Two Decades of Reformasi in Indonesia: Its Illiberal Turn

ABSTRACT

There has been an accentuation of Indonesian democracy’s illiberal characteristics during the course of reformasi. The religious and nativist mobilisation that surrounded the controversial 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial elections was only one manifestation of the sort of pressures leading to such accentuation. This article surveys the impacts of a stronger recent turn towards illiberalism across diverse areas of policy making in Indonesia, including decentralisation, civil–military relations, economic and foreign policy, as well as in the approaches to recognising past abuses of human rights. We find clear variation in its impacts, produced by differing constellations of old and new forces and what is at stake politically and economically in each arena of competition, as well as the salience of coherently expressed public pressure for reform. In particular, where the state and market have failed to address social injustices, more illiberal models have emerged, some under the guise of populist discourses that nonetheless continue to serve predatory elite interests and shift attention away from the inequalities in society. Such developments could be observed all the way to the 2019 presidential contest.

KEYWORDS:

• Indonesia
• democratisation
• illiberalism
• political reform
• policy

In the two decades since the fall of the authoritarian President Suharto in May 1998, we have seen transformations in Indonesia’s political system, through four constitutional amendments, the creation of new institutions of democratic governance and oversight and “big bang” decentralisation reforms. These reforms opened politics to new actors and amplified public pressure on the workings of the state but could not entirely supplant the politico-business elite entrenched during Suharto’s rule (Robison and Hadiz 2004, 12). Indeed, as has been frequently observed, holdovers from the authoritarian regime led and designed Indonesia’s democratic reforms, albeit from a position of having to accommodate rising new demands (Malley 2009, 137; Crouch 2010, 7–8). Consequently, although democracy has become “the only game in town,” the reorganisation of these old forces has precluded Indonesian democracy from fully embracing liberal democratic norms. If anything, pressures for a particularist form of democracy – illiberal in many of its characteristics – have strengthened rather than receded over time.

Illiberalism and Indonesian Democracy

It should be acknowledged that many analysts would reject the applicability for the Indonesian case of the idea of “illiberalism” and of illiberal forms of democracy, where the basic freedoms and rights of citizenries are said to be regularly infringed upon by elected governments (Zakaria 1997). Though now closely associated with Zakaria’s piece, the idea of illiberalism has a much longer history. It featured prominently and was rigorously debated in the literature about the “failure” of liberalism in Germany that eventually led to the rise of Nazism. In the 1960s and 1970s, historian Fritz Stern emphasised culturally ingrained tendencies towards hierarchical, authoritarian and nationalistic values. Other scholars explained illiberalism in terms of the economic and social forces that emerged out of the social dislocations specific to Germany’s nineteenth-century industrial transformation, wherein bourgeois constitutionalist streams were too weak to overtake interests enmeshed within a patriarchal state (see Jarausch 1983, 269–271). Before Zakaria’s intervention, even in the case of the industrialising Asia Pacific in the late twentieth century, Bell et al. (1995) had pointed to illiberal democratisation processes where liberal norms were subordinated to such values as familism and harmony. Within that work, Jayasuriya (1995, 108) argued that East Asian democratisation would reflect continual re-negotiation between state elites and capital that excluded broader social interests because of the structure of the political economies involved. Today, academic and popular articles have lamented the growth of illiberal tendencies within democracies as varied as India, Germany and the USA (Guruswamy 2017).

Despite a context much different to industrialising Germany or East Asia, the idea of illiberalism within Indonesian democracy is increasingly relevant given developments to be discussed in this article and in the Special Issue. These show that liberal political transformation remains hindered in many contested arenas, given the prevailing constellations of social forces that limit broader freedoms and rights. They also show that although the forces that challenge established predatory patronage systems have made advances, these have been constrained by still-powerful competing ones. Moreover, as Bourchier’s (2019) contribution to this special issue demonstrates, both the resilience and malleability of illiberal political ideas in Indonesian democratic politics and how they can borrow from existing conservative nationalistic and religious traditions helps legitimise illiberal political practices (see also Bourchier 2015, 2–5).

But the 2004 introduction of direct elections for national and sub-national executives has seen elections produce new actors and leaders and provided space for the organised assertion of non-elite interests, especially in local contests (Zhang and McRae 2015, 15–17). Moreover, Indonesian democracy has seen increased spending on healthcare and education (Aspinall 2014). Unlike the Philippines, Indonesia avoided in 2014 – albeit narrowly – the election of a populist strongman like Rodrigo Duterte (Curato 2017), as it did again five years later. More importantly, Indonesia has escaped the authoritarian turn of Thailand (Veerayooth and Hewison 2016) and reforms to civil–military relations have proven unusually resilient (Mietzner 2011). In fact, Indonesia has become a model for a successful case of transformation from authoritarianism to democracy, although scholars warn against the uncritical application of this model of transition (Mietzner 2012; Pepinsky 2014).

Nevertheless, events over the last decade, particularly from the run-up to the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election, have suggested that Indonesian democracy has taken a more pronounced illiberal turn. In that election, a politically salient and exclusivist brand of Islam was evident with the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands-strong crowds to assert that only a Muslim could be governor. Amidst this mobilisation, mainstream candidates abandoned their pluralist positions to stand with violent and intolerant groups such as the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI). Such groups had previously been confined to the political fringes. Lest such developments be dismissed as an ugly but nevertheless ephemeral aspect of a hard-fought campaign, the winning candidate Anies Baswedan – formerly regarded as a liberal Muslim intellectual – referenced racist and exclusivist religious themes in his inauguration speech. Indonesia was not “allergic to religion,” Baswedan said, while also proclaiming that the time had come for “native” (pribumi, non-Chinese ethnic) Indonesians to be masters of their own house (Tribunnews, October 17, 2017).

