of party and presidential interests. Examined in totality, these tactics directly target the core institutional and political wins of Indonesia’s 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 these social forces are exhausted as a salient political force. Surveying this narrowed field of political contestation in the twilight of the Jokowi administration, we are struck by the extent to which the previously untouchable institutions of reformasi are not only contested by powerful actors but also subject to rollback.

At first glance, the argument presented appears to endorse the widespread conclusion that Indonesia’s democracy is undergoing decline. But conceptually, the article draws on a contrasting framework. The idea of democratic decline often invites an understanding of democracy and autocracy as two opposing ends of a sliding scale upon which countries can be measured, ranked and quantified by the ‘strength’ or ‘weakness’ of their democratic institutions. For social conflict theorists, the problem with this understanding is that often the unit of analysis slips towards institutions rather than the social forces that contest power through them (Rodan 2018). This is not to say that institutions are not important but their determinative role in forging the ‘democratic-ness’ of regimes has been exaggerated (Hameiri and Jones 2020). Institutions shape who can participate in conflict, how and on what grounds, but institutions are ultimately shaped by the dynamics of contestation among social forces (Rodan 2018; Rodan and Baker 2020). The idea of ‘democratic decline’ can lay the blame on weak or unreformed institutions rather than focus attention on the shifting balance of power among social groups. These conceptual differences are neither abstract nor inconsequential. For instance, foreign donors continue to measure the success of programs to strengthen democracy in terms of technical or policy-based solutions, rather than building relationships and broadening coalitions in support of democratic institutions. Decades of embedding important mobilising actors—such as non-government organisations (NGOs)—in governance projects have, as we will see, muffled their ability to critique power and galvanise oppositional forces in support of change. These conceptual differences are also reflected in the use of the terms ‘ruling coalition’ or ‘ruling regime’. By this, I don’t just refer to the Jokowi government or the elected and party/political elites that have joined the president’s governing coalition. The ruling coalition includes these actors but also the wider constellation of social groups that have reorganised around the president’s second term. This includes political elites and parties but also conglomerates, tech entrepreneurs, technocrats and elements of the upper middle class that wield political and material power in support of this coalition’s interests. What contestation there is appears primarily generated by internal splits within this ruling coalition, explaining, as I will show in this paper, the limits of that political narrowing. The analysis in this article argues that the acceleration and audacity of ruling elites’ use of state institutions in favour of their political interests is indicative of the degree to which the ruling coalition has consolidated.

But why have these political dynamics intensified under the Jokowi presidency? Scholars are divided on the drivers of ‘democratic decline’. Power (2018, 23) argues that Indonesia’s weak state institutions have rendered them vulnerable to ‘politicisation’ by a president with a categorically authoritarian streak. Other scholars have emphasised how democratic decline is being propelled by the ruling coalition’s efforts to overcome seething social and political polarisation, particularly in the wake of two bruising national elections (Warburton 2020; Mietzner 2020; Fossati 2023). In this argument, democratic decline is the outcome of government efforts to elevate illiberal, nationalist developmentalism over Islamic populism. In such a context, argues Mietzner (2021), civil society has fragmented and cannot galvanise a common front to defend democracy from elite attacks. Indeed, Indonesia’s oppositional movements lack a strong left that would put equality and social justice issues on the electoral table (Hadiz 2019). Aspinall et al. (2020) explore the wider normative drivers of democratic rollback in which the wider Indonesian public is only weakly committed to liberal and democratic values and institutions. For Diprose, McRae and Hadiz (2019), this normative illiberalism is a function of Indonesia’s deep-rooted and growing social inequality. This gaping income inequality is transforming electoral contests into competing populisms, as we saw in 2014 and 2019, and absorbing reformasi’s new political actors into old-order, predatory politics.

These are valuable and empirically grounded contributions to our understanding of Indonesian democracy. But the deeper structural roots driving decline are ill-captured by oblique references to pro-poor policies, popular illiberalism, social polarisation or even rising inequality. The fact is that Indonesia has undergone massive socio-economic changes over the past 20 years, the political implications of which have been neglected. We are often reminded that since the fall of authoritarianism and the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, tens of millions have been moved out of poverty, precipitating Indonesia’s shift into middle-income status. But what have the poor moved into? The past 20 years have seen the dramatic expansion of Indonesia’s ‘precariously non-poor’ (Hill 2021), an economic group who are no longer poor but who also do not yet prosper. The World Bank (2019) 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 World Bank (2019) argues that this group’s continued social mobility depends on the government’s ability to deliver better services and arguably (although this is unmentioned) better labour conditions. These are immense tasks for any administration, let alone one experiencing Indonesia’s current political and economic challenges. Most middle-income nations are demographically dominated by a precariously non-poor who are unlikely to experience social mobility in their generation. So long as this group remains fragmented and harnessed to the government’s developmentalist project, the contradictions inherent to their status are not immediately apparent. However, when elements of this group were mobilised through the Prabowo presidential campaigns of 2014 and 2019, and sustained through ongoing Islamist-populist agitation, suppressing political opposition became an imperative for the ruling coalition. I suggest that demobilising this ‘aspiring middle class’ set in train political dynamics that have tipped the balance of social forces firmly in favour of the ruling elite.

The article develops these arguments by examining five arenas of narrowing political contestation. I turn first to the uncertainty surrounding the 2024 elections that dominated much of 2022–23. I argue that the failed bid to extend the president’s term amid lagging support from national elites demonstrates the president’s success in positioning himself as kingmaker over the presidential nomination process. Second, I turn to Indonesia’s once lauded war on corruption, examining how efforts to criminalise and coerce both political rivals and potentially troublesome allies, using corruption cases advanced by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and the attorney general’s office, have reorganised the party coalition formation towards the presidential nomination. Third, I show that while criminalisation has been effective in reshaping political alliances, recent rulings by the Constitutional Court demonstrate that the court’s bench, once dominated by champions of judicial activism, is increasingly factionalised by divergent interests. Fourth, I examine the increasingly centripetal dynamics at work in government—in particular, the recentralisation of key fiscal and political powers and the role of the Ministry for Home Affairs in driving anti-regional autonomy political dynamics and discourses. Fifth, I turn to the arena of civil society and grassroots social movements, highlighting the way that core issues—such as human rights and democracy—that formed the backbone of wider national-based movements in support of reformasi, have disintegrated in the face of longue durée coercion, criminalisation, co-optation and fragmentation. I argue that the weakness of these movements is apparent in the failure of protest movements to coalesce in support of the Kanjuruhan Stadium disaster, which saw 135 people die as a result of police brutality. Viewed in totality, I argue that the dynamics at work in these arenas not only highlight a narrowing field of political contestation but also, critically, challenge and indeed reverse many of the key wins of Indonesia’s reformasi movement.