Such views did not go uncontested. Alarmingly, however, even civil society opponents of this sort of exclusivist religious mobilisation themselves turned to illiberal tools and proved far less organised than those mobilising bodies to “defend Islam.” Unnerved by the show of strength of conservative Islamic forces, some of the more progressive civil society elements supported the national government’s move to disband the controversial Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, one of the main vehicles behind the protests, and emergency legislation giving the government increased powers to dissolve such organisational vehicles. The government also established a new agency to promote the Pancasila state ideology, which had been the subject of compulsory civics classes under Suharto’s New Order authoritarianism. Outside government, those campaigning against exclusivist Islamic politics have themselves deployed slogans of support for Pancasila and the inviolability of the unitary state, each of which had previously stood as the core symbols of conservative statist-nationalism (Hadiz 2017, 274–275).

The Jakarta gubernatorial election is a convenient bellwether for the trajectory of democratic governance, as each of the candidates were proxies for the main coalitions of political forces that were intending to contest the 2019 elections. These events and the broader illiberal turn they embody provide the departure point for this special issue, which surveys two decades of post-authoritarian political, economic, foreign policy, security and justice reforms. Each of the contributors to this volume engage in detailed analysis of the extent of an illiberal turn in each of their respective arenas of focus, its drivers and countervailing forces. Together, these articles provide a nuanced assessment of the state of Indonesian democracy two decades after the fall of Suharto’s authoritarian regime.

A key argument of this article and the special issue is that the turn towards greater illiberalism in Indonesian politics represents a new phase in struggles that have produced different outcomes in different arenas. These outcomes have depended on the balance of interests that are engaged in competition and whether – in Indonesia’s decentralised polity – national and sub-national interests are aligned or diverge in favour of a particular outcome. The extent to which new and reformist actors have been able to enter and establish themselves within these struggles has also been important. In part, current variations of outcomes of struggles reflect achievements in the early years of democratisation. Where new rights and reforms were enshrined in the constitution or in legislation and were institutionalised or became the norm, they have proven resilient, even when allowing for the perennial problem of enforcing laws. The implication is that deepening illiberalism, seen in the second decade of reformasi, reflects the limited ascendancy gained by reformist or rights-based impulse in many arenas of contestation during the first decade, in spite of such major achievements as electoral reform and decentralisation. This argument is explored here with regard to the politics of policy-making and the relationship between the state and social interests.

The Politics of Policy Making

Decentralisation and Civil Service Reforms

Among the most contested arenas has been decentralisation policy. Alongside the expanded political freedoms and civil liberties after the fall of Suharto in 1998, the decentralisation reforms implemented from 2001 saw significant fiscal and political authority transferred to the district and municipal levels. As has been widely discussed, most often in terms of the intensified competition and patronage politics at the sub-national level, these changes have had profound effects on Indonesia’s wider political economy (Hadiz 2010, 143–145). In some cases they have produced volatile configurations of heterogeneous national and sub-national socio-legal regimes (McCarthy 2004).

First, as Diprose and Azca (2019) in this special issue highlight, democratisation and decentralisation intensified competition for office between sub-national elites, which along with local grievances, contributed to the large-scale communal conflicts of the early post-authoritarian period in places such as Poso and Maluku. Second, decentralisation also triggered the push for splitting provinces, districts and sub-districts into smaller units (pemekaran) more aligned with concentrations of resources, ethno-religious groups and local geography. This increased the number of sub-national leadership positions in the executive and legislature, created thousands of new civil service positions and initially reduced the intra-elite competitive pressures in the conflict regions, although tensions were compounded by the large-scale escalation of conflict and the arrival of large numbers of jihadi fighters in regions such as Poso and Maluku (see Diprose and Azca 2019).

Eight new provinces were formed post-1999 to reach 34, with the latest, North Kalimantan, added in 2012. Districts and municipalities proliferated from 292 in 1999 to 514 as of January 2018 (MOHA 2018). The burgeoning growth of the civil service put significant pressure on the national budget to support wages and the establishment of local offices. It also introduced a high degree of uneven functional capacity to implement new authorities and deliver services, which was pronounced in the newly formed districts and which has resulted in uneven advancements in welfare across the archipelago. By 2010, the National Institute of Public Administration identified that 47% of bureaucrats still lacked “professional skills” (LAN 2010). No doubt, with the introduction on the Village Law in 2014, and the disbursement of funds of up to one billion rupiah per village (approximately US$75,000) directly into village accounts for development, this challenge of developing “professional skills” has now been extended to even smaller units of governance.

Further, the burgeoning state infrastructure intensified attention on the structural issues of endemic corruption and patronage within the bureaucracy, but also the difficulties of mitigating this practice and the impediments to implementing policy and service delivery (McLeod 2008). While the Civil Service Law was revised in 1999 (No.43/1999) and recommended the creation of an oversight body – the Civil Service Commission – its creation was delayed. Even though President Yudhoyono promised bureaucratic reform in his first term, the Ministry of State Apparatus and Bureaucratic Reform was not established until his second term. It took three more years of highly contested deliberation to pass further revisions to the Civil Service Law (No.5/2014), and the Civil Service Commission did not even make it into the ratified draft. This indicates that without the entrenchment of early democratisation reforms, once power structures have been reorganised it is more difficult to tackle endemic problems, especially in areas where vested interests (in this case, located in the apparatus of the state itself) have much to lose.

Third, decentralisation together with the electoral reforms created new arenas to exercise power, control and even predatory practices. The decentralisation of “money politics,” patronage politics and the creation of “little kings” (raja-raja kecil) in the regions was a concern for observers from the onset (see, for example, Benda-Beckmann and Benda-Beckman 2013; Potter and Baddock 2001), as was the implementation of direct elections for regional leaders commencing in 2004 (Choi 2007). This concern has grown stronger as clientelist practices have consolidated at all levels in electoral politics as the established practice of gaining office, together with the pervasiveness of money politics (Aspinall and Sukmajati 2016). Such clientelism elevates the importance of local mass organisations that play the dual function of supporting the state in providing ad hoc social services, but also serving as a base for mobilisation during elections, including at the local level. In Lampung and in East Java, for example, large martial arts (silat) youth sports groups also offer social services for the poor through their extended social networks, provide manpower for security services for businesses and provide a base for electoral mobilisation for connected political elites. In effect, while decentralisation reforms have on the whole been maintained, liberal democratic norms and practices do not necessarily pervade sub-national politics.

Yet decentralisation has provided increased scope for, and scale of, political actors in the legislature, bureaucracy and in civil society to influence authority and policy decisions to benefit sub-national regions. Working groups, task forces, committees and public–private partnerships have proliferated in the formal structures of policy making in districts and provinces, while new and old informal networks of influence abound as the instruments of politics and of sub-national policy delivery. Policy innovation has been made more possible – particularly in providing social services such as child protection and in health, education and local economic development, albeit unevenly, at the sub-national level. While Zhang and McRae (2015, 8–10) have found that some of the resulting local policy initiatives do not persist even when they have received awards as innovations, the more complex system of policy development contrasts with the unresponsive, hierarchical and centralised structures of past governance.

Fourth, in sectors of the economy where oligarchic interests have long been entrenched, such as the resource sector, the degree to which sub-national interests have been able to challenge them has varied. In Riau, for example, oil extraction has long generated revenues for the central government while also being a source of wealth for Jakarta oligarchs that dominate the sector. These were challenged by the Free Riau Movement, but once revenue sharing agreements saw more revenue flowing to sub-national coffers – therefore helping to sustain burgeoning local patronage networks – the movement promptly dissipated (Saleh 2010, 179–182). The result is that there have been few disruptions to the status quo in well-established resource sectors.

Elsewhere, local elites have pushed for a greater share of revenues from resource wealth than decentralisation legislation provides. The Bangka and Belitung islands, the site of rich tin deposits, are an example. In 2001, the local district head introduced new regulations that recognised artisanal mining and imposed new local taxes and levies on large-scale mining (Erman 2008). Both measures damaged the interests and revenues of powerful, national-level, New Order-era, politico-business coalitions, especially the PT Timah tin monopoly that was closely aligned with Golkar, the party of the authoritarian New Order regime (Erman 2008). While local elites benefited from increased revenues and illicit payments, these arrangements were popular with the local populace too as they created new livelihood options, rendering them more enduring (Diprose, Kurniawan, and Winanti 2017). They were welcomed as a signal that democracy would mean a more equitable sharing of the wealth between Jakarta and the regions even if local elites, in reality, were to enjoy a disproportionate share of that new wealth.

Finally, decentralisation raised expectations of improvements in welfare in spite of the growth of inequality in Indonesia (see below). Such expectations have emerged because local elections can provide pressures on local leaders to accommodate the interests of diverse social groups through joint tickets that cross-cut group cleavages, thereby notionally facilitating more inclusive development (Brown and Diprose 2009).

Nevertheless, where socio-economic and political inequalities abound, particularly if they occur along sensitive group identity lines, there has been a greater propensity for conflict and even violence (Diprose 2009; Cederman, Weidmann, and Gleditsch 2011; Stewart 2008; Tadjoeddin 2014). Pierskalla and Sacks (2017) rightly identify that where specific groups have been locked out of welfare gains under decentralisation, tensions have risen. Additionally, the problem of weak implementation of rule of law, noticed by Rosser (2013), has dashed some of the hopes for improved welfare under decentralisation. It has compounded the challenge of realising socio-economic rights and social inclusivity by failing to check predatory forms of private accumulation by local elites through their control over public resources and institutions.

Overall, with decentralisation, liberal reform has been more likely in those sectors which compete less directly with entrenched interests, particularly in areas that are resource-rich or have other strategic assets. Even though delivering broad-based social programmes and income-generating opportunities has been an important facet of local politics, past patronage and predation practices have either been sustained or replicated among new actors, particularly in economically lucrative sectors.

Civil–Military Relations

Civil–military relations is another contested arena, where early post-authoritarian reforms were far-reaching but ultimately incomplete (see Laksmana 2019). The military had played a dominant role in Suharto’s authoritarian regime, with its dual-function (dwifungsi) doctrine enabling the placement of active officers into positions of authority in civilian institutions. Indeed, territorial command meant that military personnel were deployed in parallel to the civilian administration throughout Indonesia (Crouch 2010). Additionally, much of the military’s resources were raised off-budget through a network of legal and illegal businesses. Early reforms stripped the military of much of this political role.

By 2004, active officers had been withdrawn from the bureaucracy (with the exception of the defence ministry and other security ministries and agencies), the appointed military bloc in national and sub-national legislatures had been abolished and the government had legislated to take control of military businesses within five years (Crouch 2010, 147–150; Sebastian and Gindarsah 2013, 35). The direct election of the president from 2004 also made the civilian government more robust against challenges from the military, while direct local elections ensured a sharp decline in the number of military officers occupying mayoral and gubernatorial positions (Mietzner 2013, 304). Nevertheless, these reforms did not establish complete civilian control, with Honna (2013, 186) describing a grand bargain under which the military agreed to disengage from politics in return for civilian leaders respecting the military’s institutional autonomy and overlooking its lack of accountability.