In the final section of this article, I propose a structural correction to the debate on Indonesia’s ‘democratic decline’. I argue that Indonesia’s middle-income status and the growth of the precariously non-poor present new political challenges to rule. Specifically, I suggest that the mobilisation of elements of this group through populist messaging on inequality by the Prabowo camp and broader Islamist organising represented a threat to the ruling coalition. I argue that the project of co-opting the opposition and demobilising this ‘aspiring middle class’ set in train political dynamics that at once narrowed the field of political contestation and consolidated the power of the ruling coalition. I conclude by reflecting on what the contradictions of governing middle-income Indonesia could mean for future regime trajectories.

Election 2024: All the President’s Men

Indonesia’s sixth national elections since the 1998 downfall of Soeharto’s order are slated for 14 February 2024. Like the 2019 elections before them, the 2024 elections will combine the presidential and legislative elections into a single day, ² the world’s biggest simultaneous election (Krismantari and Ramadhani 2023). While there are obvious financial and logistical advantages in combining the vote, observers have noted that simultaneous elections muffle local policy debates, make catching voter fraud more complex and exacerbate the presidentialisation of Indonesia’s electoral contest. This electoral system also entrenches advantage for large, established parties because presidential nominations for 2024 can be made only by parties or coalitions of parties that have obtained 20% of the seats or 25% of the votes in the preceding legislative election. The 2024 campaign window will also be one of the shortest, at just 75 days, privileging incumbents and opening the door to logistical problems (Lai 2022b).³

However, for most of 2022 and early 2023, robust debates about the fitness of Indonesia’s electoral laws were sunk beneath fears that the 2024 elections would not happen at all. Public support for the constitutionally mandated two-term limit on presidential power, a signature win of the reformasi movement (Fahrizal 2022), was repeatedly tested by statements in favour of a third term or a term extension by members of the government coalition, such as the maritime affairs and investment coordinating minister, Luhut Panjaitan (Anugerah 2022); the investment minister, Bahlil Lahadalia; the National Awakening Party (PKB) head, Muhaimin Iskandar; and the Golkar chief, Airlangga Hartarto. Civil society groups such as Jokpro 2024, led by the pollster Muhammad Qodari, agitated in favour of a third term under a Jokowi–Prabowo executive (Hasyim 2021). Despite repeated arguments about the need for stability in Indonesia’s post-pandemic recovery period, these efforts faltered in the face of categorical public dismay and an ambiguous legal path to constitutional amendment.⁴

When, in January 2022, the parliament finally confirmed that the General Elections Commission (KPU) preferred 14 February as the election date, many assumed that further elite probing in favour of a presidential extension would be abandoned. However, proposals to lengthen Jokowi’s reign continued to circulate through 2022 and early 2023 as national elites publicly workshopped different paths to maintaining the president’s rule, citing the need for a safe pair of hands to see through the construction of the new capital, Ibu Kota Negara (IKN) Nusantara. In September 2022, a proposal was floated in which Jokowi would serve as vice president on a Prabowo ticket. When Constitutional Court spokesperson Fajar Laksono gave the all-clear, a number of political parties such as the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) and Gerindra Party signalled interest. Ultimately, the idea lost wind when KPU head Hasyim Asy’ari and Constitutional Court justices disavowed Laksono’s statements and warned of legal turmoil. The speaker for the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR), Golkar member Bambang Soesatyo, who was at the same time seeking elsewhere to expand the authority of the MPR by reviving a New Order instrument known as the Broad Guidelines of State Policy, nonetheless continued to insist that a path to constitutional change was feasible (da Costa 2022). More generally, the government appeared to be dragging its feet in its election preparations, with repeated complaints from the KPU about unnervingly slow budgetary disbursements and a lack of support (Lai 2022a). In March 2023, a shock ruling by a lower Jakarta criminal court again put the certainty of the elections in question. The court ruled against the KPU in favour of a largely unknown political party known as the Just and Prosperous People’s Party (PRIMA), which had argued that it had been unfairly treated by KPU’s eligibility verification process.⁵ In their verdict, the judges ordered the KPU to postpone the 2024 elections and start preparations from scratch, delaying the election to July 2025 (Wahyuni 2023). Although the decision was overturned on appeal, and the justices were subject to sanction, the president observed ambiguously that ‘the controversy had triggered pros and cons’ (CNN Indonesia 2023).

Proposals by the elite about how to extend presidential rule dwindled in force and novelty as Jokowi’s role as kingmaker over the nominating party coalitions strengthened. Jokowi’s power to reshape the presidential nominations has stemmed from his soaring personal popularity as his term comes to an end. Jokowi’s predecessor, former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), for instance, slunk out of office in 2014 with approval rates of 49%. By contrast, President Jokowi’s approval rating is the highest since he entered office in 2014, hovering between 75% and 85%. Clearly, some public satisfaction stems from his handling of Indonesia’s post-Covid economic recovery. His 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. These strategies have successfully provided the president with an estimated 10%–15% voter endorsement bonus, which he can bestow on presidential hopefuls who curry his favour (Muhtadi 2023).

The effect has been that Jokowi has been able to embed his personal and policy interests into the presidential race. Three presidential candidates have emerged. The first is the governor for Central Java, Ganjar Pranowo, whose youthful energy and background in student and regional politics at first made him appear to be Jokowi’s natural successor until his vocal opposition in March 2023 to the Israeli team’s participation in the U-20 World Cup planned for Indonesia caused football body FIFA to move the tournament offshore. Ganjar’s rejection of the Israeli team was widely seen as an attempt to placate the party chair, Megawati Sukarnoputri, raising presidential doubts about Ganjar’s ability to adeptly negotiate PDIP demands in a thin coalition with the United Development Party (PPP).