These incomplete reforms have left the military as a persistent threat to democracy, albeit one that is unlikely to directly challenge it given the interests that have now become entrenched in the system (Aspinall 2010, 21). One way in which the early failings of military accountability have become a driver of illiberalism in more recent years has been the rehabilitation of authoritarian-era generals with poor human rights records as senior public officials, party bosses and political candidates. Their return has been possible because they were dismissed from their posts but never prosecuted for human rights abuses in the early democratic period.

One prominent example is Wiranto, commander of the armed forces upon Suharto’s resignation, who was dismissed in 2000 by President Abdurrahman Wahid from his post as Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal and Security Affairs after he was identified as being responsible for atrocities committed in East Timor by a commission investigating human rights violations there. He was appointed to the same post as part of the Jokowi government, having previously run unsuccessfully for president in 2004 and vice president in 2009. Another prominent military figure is Prabowo Subianto, dismissed from the military in 1998 in connection with the disappearances of pro-democracy activists, thereafter spending a period in self-imposed exile in Jordan. Aided by the renewed popularity of the military reflected in public opinion polls amidst dissatisfaction with the performance of civilian politicians, Prabowo’s political party Gerindra gained public support quickly. It became the third largest in the legislature, enabling him to emerge as Jokowi’s narrowly defeated rival in the 2014 presidential elections. He took on Jokowi again in the 2019 presidential election but was once again defeated, although Gerindra grew further to become the second largest party. Jokowi’s Defence Minister General Ryamizard Ryacudu – a hard-line nationalist linked to allegations of human rights violations – is another who has enjoyed a rehabilitation after his military career stalled when President Yudhoyono blocked his appointment as military commander in 2004.

In the security sphere, evidence for an illiberal turn in civil–military relations is manifest in the legislature granting state agencies greater repressive powers even as the incidence of violent conflict and terrorism has receded. In one example, a 2012 Social Conflict Law grants sub-national leaders the ability to declare what amount to civil emergencies in their regions, under which they gain extraordinary powers over the local population. In this context, Diprose and Azca (2019) chart the impact of the global discourse on anti-terrorism in maintaining the relevance of Indonesia’s prior conflict regions to institutional competition between security agencies. Joint security operations between the police and military in Central Sulawesi to weed out a small number of former, poorly resourced and organised jihadi combatants espousing their alliance with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), provided the impetus for the military to demonstrate its importance and to push for an increased role in domestic security through revisions to the Anti-Terrorism Law. In this special issue, Diprose and Azca (2019) argue the scale of the operations in Poso also served to strengthen public perceptions of threat and insecurity and reasserted the importance of the role of security actors in domestic affairs. The Law was passed in 2018 outlining a clear role for both the military and police in counter-terrorism operations.

Such moves appear to be as much opportunistic as they are strategic, and therefore, unlikely to be a part of a master plan for the military to seek to return to power. After all, such a plan would – as mentioned – infringe on the interests of the political parties that have dominated politics for two decades and is likely to encounter resistance from those civilians who have benefitted most from money politics-infused and decentralised democracy. Yet the same civilian leaders have frequently provided new opportunities for the military to assert itself politically.

Other developments indicate that some military actors have increased their political role in the Jokowi era. The Commander of the Armed Forces to the end of 2017, Gatot Nurmantyo, extended support to hard-line groups such as FPI in the Jakarta governor’s race, intervening after civilian candidates focussed public attention on divisive ethno-religious exclusionary politics (Hadiz 2017). Gatot and other senior military figures sought to popularise the notion of a “proxy war,” through frequent media statements and speeches in various public forums, including on university campuses. In the absence of a conventional threat to security, the “proxy war” imputes that undefined foreign interests are seeking to re-colonise Indonesia by weakening the fabric of its society without the need for a military invasion. Consistent with this idea that society faces unseen threats, the military has also pushed for large numbers of civilians to undertake State Defence (Bela Negara) training (Reza 2016).

In another illiberal development the military has pushed to re-engage itself in civilian governance. An example is the signing of Memoranda of Understanding with numerous civilian agencies in recent years (IPAC 2015, 11–15; 2016), which provided avenues for military officers to participate in the workings of civilian bureaucracies. Again, this re-engagement stems from incomplete reforms in the early years of democratisation. In this special issue, Laksmana (2019) highlights the promotional logjam within the Indonesian Military (TNI) when explaining the influx of active duty officers into civilian ministries, a factor Honna (2011, 274–278) has previously cited to explain Navy support for formation of a coastguard. Laksmana contends that intra-military, inter-agency and civil–military conflicts have occupied the TNI leadership’s energy as much as the need to maintain the organisation’s political relevance, challenging any efforts to professionalise the armed forces. President Yudhoyono had sought to strengthen civilian control over the military and carefully manage the rotations of officers to reduce the pressures of the logjam. However, with President Jokowi taking office, Laksmana argues, the frequency of rotation declined and the previous promotional logjams are again evident.

At the sub-national level, the efforts of individual military actors to profit by providing informal protection to illicit resource extraction activities are not new, although they might have intensified with decentralisation (Diprose and Azca 2019). Nor are such revenue raising activities such as providing protection of strategic assets and industries new. But taken together, it is clear that compared with the early years of reform there has been a gradual increase in the influence of the military (and other security forces) in national politics, which is indicative of the hyper-nationalism and illiberalism that have begun to intensify in recent years. Such hyper-nationalism is seen in the renewed vigour with which devotion to Pancasila as an indigenously-derived state ideology, as well as the unitary Indonesian republic, now appears in the statements of politicians and officials all the way up to the president.