The second candidate is Jokowi’s former political opponent turned defence minister, Prabowo, whose third bid to be president has produced a campaign that has plainly sought presidential endorsement, so much so that his alliance—including Golkar, the Gerinda Party, the National Mandate Party (PAN), the Democratic Party (PD) and the Crescent Star Party (PBB) parties—has rebranded itself the Onward Indonesia Coalition, named after Jokowi’s current cabinet. The third is the dark horse of 2024, former governor of Jakarta Anies Baswedan, an academic and former minister whose long track record of disputes with Jokowi has made his coalition the one most closely resembling an anti-government alliance. Nonetheless, the Coalition of Change for Unity is made up of two parties that sit in Jokowi’s cabinet, the National Democratic Party (NasDem Party) and the PKB. Only the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) and PD, who as we will see, exited the alliance in late August 2023, have been outside of the government coalition.

Over much of 2023, an awkward three-way slow dance occurred as the president accepted lavish praise and promises to continue his policy platform, from the most competitive presidential candidates, Ganjar and Prabowo, who were neck and neck in the polls through much of the year. Demonstrations of fealty have included pledges to continue the president’s signature project of constructing IKN Nusantara, Indonesia’s new ‘rainforest’ capital, despite low foreign investment and persistently ambivalent public polling. IKN Nusantara has come under criticism for dubious environmental credentials, local opposition and flagging support from Indonesia’s public service. Despite the pervasive sense of unease around the project, even Anies has been reticent to oppose it openly, suggesting ambiguously that, under his government, the IKN Nusantara project would be subject only to ‘review’ (Shibata 2023).

But the president’s priorities for the next administration concern more than just policy. During 2023 Jokowi has shored up his family dynasty by promoting the political careers of his sons, Gibran Rakabuming Raka and Kaesang Pangarep. Jokowi’s eldest son, Gibran, is currently in his father’s old chair as mayor of Surakarta, for which he ran uncontested on a PDIP ticket. Jokowi was instrumental in ensuring Gibran would claim the vice-presidential nomination on a Prabowo ticket. Within the Prabowo coalition, Gibran’s low national polling numbers are seen as offset by the voter bounce gained from presidential endorsement and access to Jokowi’s considerable resources and financiers for the campaign period. At 36, Gibran was legally too young to nominate for the vice presidency until a highly controversial decision by the Constitutional Court on 16 October lifted the age ban for candidates who, like Gibran, had previously been elected to a regional government post.

Jokowi has also been instrumental in manoeuvring his youngest son, Kaesang, a YouTuber turned catering entrepreneur, to become the chair of the Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI) in early October 2023. Over Jokowi’s second term, PSI shifted from being a visibly millennial party with secular progressive credentials to a Jokowi tribute party, willing to promote the president’s core interests. PSI declared itself the guardian of the president’s legacy and of ‘Jokowisme’ and was the author of numerous petitions to lower the minimum age for presidential candidates. 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.

Proposals to extend the presidential term beyond the ‘previously sacrosanct’ (Mietzner and Honna 2023, 116) two-term limit dissipated only once the president turned his influence towards the presidential nomination process, using political nepotism to secure his interests. Though the outcomes of 2024 are still uncertain, Jokowi has installed family members as proxies in the electoral contest. The level of presidential intervention so far in the nomination process and, presumably, in the campaign to come opens up space for critical debate over how competitive Indonesia’s elections are. A more serious problem is that, despite unambiguous public rejection of an election delay or presidential third term, the position of key party powerbrokers in the ruling coalition vacillated. Some elites deliberated deeply over the individual and party advantages of prolonging the president’s rule, before eventually plumping for competitive democratic elections. Ultimately, 2024 will be remembered as the election that took place in ways shaped by the narrow terms and interests of the outgoing president, Jokowi.

The Criminalisation of Politics

A second arena through which we have witnessed the narrowing field of democratic political contestation has been in the harnessing of Indonesia’s law enforcement agencies to the process of candidate coalition formation. Analysts had pointed to the propensity of the government under Jokowi to engage in ‘political criminalisation’. In 2018, Power documented how political figures were threatened with corruption cases by the attorney general’s office in order to pressure them to expand the incumbent coalition in the lead-up to the 2019 election (Power 2018). That period also saw the intensification of a police campaign of prosecution of elements of the populist-Islamist opposition, such as the rock singer turned political aspirant Ahmad Dhani and the controversial head of the Islamic Defenders Front, Habib Rizieq Shihab. The effect was to disable key mobilising figures in the Prabowo camp going into the 2019 election (Aspinall and Mietzner 2019). However, these dynamics have dramatically accelerated in the final years of Jokowi’s presidency, with the blatant use of the attorney general’s office and the once widely respected KPK to place pressure on political opposition figures and allies alike by charging them for fresh or resurrected corruption offences.

An important instrument in this project has been Indonesia’s KPK. The KPK was established in 2002 as a major outcome of the reformasi movement and, over the period of Indonesia’s democratic reform, became a prized institution of legal activism, able to mobilise a vast and resilient cross-class coalition in support of the anti-corruption agenda. After numerous failed attempts, parliament suddenly passed crippling amendments in September 2019 to the law underpinning the formation of the KPK (Law 30/2002 on the Eradication of Criminal Acts of Corruption) and installed Firli Bahuri as the KPK chair. Firli is a police general who, while seconded to the commission as an investigator, was himself accused of extortion and corruption. Firli is also a close ally of the intelligence tzar and former police general Budi Gunawan, whose nomination to be national police chief in 2014 was scuppered when the KPK declared him under investigation for corruption (Kustiani 2015). These legislative and leadership changes, though widely criticised, were justified within a wider government drive ostensibly targeting Islamist-populist forces, which ultimately purged anti-government critics. Social media buzzers and influencers alleged that the KPK had become a ‘nest for the Taliban’ that needed rooting out (Sudin 2021). Not only did this narrative effectively splinter public support for the institution, but it also enabled Firli to oust 57 KPK investigators and administrative staff who made up the driving force of the KPK staff union, falsely suggesting that their failure of a ‘nationalism test’ exposed them as anti-Pancasila Islamic extremists.