Economic Policy and Inequality

The first decade of democratisation did indeed indicate a major orientation towards economic liberalisation, especially in the early years in the wake of the Asian economic crisis. In land, property, labour and other arenas early attention was given also to political and economic rights. Yet economic and political liberalism collided. Strong protections for labour were introduced, for example, while IMF loan conditions and other policy reforms saw market and banking deregulation, labour outsourcing and the winding back of fuel subsidies to name a few, which particularly impacted the poor (World Bank 2016). Policies to support economic liberalism became highly selective sectorally and contingent on the state of the economy at particular points in time and the alignment or divergence of social, economic and political interests, at national and sub-national scales.

While the New Order began the process of easing restrictions on foreign direct investment (FDI), significant FDI was not forthcoming in the early years of reformasi despite efforts to attract investors. This was, among other reasons, due to the wider effects of the Asian economic crisis, the uncertainties of the impacts of decentralisation, and the operational difficulties in the regulator environment encountered by existing investors (Lindblad 2015, 228). FDI improved when the economy began to recover and grow anew during Yudhoyono’s first term (2004–2009), particularly with further efforts to reduce the barriers to investment, to wind back the mediating role of the Indonesian Co-ordinating Investment Board, and with the new Law on Investment (No.25, 2007) that clarified foreign and domestic investment rules and allowed for 100% foreign equity ownership in some sectors.

However, recovery was slow, dipping slightly with the global financial crisis, and investor confidence remained low compared with neighbouring countries (Lindblad 2015, 229–232). Boyd and colleagues (2010, 238) argue that a decrease in production in the crucial oil and gas sector up to 2010 – on which Indonesia was heavily reliant for central government revenues – was due to reduced exploration efforts based on concern for fair rules for cost-recovery, poor incentives for new exploration and international investment, natural decline in production and, in the new decentralised era, the difficulty in land acquisition, securing production permits and in doing business (see also Pangestu, Rahardja, and Ing 2015).

Indeed, decentralisation and the opening up of the economy to a degree of domestic and international competition (with foreign multinationals often operating through Indonesian subsidiaries and joint ventures) challenged the market control of some of the state-owned enterprises and associated oligarchic interests. This was particularly the case for those extraction activities in the minerals and plantations sectors that did not require the same kinds of long-term, large-scale capital investments as the likes of oil and gas mining. The point to be underlined is that under specific conditions, new coalitions – often of sub-national and international actors – have made inroads into oligarchic power structures under reformasi. These conditions have involved the creation of popular sub-national policies that, for example support local livelihoods or local business opportunities in the supply chains of larger export and domestic industries. They have also involved cooperation between the social interests benefiting from these policies, sub-national political elites (who gain district revenues and sometimes private rents from these activities as well as popular political support), security actors (that formally or informally protect the business activities), and private firms.

In effect, international firms and other international actors have had a greater degree of influence in sub-national domains than was previously possible under the centralised system, through co-operating with sub-national elites, either directly when investment laws permit, through domestic subsidiaries, or through other initiatives (Diprose, Kurniawan, and Macdonald 2019). But this has produced tensions involving interests in different layers of government, particularly when the capacity of each to generate revenue, for example from large-scale resource extraction, has been reduced, or when powerful conglomerates have lost market share and consequently put pressure on the centre.

In the example of tin mining on Bangka island mentioned above, the central government tried for years to outsmart district regulators by using government regulations to restrict exports of unsmelted tin by local actors. However, the Bangka district head found several work arounds, and both illicit and licit exports continued as artisanal miners favoured on-selling their tin to PT Timah’s main competitor, the Malaysian-owned joint venture PT Koba Tin (Erman 2008; Diprose, Kurniawan, and Winanti 2017).

The central government then responded by legislating to partially retake control through the Mining Law (Law No.4/2009), which outlawed the export of raw minerals unless these were first smelted in Indonesia, turning the minerals into, for example, tin ingots that could then be certified for export centrally and subject to relevant levies. The Mining Law also introduced stronger local content rules and other regulation of FDI in the sector. Following a period allowed for transition under the implementing regulations, the changes introduced by the Mining Law only started to come into full effect towards the end of 2018. Such changes have bolstered the political agendas of those advocating for limited economic liberalisation and greater resource nationalism under both the Yudhoyono and Jokowi administrations (see Warburton 2014).

Given these sorts of periphery-centre tensions in key resource sectors, Jakarta also sought to wind back some of the decentralisation reforms in 2014 under revisions to the Local Government Law (No.23/2014), by giving greater authority for mining, forestry, maritime and fisheries licences to the provinces rather than districts, whereby provincial governments are more likely to be influenced by politico-economic interests at the centre. In the case of Bangka Belitung, however, prior district initiatives had already had sufficient time to take root. While PT Timah now predominantly controls tin mining in the region, the tin produced by artisanal miners continues to reach the supply chain through intermediary businesses (Diprose, Kurniawan, and Winanti 2017).

Aligning broad social interests and those of elites was also not confined to sub-national political strategies and continues under President Jokowi. Hamilton-Hart’s (2019) survey of the food self-sufficiency drive in this special issue shows that politically connected rent-seeking interests are present in the food sector in the form of large-scale agri-business and benefit from the food self-sufficiency policies that Jokowi has championed. However, they appear to be relatively unimportant in steering Indonesian food sector policy. Instead, smallholder producers – who also favour self-sufficiency policies – are so numerous that they themselves have wielded influence. Hamilton-Hart suggests that because such smallholders benefit from the president’s food self-sufficiency drive, Jokowi can claim that his policies are pro-people and aimed at alleviating poverty rather than an instrument of rent-seeking interests.

By the end of Yudhoyono’s second term (2009–2014), it seemed clear that economic liberalisation was implemented only in a limited form; a trend which continues. A study of the ownership of Indonesia’s 200 largest listed corporations (including some data on unlisted firms) identified that in the first decade of reform, listed state-owned corporations were more prominent after the fall of Suharto than before, and foreign governments (particularly Singapore and Malaysia) had also substantially increased their ownership share of many of Indonesia’s largest corporations (Carney and Hamilton-Hart 2015). Under Jokowi, a more prominent policy of resource nationalism has been evident with a shift away from the privatisation of state-owned assets and the injection of billions of dollars to state-owned enterprises, which are also given greater access to strategic contracts (Warburton 2016).