With the KPK now co-opted, we see the agency’s once-prized war on corruption was harnessed to interests seeking to influence party coalition formation in the lead-up to 2024. A prime target of the KPK’s criminalisation campaign has been the coalition of parties supporting the Anies ticket. When Anies first announced his intention to run in late 2022, he was supported by the NasDem Party, a solid player in the government with three important portfolios (information, agriculture and environment/forestry), and by opposition parties, the PKS and PD under Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono (AHY), the son of the former president SBY. Initial polling was positive, with Anies running a close second to Ganjar in a three-way presidential race (Muhtadi 2022).

However, a series of high-profile corruption scandals pursued by the KPK (and the attorney general) irreversibly weakened the opposition coalition. In mid-September 2022, the KPK announced it had opened a corruption investigation into the then governor of Papua, Lukas Enembe, a major revenue raiser for PD. In addition, the KPK chair, Firli, circulated rumours that Anies had misused funds at the electric vehicle grand prix, known as Formula-E, organised under his governorship. The affair became a full-blown crisis when Firli terminated Endar Priantoro’s 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 (Jakarta Post 2023b). As the conflict escalated, the Jokowi ally and national police chief, Listyo Sigit Prabowo, issued a directive returning Endar to his position at the KPK. The tussle between Polri and the KPK suggests conflicting strategies within the ruling coalition over the tactics of criminalisation. Many within the palace feared that arresting Anies would be an own goal, resurrecting his mid-2023 slumping performance in the polls and distracting from the president’s courtship by Ganjar and Prabowo, which had by then taken centre stage.

At the same time, the attorney general’s office, an agency with a limited track record in democratic reform, has also broken with anti-corruption convention to lead (rather than just prosecute) corruption cases targeting backers of Anies within the government. In early 2023, the office began investigating and eventually arrested the then NasDem Party secretary general and then minister for communication and information technology, Johnny G. Plate, on suspicion of graft to the tune of $550 million in the procurement for base transceiver station projects. The arrest was a colossal blow to the NasDem Party and its chair, Surya Paloh, sapping party finances and the chair’s drive. By mid-June 2023, the KPK had also put the NasDem Party politician and then agriculture minister, Syahrul Yasin Limpo, under investigation, raiding his homes and the ministry. Under such pressure, Anies has struggled to consolidate his support base, exacerbating tensions with his coalition. His eventual pick for vice-presidential running mate, PKB’s Muhaimin, saw the vice-presidential hopeful AHY withdraw PD from the coalition and defect to the Prabowo ticket.

KPK harassment of the Coalition of Change for Unity nonetheless continued. Two days before Muhaimin declared he was joining Anies’s ticket, the KPK summoned him to discuss a corruption case in the Ministry of Manpower, which Muhaimin had led during the SBY government from 2009 to 2014 (Janti 2023c). The case is proceeding, with three suspects already named, suggesting that a full investigation will unfold over the campaign period.

The attorney general was also instrumental in the collapse of a fourth coalition— known as the United Indonesia Coalition (KIB). This consisted of government allies including PAN and PBB, which had formed in May 2022 under the Golkar chair and coordinating economic minister, Airlangga. The long period of dithering by the KIB appeared to indicate that Airlangga was awaiting presidential blessing for his nomination. By June 2023, Golkar factions allied to the coordinating maritime and investment minister, Luhut, had begun agitating to overthrow Airlangga through an extraordinary congress. In a sudden turn of events, in July 2023, Airlangga was forced to submit to an interrogation by the attorney general’s office after it announced it was reopening a 2021 investigation into bribes for palm oil export permits. In the melee, both Luhut and Investment Minister Bahlil declared interest in the Golkar leadership. By mid-August 2023, KIB had collapsed. Golkar’s move to the Prabowo ticket—which had been openly courting the president’s eldest son, Gibran, for the vice-presidential role—boosted the Onward Indonesia Coalition across the presidential nomination threshold. The Airlangga case illustrates how political criminalisation in the Jokowi era does not just target the ruling coalition’s rivals but inveigles allies to abandon their interests in order to align with those of the president.

The Weakening of Judicial Activism

Indonesia’s Constitutional Court was also formed in the wake of reformasi, as part of a package of reforms that promised an independent judicial review of the legality of state actions. The establishment of the court itself was an acknowledgement by legislators that the existing judiciary was riddled with corruption and incompetence. The court’s track record is not free of controversy. Butt (2018) has persistently noted that the court’s legal reasoning has often been of erratic quality and the 2013 arrest of the court’s then chief justice, Akil Mochtar, by the KPK for receiving bribes was a low point. Nonetheless, as Butt (2018, 214) argues, ‘On the whole, the Court has been a model for judicial reform in Indonesia … It has largely acted as an effective check on legislative power, making significant contributions to Indonesian law and democracy along the way’. Butt argues that the court’s appetite for ‘judicial activism’ has made it a significant site for civil society contestation against the government, and a force strengthening core legal rights. The court is also the primary forum through which challenges to the electoral rules and outcomes are decided, as tested by Prabowo after the 2014 and 2019 elections.

The second term of the Jokowi administration has seen overt strategies to reshape the composition of the court’s nine-member bench. A notable example is the career of Anwar Usman, the chief justice of the court since 2018. In September 2020, parliament passed an amendment that lengthened the term limits of the current chief and deputy chief justice, technically extending Anwar’s tenure from 2020 to 2026 (Butt 2020). When petitioners successfully won the right to have chief justices periodically elected, Anwar was returned to his chief justice role by vote. Anwar’s tenure became even more controversial when he started dating Jokowi’s sister in late 2021, eventually marrying her in May 2022.

At the same time, parliament has been candid in its determination to rid the bench of dissenting justices. In November 2022, the national legislature dismissed Justice Aswanto in a closed session with Commission III, with members accusing the judge of disloyalty for his independent opinions on government policy, in particular his position on the government’s labour law (Law 11/2020 on Job Creation). In the uproar that followed, the PDIP chair of Commission III, Bambang Pacul, argued that Aswanto had breached his role as ‘a representative from the parliament’ (VOI 2022). In support of parliament, the president affirmed Justice Guntur Hamzah to replace Aswanto by presidential decree. Once in place, Guntur changed the wording of a court ruling challenging the dismissal of his predecessor Aswanto, without informing the other justices (Janti 2023a). In September 2023, parliament further shifted the politics of the Constitutional Court’s bench by appointing Arsul Sani from the PPP, the only sitting lawmaker from the choice of candidates (Janti 2023b).