At the same time the close links between business and politics that had developed in the New Order have been replicated in Indonesia’s democracy, but this time with many business owners entering the sphere of politics directly and openly (see also Aspinall 2013). This has been particularly visible in newer parties such as the People’s Conscience Party (Hanura) and the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra), but also in such established parties as Golkar (Poczter and Pepinsky 2016). That businesspeople would play a more prominent role in politics is clearly related to the growing expense required to win political office, given the pervasiveness of money politics in Indonesian elections mentioned earlier.

All of these changes to economic policy have taken place amidst Indonesia’s recovery from the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s. In the early post-Suharto years, the need to resume economic growth and poverty alleviation dominated public debates. Absolute rates of poverty began to fall during the Wahid and Megawati presidencies, but growth scarcely reached 3%. Economic growth and poverty reduction thus remained the key pillars of the Yudhoyono government’s development plans and Indonesia improved markedly on both fronts, despite the impact of the global financial crisis commencing in late 2008 (Lindblad 2015). More recently, both a steady decline in growth from 6.5% in 2011 to around 5% throughout Jokowi’s first term and the end of the commodity boom have ensured that economic stimulus and efforts to maintain strong growth remain a policy focus.

Jokowi’s “Nawa Cita” – Nine Priorities – were thus developed to improve productivity and competitiveness in the international market, and to address weaknesses in the economy. At the same time, the Nawa Cita prioritises economic independence by moving strategic sectors to the domestic economy. It is here that we again see the select implementation of economic liberalisation. The 2016 negative investment list permits foreign investors full control for a concession period in high-capacity power plants and reduced restrictions on power transmission and distribution. Other sectors that have seen restrictions eased under Jokowi include transportation, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals, while restrictions have been tightened on FDI in the minerals, oil and gas sectors. For Jokowi, Warburton (2016) argues, the state should control imports and exports and functions to provide economic services and nurture local industry, with the state sector deemed to be the “locomotive for his infrastructure boom.”

The idea that the state should be the engine of development and efforts to regain control of key economic sectors resonates with a significant section of the Indonesian populace. This includes older people accustomed to such developmentalist strategies under the New Order but also those more generally imbued with the statism implied in Pancasila. Jokowi’s Nawa Cita largely aligns with the well-known model of organic statism in which there is a central role for the state in improving welfare and representing the interests of society as a whole (see Bourchier 2015). That model has now provided an outlet for an amplified rhetoric of resource and economic nationalism, which endorses a key role for the state in redressing global north–south inequalities by redistributing Indonesia’s economic development gains back to the country rather than to foreign firms. This rhetoric paints faceless foreign entities and powers as the economic bogeyman, detracting from Indonesia’s internal economic problems, predatory patronage practices and growing inequality.

Indeed, the question of who development policies and objectives benefit is a central facet of Indonesian political debates. There were marginal decreases in the number of people living below the official poverty line from 10.96% in September 2014, just prior to the inauguration of Widodo, to 10.64% in March 2017. The rate fell to 9.66% in September 2018. Rural rates during this period were higher, at 13.1% (BPS 2019b). Despite such declines, the poverty gap index, which measures the intensity of poverty, increased from 1.75 in March 2013 to 1.94 in March 2016, which includes the first two years of Widodo’s presidency. However, it fell again to 1.71 in March 2018 (BPS 2019c). The index was significantly higher in rural areas at 2.37 in March 2018, and places such as Papua had a significantly higher rate of 6.73 in the same period. Although poverty rates have decreased by more than half between the late 1990s and 2016, progress has been slow on tackling some intractable aspects of poverty and improving welfare – both for those living in dire poverty or at subsistence levels, and for those who live precariously just above the poverty line and are vulnerable to economic shocks.

Inequality also grew sharply during the first two decades of the reform era, while it fell in other Asian economies that also experienced the financial crisis (World Bank 2016). Indonesia’s GINI co-efficient rose from 0.34 in 2002 to 0.38 in 2010, early in Yudhoyono’s second term, and by 2012 had reached 0.41, where it remained until it dropped marginally in 2016 to 0.40 and 0.39 in 2017–2018 (BPS 2019a). This means the country’s wealth was increasingly concentrated among fewer people. According to the World Bank (2016, 7):

In 2002, the richest 10 percent of Indonesians consumed as much as the poorest 42 percent combined; by 2014, they consumed as much as the poorest 54 percent … [and] the richest 10 percent of Indonesians own an estimated 77 percent of all the country’s wealth. In fact, the richest 1 percent own half of all the country’s wealth.

Issues of growing inequality are significant to the rise of populist politics in Indonesia which seems to have tapped into broad-based grievances related to skewed patterns of wealth distribution (see Mietzner 2014; Aspinall 2015; Hadiz and Robison 2017). The problems of inequality are particularly evident in large cities where there are growing populations of urban poor. Increased mobility and telecommunications mean that inequality is more visible, driving wider discontent among the poor and the lower-middle classes. This no doubt partly contributed to the mobilisation of the urban poor in demonstrations during the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial elections (Wilson 2017). Discontent with limited and uneven improvements in welfare provides the base for mobilising non-state political actors that can appropriate such discontent in populist campaign strategies. They do this while disguising efforts to maintain or assert control of the state and its institutions and resources on the part of predatory elites. The deeper structures that sustain this inequality are therefore obscured by these populist campaign strategies.