The composition of the court’s bench—where reform-orientated justices are increasingly trapped between PDIP and presidential factions—means that a range of political elites view it as a potentially viable site to advance their interests. The court has accordingly presided over a range of decisions that strengthen the political status quo. This included a petition by Gerindra Party ally Garuda Party to revoke Article 170 (1) of Law 7/2017 on Elections that required ministers to resign in order to become official nominees. The ruling was seen as benefitting Prabowo, who will maintain his position as the defence minister while running for president. The court also found in favour of a Jakarta politician that state facilities could be used in campaigning, opening up a range of new resources to the current administration. In February 2023, the court dismissed a petition to annul articles in the new criminal code that criminalise insulting the government, the Regional Representative Council (DPD), the Supreme Court and the president, despite the Constitutional Court previously finding these articles constrained freedom of speech (VOI 2022). In a surprise decision in May 2023, the court found in favour of a KPK commissioner and approved the extension of KPK leadership term limits ostensibly to ‘protect the independence’ of the KPK. This has effectively paved the way for KPK chair Firli, whose term was to finish in late 2023, to maintain his campaign of criminalisation throughout the 2024 campaign period.

While these decisions clearly strengthen the political status quo for 2024, more contentious decisions expose the splits between Jokowi’s ruling coalition. In midOctober 2023, the court ruled that candidates under the age of 40 could nominate for presidential roles if they had previously been elected to regional office, a decision widely derided as pandering to the president’s intent to see his eldest son Gibran paired as vice-presidential candidate with Prabowo. The court presided over the cases of 10 plaintiffs who wanted to remove or amend the minimum age for nomination. The only petition to succeed saw Chief Justice Anwar suddenly assume the position of chair, going back on his previous pledge to recuse himself. The four dissenting justices on the ruling were furious, condemning the ‘unacceptable’ and ‘extraordinarily bizarre’ circumstance in which the ‘court changed its stance in a flash’ (Rayda 2023). The public nature of their protest highlights the factionalised character of the Constitutional Court bench.⁶

Two other Constitutional Court decisions sustain this argument. In 2022, the court ruled against an appeal to postpone the 2024 election and extend the presidential term. Another ‘test of democracy’ came in July 2023 when the court ruled against a PDIP challenge to restore closed voting lists that limit voter choice to the party rather than the candidate (Jakarta Post 2023a). This decision reaffirms the court’s previous 2008 open-list ruling, which stressed that voters deserved a greater exercise of choice. Both the closed-list and election delay petitions were widely rejected by most political parties. Indeed, the open-list system was defended by eight of the nine party factions in parliament as an expression of ‘progress [in] Indonesian democracy’ (Lai 2023).

Sustained political interference over Jokowi’s second term means that the court is no longer a space of judicial activism in the spirit of reformasi. However, this does not mean that the court will always act as a rubber stamp for particular elite interests. Instead, its pattern of rulings suggests that the court is better understood as a legal forum in which political elites contest each other. The court’s decisions that affirm democratic competition in turn highlight continued elite affirmation for elections as a means of contestation.

Political Recentralisation

While national democratic elections are secured for now, the ruling coalition has increasingly coalesced around an anti-regional autonomy position that questions the validity of regional elections and has sought to further shift the balance of power to the political centre. Law 22/1999 on Regional Government was a major win for the reformasi movement, transferring fundamental government responsibilities (and most importantly funding) to local administrations. Subsequently, in 2005, direct elections for district and provincial heads were introduced. Within the context of the reformasi movement, regional autonomy (otda) was an avowedly political undertaking intended to reverse the pattern of centralised extraction that characterised New Order authoritarianism. As Ahmad and Mansoor (2002, 3) argued, ‘the demand for decentralisation is associated more with control over resources and political and legal autonomy than with a perceived need to improve local service delivery’. This is not to suggest that service delivery is of no consequence. While regional governments have improved access to services, the quality of those services is mixed or declining (Lewis 2023). But the central government has seized and expanded upon neoliberal discourses of good governance to justify a rebalancing of centre-periphery relations that works in the material and political interests of Jakarta. Anti-regional autonomy discourses portray elected regional governments as corrupt and inefficient, and present their democratic mandate merely as a delegation of ‘administrative’ functions from Jakarta. Despite continued public support for regional elections and high turn-out rates, these arguments have evolved from a fringe idea first circulated by the Prabowo opposition to a discursive glue that consolidates key players within the ruling coalition.

An important advocate for recentralisation is the home affairs minister, Tito Karnavian, who also served as Jokowi’s national police chief in the president’s first term. Tito came to office in 2019, promoting a system of ‘asymmetrical democracy’ where the right to hold local elections would be tied to a government index of democratic maturity. Where provinces did not make the grade, regional heads would return to being appointed by regional parliament. The PDIP chair, Hasto Kristiyanto, and the Golkar head of Commission II, Ahmad Doli Kurnia, both declared their support for the ministry’s intention to re-evaluate local elections, expressing concerns about the efficiency of local elections. While the proposal for ‘asymmetrical democracy’ ultimately failed, Tito has routinely frowned on regional elections, unironically emphasising the dynastic characteristics of their political candidates and the proliferation of vote-buying as evidence that these mechanisms are being abused.

As the home affairs minister, Tito has also appointed caretaker administrations, as per the 2016 regional election law, for hundreds of regions awaiting the simultaneous regional elections scheduled for late 2024. The scale of the program is massive. By the end of 2023, 24 provinces, 56 cities and 191 districts will be governed by an interim leader appointed by the Ministry of Home Affairs (Ramadhan and Rastika 2023). Regional caretaker administrations have frequently been utilised in the context of creating new districts (pemekaran), but usually with 12-month time limits, performance reviews and clear stipulations to maintain existing staffing. By contrast, the regional caretaker administrations established by the Jokowi government will have terms of up to 34 months and have been endowed with a broad range of powers including the power to hire and fire at will and govern according to central government priorities (Wilson 2023). As Wilson (2023, 4) argues, ‘There is a clear expectation that interim leaders will use their time in office to actively govern and make significant changes in line with national government priorities “unburdened by political interest”, rather than operate in a caretaker mode or continue the policies of their predecessors’.

Another critical problem with the appointments has been the ministry’s unwillingness to adhere to a clear set of guidelines around who can be an interim leader. After sustained backlash, the Ministry of Home Affairs outlined a process in April 2023 whereby regional parliament would put forward three names for consideration by the minister and approval by the president. But many of this cohort are centrally selected with little regard for regional preferences (Wilson 2023). A significant number of the appointees are officials from the Ministry of Home Affairs itself or active intelligence, police and military officers who are under no obligation to resign from their positions (Aqil 2022). The core concern is that regional appointees will use their office to promote either their own or other political interests in the lead-up to the 2024 elections.

Rodan (2018) argues that regimes produce institutional innovations when existing institutions and mechanisms no longer produce outcomes that ruling coalitions can manage, accommodate or shape in their interests. One innovation has been the use of ‘omnibus’ laws, a strategy for legislative reform that allows the government to pass umbrella legislation overruling previous articles and stipulations. There are notable advantages to omnibus law making, including efficiency, the ability to prioritise policy decisions across a range of sectors and give legal certainty. Parliament also escapes the heavy load of regulatory ‘harmonisation’ as it falls to the relevant body or ministerial agency to edit conflicting regulations. Omnibus laws have also recently been proposed in the form of a 2022 omnibus education bill and passed in the form of the 2023 omnibus health law, which, aside from liberalising the health sector, has scrapped mandatory health spending for regional government in order to further centralise control for health. Deliberation times have also narrowed dramatically, shutting out contending voices in regional government, professional associations and civil society. The government’s strategy appears to be to use its majority to hurriedly pass poor or weakly debated legislation and allow a progovernment Constitutional Court to perform the regulatory fine-tuning. Aside from the problems outlined in the previous section, this has arguably turned the court from a space of judicial review into a chamber for the judicial validation of government legislation, precisely Commission III’s justification for the ousting of Justice Aswanto.

As noted above, the Jokowi government first turned to the omnibus legislative strategy with the controversial 2020 job creation law, after the president’s first-term suite of ‘big-bang’ deregulation policies failed to meet foreign investment goals. Overriding 77 existing pieces of national legislation, the job creation law strengthened the central government’s authority to issue and process business permits in a range of sectors, including mining, energy and manufacturing.⁷ As Negara and Hutchison (2021, 291) observe, ‘This centralization of licensing authority under the Omnibus Law is contrary to the principle of decentralization. Granting business permits without involving local government may cause problems such as social conflicts’. The final years of the Jokowi administration have seen those conflicts laid bare. Saputra (2023) highlights how post-omnibus mining permits for coal issued by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources have strained local public infrastructure. Tens of thousands of coal-bearing trucks ply the public roads creating perilous 28-hour traffic jams on the roads of Jambi Province and significantly damaging road infrastructure. Previously, local regulation was relatively effective but now ‘coal oligarchs know that local leaders are toothless’ (Saputra 2023). While the central government benefits from extraction, it has eschewed calls to pay for the infrastructure to support it. This leaves ordinary people lobbying local government to deal with a problem it did not create and lacks the funds to fix. The job creation law thus repeats New Order patterns of centralised extraction in the material interests of the ruling coalition and leaves regional government unable to respond to local grievances.

A final element of the recentralisation of centre-periphery relations has been the restructuring of fiscal relations. In his analysis of Law 01/2022 on Fiscal Decentralisation, Lewis (2023, 1) found that the law uses public finance instruments to ‘facilitate more central government control over regions’. The law seeks to reduce the discretionary spending by regional governments of general grants and to tie all types of revenue to the spending preferred by the central government, by mandating 60% of district spending to certain functions.⁸ This message of fiscal discipline appears reversed in the parliament’s hasty revisions to the 2014 village law, which proposes effectively doubling village budgets to Rp 2 billion annually (Suhenda 2023). This increase is funded directly by a cut to the regional transfer fund.

In addition, the draft law politically ‘indulges’ Indonesia’s 70,000-odd village heads (Purba 2023) by providing an extension to their tenure from six to nine years. This extension is justified through the recycling of Tito’s persistent refrain that village elections incite conflict. Regional Autonomy Watch (KPPOD) described the village law revision as driven by the political imperatives of 2024, in which a ‘mutual symbiosis’ has emerged between the national elites, village heads and village administration’ (Nugraheny and Meiliana 2023). While the bill panders to the personal interest of village heads, the Jokowi administration has treated village governance as an extension of national and district priorities and village administrators as the lowest level of state bureaucracy (Syukri 2022).

Failure to Launch: The Collapse of National Protest Movements

Why have these efforts to narrow political contestation been so potent in their effects? Where are the sources of dissent and opposition that Mietzner (2021) argues were once so characteristic of Indonesia’s democracy? Setiawan (2022) argues that Indonesia’s democracy still shows signs of ‘democratic resilience’ evidenced by the ability of women’s organisations to agitate effectively for a long-delayed law on the eradication of sexual violence (Law 12/2022 on Criminal Acts of Sexual Violence). But the early years of Jokowi’s second term have also seen a string of attempts by civil society, particularly Indonesia’s student movement, to reignite the kinds of street-based protest movements that characterised reformasi and to reassert people power. Student mobilisations started in September 2019 against the amendments to the KPK law, and as per the 1998 reformasi movement, coalesced around a sophisticated set of demands. These included ending militarism in Papua, halting forest destruction in Kalimantan and Sumatra, cancelling corrupt appointments in the KPK, restoring integrity to the war on corruption, banning appointments for the Indonesian Armed Forces and Polri to civilian posts and annulling or retracting laws such as the omnibus job creation law, the new criminal code and laws on land, mining and natural resources as well as informal work. Together this agenda for change formed the basis of the new movement #ReformasiDikorupsi (Reform Corrupted) (Mayangsari 2021).

The subsequent protests were some of the largest the country had seen in decades, with up to 50,000 students taking part in demonstrations that erupted across 40 cities in 18 provinces. But these protests failed to have a major impact on government priorities or behaviour. Why? Some have argued that conflict over tactics and goals, splits among student groups, and elite engagement weakened the movements (Jakarta Post 2020). 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 killed. The anti-omnibus protests the following year saw nearly 7,000 student protesters arrested (Mayangsari 2021). Counter-insurgency operations by state security agencies 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 leaders threatened to expel students who took part in anti-government protests (Mayangsari 2021).