Indonesia and the World

Two of the articles in this special issue bear directly upon the question of Indonesia’s place in the world. An illiberal turn in Indonesia’s conception of its place in the world is evident in each of them, be it the drift away from universalist notions of justice in Indonesia’s reckoning with its authoritarian past (McGregor and Setiawan 2019), or the increasingly visible nationalist response to challenges to Indonesia’s claims to maritime territory (McRae 2019).

McRae (2019) surveys Indonesia’s foreign policy and observes strong continuities in Indonesia’s approach and position on the South China Sea dating back to the authoritarian era. Here, vested interests are only weakly engaged, which is in line with Robison and Hadiz’s (2017, 896) argument that “ruling political and economic interests” do not require “the capture of foreign markets or resources or to influence the policies of other nations” to maintain their pre-eminence. Tellingly also, apart from the brief tenure of Alwi Shihab under President Abdurrahman Wahid, Indonesia’s political parties have been content for career diplomats to occupy the post of foreign minister throughout the democratic era. Accordingly, McRae argues that neither initial democratisation nor the more recent illiberal turn in Indonesian democracy have fundamentally transformed Indonesian foreign policy. Consequently, even as nationalist, anti-foreign rhetoric has steadily increased in Indonesia since the 2014 presidential election (Aspinall 2016), Indonesia has continued to engage pragmatically with a range of international partners (McRae 2019).

By contrast, McGregor and Setiawan (2019) find such ruling interests directly engaged by the question of how Indonesia should deal with past human rights abuses. If Indonesia were to adopt international models of transitional justice, various former military officers in both the current Jokowi government and previous democratic-era administrations could face prosecution or be named in truth-telling exercises as bearing command responsibility for abuses. Accordingly, although Indonesia did initially incorporate various international human rights principles into Indonesian law – most notably adding a chapter on human rights to the amended constitution modelled on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – in practice, the implementation of these principles has faced stern resistance.

For example, the military has been able to undermine newly formed human rights courts to the extent that they failed to achieve a single conviction of military personnel either for the 1999 East Timor violence or for the 1984 Tanjung Priok massacre (Rusli 2004; Sulistiyanto 2007) and have not been re-convened since (McGregor and Setiawan 2019). A slated Truth and Reconciliation Commission was never formed, after the Constitutional Court revoked its enabling legislation in 2006. Indeed, military interests have prevented new actors from assuming decision-making authority over transitional justice, with no civilian occupying the powerful post of Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal and Security Affairs at any point during the democratic era. Under these circumstances, McGregor and Setiawan (2019) observe, the Indonesian government has rejected international models of transitional justice as culturally inappropriate, and instead turned to novel “Indonesian” non-judicial mechanisms. They argue the principles of musyawarah (deliberation) and mufakat (consensus) – held out to underpin these culturally-specific mechanisms – have repeatedly been deployed throughout Indonesia’s modern history and now help to sustain particularist ideas of Indonesian democracy with strong illiberal undercurrents.

State and Social Interests

All of the discussion above is intricately related to the kinds of social interests that are engaged, and predominant, within struggles over different arenas of contestation. It is therefore important to step back at this point and observe how these interests are represented within contemporary Indonesian state and society and how they may be related to what we have identified as growing illiberalism within Indonesia’s democracy.

Many of the debates about Indonesian democracy have focused on the extent to which institutional reforms have altered the balance of power between different social forces and interests. As alluded to earlier, though opportunities to challenge entrenched interests have occurred during the reform era and changes have emerged when there has been alignment between a range of sub-national, national and even international interests, some of these have resulted in new networks of predation and patronage rather than cohesive alliances that are able to push reforms in a politically liberal direction. In other words, though it has been two decades since the fall of Suharto, the legacy of the regime he created continues to shape the contours of state and society relations in Indonesia.

This is because the New Order had so thoroughly disorganised and fragmented any threatening set of social interests, whether premised on a putative liberal middle class, working-class militancy or even on reactionary Islamic petty bourgeois politics. Such an outcome was achieved through outright repression by a pervasive security apparatus as well as through a web of state-sponsored corporatist organisations that co-opted much of civil society.

It was only when the New Order ceased to deliver economic growth as a result of the Asian economic crisis that its institutional structure, based on repression and organisational and ideological domestication, began to unravel. Despite the enthusiasm that initially infused Indonesia’s reformasi struggle, and continuing efforts waged by bands of reformers whether within the institutions of the Indonesian state or within its civil society, the legacy of New Order rule still looms large over Indonesian democracy.

This is not to say that new political actors have not emerged – as they would be expected to with the passage of time. Joko Widodo’s rise to the presidency reflects an ability to navigate the new contours of direct elections by mobilising public support as does the success of a host of mayors and district heads presenting a reformist platform to voters who are increasingly eyed as promising candidates for provincial and even national executive leadership positions. More broadly, Mietzner (2014) observes that individuals with reformist inclinations have come to inhabit Indonesia’s major social and political organisations – even Golkar, the former New Order era regime electoral vehicle. Some of these new actors have emerged from activist circles, student and non-governmental organisation (NGO) movements and from new businesses, rather than from within the ambit of the New Order’s extensive corporatist organisations, from where the regime used to recruit and undertake the political socialisation of new operatives.

Certainly, these new political actors have had to reach accommodations with robust networks of predation and patronage within any given arena of contestation in order to survive politically. The question is whether they will be simply absorbed into the existing logic of Indonesian politics or pose a fundamental challenge to it. Those who hope for more sustained reforms will gain solace from the fact that reformist discourse continues to resonate with significant sections of the public, as evident in the fact that Jokowi won the 2014 elections despite a concerted smear campaign, and increased his winning margin in 2019. Even former Governor Ahok garnered 42% of the vote in the Jakarta gubernatorial runoff in 2017 despite his prosecution for “blasphemy” and his Chinese ancestry, which was counter to the pro-Muslim and nativist elections rhetoric of the winning candidate.