Student protests are often seen as a bellwether for public opinion because they represent Indonesia’s moral voice. During reformasi, this moral credibility helped mobilise other social forces, including labour, peasant and environmental movements, to join the protests. Many of these groups turned out during the #ReformasiDikorupsi protests; however, the overall coalition was feeble. This is partly a longue durée effect of the repression and criminalisation of grassroots activists and critics in Indonesia’s villages and regional towns, processes that have cut the regeneration of social movements at their roots (Wardana 2023). Village- and regional-level land disputes have also struggled for attention from Indonesia’s urban middle class. But oppositional movements have been further handicapped by the Jokowi administration’s co-optation of prominent activists and professionals capable of mobilising public opinion. As the disdain of the #ReformasiDikorupsi campaigners made clear, many former 1998 activists had abandoned the movement for well-positioned careers in the Jokowi administration (Mayangsari 2021). This includes the renowned anti-corruption activist and minister for cooperatives and small and medium-sized enterprises, Teten Masduki, who worked to maintain civil society’s faith in the president, even as students violently protested the government’s 2019 legislative kneecapping of the KPK. Another example is former journalist Budi Arie Setiadi, who has spearheaded Jokowi’s volunteer network, Projo, since 2014. In late 2022, Jokowi urged the Projo network to come out in support of a Prabowo presidency. In doing so, Projo has been an important means by which the president has dangled his endorsement, amplifying his influence over the 2024 presidential nomination process. Whether unintentionally or otherwise, activists embedded in the Jokowi administration have been an important presidential mouthpiece to Indonesia’s progressive social forces, transmitting Jokowi’s political goals into a milieu that might otherwise oppose him.

This has occurred in a wider context in which civil society elites have utilised the economic opportunities presented by democratisation to absorb funding from Western donors and respond to their fluctuating priorities (Norén-Nilsson, Savirani and Uhlin 2023). This has meant that Indonesia’s most commanding advocates for social change have relinquished the power of representation, mobilisation and dissent for an ‘engaged’ relationship with the government to produce ‘policy impact’.

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 Polri tactical officers (Brimob) shot tear gas into an overcrowded stadium of families and supporters, generating international media scrutiny and the secondmost deadly 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 (Graham 2022). 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’.⁹

Jokowi’s inner circle quickly recognised that, 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 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, once imagined as Indonesia’s police oversight body, leapt to the force’s defence, contesting every detail of the event. 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 protesters’ optimism was that the Kanjuruhan tragedy had occurred in a dangerous moment of unprecedented public scandal for the Indonesian police. August 2022 had seen Ferdy Sambo, then a two-star general heading up Polri’s Internal Affairs Division (Propam), arrested for ordering his aide Richard Eliezer Pudihang Lumiu to execute fellow aide Nofriansyah Yosua Hutabarat, 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 (Baker 2022).

A number of Indonesia’s human rights organisations such as Amnesty International responded to the Kanjuruhan tragedy and the Sambo case by reasserting demands for root and branch police reform. But activists and NGOs working on police reform found it challenging to speak out. Concurrently, digital media reporters observed how, as the Sambo trial ramped up, traffic on the Kanjuruhan articles shrank. Journalists’ attempts to reignite public interest in the disaster, simply 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 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

Why has the field of democratic contestation contracted so noticeably under the Jokowi presidency? The first and most immediate answer to this question is that the ruling coalition has greatly consolidated over Jokowi’s second term. I contend that this consolidation occurred in two parts. The first part came six months after the bitterly contested 2019 election, with the incorporation of Prabowo and elements of his opposition coalition into the Onward Indonesia Cabinet, leaving PKS and PD as Indonesia’s weakened opposition. The second was the government’s aggressive moves to dismantle populist-Islamist networks. In doing so, not only did the administration enervate the mobilisation structures of the opposition, but that purge also intentionally subdued, isolated and disorganised the main sources of government critique. As previously outlined, this campaign also weakened powerful galvanising figures within the KPK and Indonesia’s anti-corruption movement and had chilling effects on many critical elements within the country’s professional classes, including scientists, academics, bureaucrats, educators and legal professionals.

There are no credible grounds to assume that the current ruling coalition under Jokowi has a deep normative commitment to the tenets of Indonesia’s democracy. While Jokowi’s political career can be credited to the reformasi victory of decentralised democracy, he attained his financial success under the late New Order, at a time in which the bourgeoisie was well accustomed to making political and material alliances with predatory oligarchs and political elites (Baker 2016). As Aspinall (2020) has observed, many constituent elements of his coalition have been forged equally through Indonesia’s democratic and authoritarian political orders, explaining the similarity of their repressive tactics to those of the New Order. Just as significantly, the consolidation of this coalition has accommodated multiple and conflicting social forces, driving intra-elite tensions. Consider, for instance, the inherent contradictions between Jokowi’s brand of developmentalist neoliberalism and the hyper-nationalism of elements of the Gerindra and PDIP political base. Or consider the material and ideological contradictions between Jokowi’s specific brand of neoliberalism and the state-supported oligarchs that have financed his political career, such as Kalimantan palm oil baron Haji Isam (Susanti 2021). Competition for the distribution of political and material power within the ruling coalition is driving these dynamics of narrowing democratic contestation.

But we are nonetheless left with the question: why now as opposed to any other time in Indonesia’s post-1998 democracy? Why did the current coalition consolidate in this way? I propose that the narrowing of political contestation is the ruling coalition’s response to a core political problem inherent to Indonesia’s middle-income status. That problem is the challenge of a numerically dominant but economically insecure socio-economic group whose aspirations for continued social mobility are unlikely to be met within their generation. Comprising 44% of the Indonesian population, these ‘precariously non-poor’ are arguably Indonesia’s largest voting cohort, yet their ‘vast and disparate’ (Yasih and Hadiz 2023, 90) scope means they are unable to see and articulate 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, and access to health and higher-quality education, signature policies of his administration.

But these upgrading reforms require an institutional sophistication and a temporal horizon that are far more complex than the transition from low- to middle-income status. More importantly, argue Doner and Schneider (2016, 618–9), the ‘trap’ of middle-income status is the necessity for ‘extraordinary collective action and coalition building’ across deep social cleavages and inequalities for ‘benefits that will only emerge in the medium or long term’. In Indonesia, there are immense challenges to establishing the political pacts required for forging such reforms. The Indonesian state has been moulded to protect oligarchic interests (Hadiz and Robison 2004) and the challenge of shifting these interests in service of ‘better government services’, as the World Bank (2019) puts it, is immense. For instance, in an important paper, Rosser, King and Widoyoko (2022) examine the prospect of quality reforms in Indonesia’s education department, a sector critical to the socio-economic mobility of the precariously non-poor. They conclude that despite urgent shifts in policy to upgrade education quality, the inability of the political elites to challenge vested interests means that contestation ‘has been settled in favour of predatory elites’ (Rosser, King and Widoyoko 2022, ii).

Such is the fragmentation of the ‘aspiring middle class’ that poor government services and the lagging pace of reform become a problem for rule only when parts of the ‘dangerous class’ (World Bank 2019) become politically mobilised. This occurred during Prabowo’s 2014 and 2019 presidential campaigns as Jokowi’s challenger spoke darkly of corrupt elites stealing away the economic opportunities of the Indonesian people. This is not to suggest that Prabowo’s ultra-nationalist populism offered elements of the precariously non-poor a genuine vehicle for them to pursue their interests, but that he effectively ‘politicised’ their inequality within a framework of ultra-nationalist populism (Warburton and Muhtadi 2019). Equally, the dangers of inequality were not lost on Jokowi or his political coalition. In an interview during his first six months in office, Jokowi admitted that the country’s Gini coefficient of 0.4—representing the fastest-growing inequality in Southeast Asia—was for him ‘dangerous’ (Chatterjee, Ho and Brummit 2015). This was not a one-off statement. The political mobiliser of inequality was a persistent source of anxiety for members of the governing coalition throughout the president’s first term, with then PAN legislative assembly speaker Zulkifli Hasan announcing in his 2017 New Year address that ‘It’s not the far right or far left that are dangerous here, our main enemy is inequality’ (Lu 2017).

The president’s second term saw a reorientation of the administration’s political strategy. While the president tried to deal with inequality by promoting various social welfare measures and pursuing economic growth, he also tackled the political problem that sought to mobilise it. As such, critical to the maintenance of Jokowi’s rule was the 2019 co-optation of opposition figure Prabowo into Jokowi’s government and a concerted legal and social purge of so-called ‘Islamist’ forces, dismantling the mobilisational structures of the opposition. These strategies have left Indonesia without a coherent opposition, consolidating the ruling coalition and giving it rein to reverse and challenge the key victories of reformasi. Thus, what has broadly been understood in the literature as ‘democratic decline’ can best be interpreted as a set of political dynamics set in motion by the underlying necessity to politically manage the aspirations of the precariously non-poor and keep them harnessed to the government’s model of national development. In the political economy of Indonesia’s middle-income status, narrowing the field of political contestation has been seen by Jokowi’s ruling coalition as fundamental to preserving its rule.

Conclusion

In the wake of the 2019 elections, Aspinall and Mietzner (2019, 298) observed that many of the political strategies of coercion, accommodation and co-option deployed by the ruling coalition to help the president ‘win big’ had limited success. ‘Instead of the 60% Jokowi had aimed for, the president attained 55.5% of the vote—only about 2% more than in 2014, when he gained 53.2% without the help of the bureaucracy, security forces or the media’. I have argued that despite the president’s twilight in office, 2023 has seen the acceleration and proliferation of these tactics to shore up the electoral advantage for key political actors, some of which now include Jokowi’s sons.

While the exact impact of these strategies on the outcomes of 2024 remains to be seen, paradoxically, their long-term effects are easier to grasp. This article has examined the narrowing field of political contestation in five arenas: (1) the certainty of democratic elections and a two-term limit on the executive, (2) the political criminalisation of regime opponents and allies to reshape party coalition formation towards a presidential nomination, (3) the end of the war on corruption and judicial activism, (4) political recentralisation and (5) the collapse of national protest movements. Examined in totality, these dynamics roll back the core regulatory and political wins of Indonesia’s reformasi movement: regular elections, anti-corruption, rule of law, regional autonomy and human rights. This conclusion suggests that the social and political forces in serious contest over political power in Indonesia have definitively broken from the reformasi movement. Instead, the dominant sources of political contestation are markedly intra-elite. For now, that elite still largely holds to competitive national elections as the dominant means to contest power, but as the elite’s souring towards regional democratic elections shows, the institution of democratic voting cannot be taken for granted.

In the final section of the article, I proposed that the narrowing field of political contestation was the regime’s response to an emergent demographic problem inherent in Indonesia’s middle-income status: the growth of a massive aspiring middle class. With the demobilisation of the political opposition, this socio-economic group has been harnessed to the project of new developmentalism with little hope of experiencing its benefits. Whatever regime takes power in the future, managing the aspirations of Indonesia’s new precarious non-poor will be a fundamental project of rule for many years to come.

Notes

1 The author thanks Indonesia Update convenors Professor Edward Aspinall and Associate Professor Amalinda Savirani as well as Dr Liam Gammon, Eve Warburton, Marcus Mietzner, Ross McLeod, Blane Lewis, Garry Rodan, Sana Jaffrey, Burhanuddin Muhtadi, Nava Nuryaniyah, Ian Wilson, Rebecca Meckelburg, Lian Sinclair, Ian Baker, Piero Moraro and Michael Buehler for their support, comments and feedback on this paper.

2 The elections are for the People’s Representative Council (DPR), the Regional Representative Council (DPD) and Local People’s Representative Council (DPRD).

3 The KPU argued for a 120-day campaign period as the agency’s shortest possible preparation time for the national elections.

4 Postponement would require a two-thirds quorum of the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR), which comprises the DPR and DPD.

5 Parties seeking to contest the election should have functioning offices in each of Indonesia’s 514 districts. PRIMA, which has Golkar connections, fell short in 22 of 34 provinces.

6 The actions of Justice Anwar in chairing the case have been reported to a newly formed ethics committee to examine violations and conflicts of interest. In turn, the dissenters of the ruling have also been reported to the ethics committee for their legal opinions.

7 Law 1/2022, addressed in the following section, further restricts local government authority over these sectors. I thank Blane Lewis for this point.

8 I thank Blane Lewis for clarifying this point.

9 I thank Aisyah Llewellyn for sharing this insight.