Indonesia’s anti-corruption fight is the major area that demonstrates how democracy has constrained predatory interests from running roughshod over all of Indonesian politics. Consistently strong public support for Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) has been crucial both in emboldening the commission to pursue some of Indonesia’s most powerful established interests, and in preventing it from being dismantled when its targets push back. Between 2009 and 2017, the commission was embroiled in three high-profile confrontations with very senior police figures – in one case effectively preventing the appointment of a particular police general as chief of police – in addition to taking on an electronic identity card corruption case that threatens dozens of national legislators (Dick and Mulholland 2016).

Undeniably, this series of confrontations has taken a heavy toll on the commission’s personnel. The commission’s then head, Antasari Azhar claims he was framed for murder in 2009, and in the view of some scholars (Butt 2012, 89), probably should not have been convicted. Various other commissioners have faced trumped up criminal charges in response to the commission’s investigations, forcing their resignation. A high-profile police investigator transferred to the commission has also faced politically-motivated prosecution, and had acid thrown in his face near his Jakarta residence in 2017. With the exception of the Antasari case, however, all of these prosecutions against the commission’s personnel have ultimately been dropped.

Public support for the KPK has induced successive presidents to intervene to prevent an array of legislative and budgetary attempts to weaken the commission. These have included proposals to revise the KPK Law to remove its prosecutorial and wiretapping powers, requiring it to obtain a court warrant to conduct a wiretap (virtually ensuring the wiretap would leak), and establishing a police anti-corruption special detachment with a greater budget than the commission itself. But the commission continues to pursue very high-profile targets, notably taking national legislative speaker Setya Novanto, a Golkar boss and powerful government ally, into custody in 2017. This was in connection with a corruption case involving a project to introduce electronic national identity cards. Nevertheless, some question the systemic impact of the KPK’s prosecutions, with Dick and Mulholland (2016) characterising them as “cutting off the heads of a hydra.”

Ascertaining the degree to which new actors alter the existing logic of politics, rather than being wholly absorbed within it, is important to understand the nature of contemporary Indonesian civil society. On the one hand, civil society activism has secured clear advances in the observance of a range of political and socio-economic rights. Organisations like AMAN (Alliance of Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago), in advocating for the recognition of customary and communal land rights, gained a review of the interpretation of the 1999 Forestry Law (that categorised customary/traditional forests as state forests) by the Constitutional Court. The court agreed with the main arguments of the claimants that certain articles of the Forestry Law were unconstitutional and changed the law to remove customary forests from the definition of state forests (Butt 2014).

But civil society is also inhabited by decidedly illiberal or even anti-liberal organisations. In the absence of a real leftist political current, student organisations, labour unions, environmental groups and other organisations tend to have both deep faith in the state as the main benefactor of social welfare, in spite of its history of colonisation by predatory forces, and scepticism of market mechanisms. The absence of the left is obviously a continuing legacy of the 1960s anti-communist massacres, while the weak social basis for liberalism dates back to Indonesia’s early independence years, with, for example the Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI) performing poorly in the 1955 elections. Under the New Order, it was particularly difficult to be against the state’s role in delivering social justice while capitalism was distrusted, although the state was avoided by NGOs promoting a community-based swadaya (self-help) agenda. In the 1990s, civil society discourse was focussed on promoting a more just state (rather than alternatives to the state – see Robison and Hadiz 1993, 26–28), and certainly today there is support for the nationalist agenda of the state and its enterprises being the most appropriate institution to manage the resource base (Warburton 2016).

Given this history, the default position of civil society organisations is that the state should be the main mechanism of social justice, unless it becomes too aligned with business interests or predatory actors, in which case alternative agendas are pursued. However, what constitutes this alternative agenda and who should benefit primarily from it remains contested in different ways in different contexts. Sub-nationally, debates on political legitimacy have been coloured by ethnic claims: defining “Malayness” in Riau, Dayak rights in Kalimantan, and Sasak rights in Lombok vis-à-vis those of other communities in the region. More broadly, the rights of religious and other minorities have come under sometimes violent attack.

In fact, illiberal and anti-liberal organisations abound in Indonesian civil society. The infamous Pemuda Pancasila (PP), while no longer as influential as it was during the heyday of the New Order, remains a formidable youth/gangster organisation that can act as enforcers for local elites in cases like land disputes. As is well known, its origins lie in the public mobilisations by the military directed against its major political foe in the 1950s and 1960s, the PKI (Ryter 2005). More recently, the FPI, Forum Betawi Rempug (FBR), and various others like it, have developed militia forces that recruit mainly from the urban poor and play a major role not only in organised crime rackets, but also have come to be important in mass mobilisations on behalf of competing elites during election time (Wilson 2015, 147–151). They do this mainly by making appeals to conservative and socially exclusionary interpretations of Islamic morality, while older organisations like PP usually latch on to nationalist symbolism and imagery to legitimise their existence.

Such developments are not entirely surprising given that the broader comparative literature notes that the Nazi movement had emerged within German civil society in the 1920s and that groupings with illiberal tendencies had emerged in the Middle East, recruiting followers by providing welfare services that states had retreated from in an age of growing economic austerity in the region (Berman 1997, 2003). For White (1994, 377), moreover, it is possible for civil society to include “decidedly ‘uncivil’ entities like the Mafia, ‘primordial’ nationalist, ethnic or religious fundamentalist organisations, as well as ‘modern’ entities such as trade unions, chambers of commerce and professional associations” (see also Hewison and Rodan 1996).

Similar observations could be made about the sorts of interests that prevail within the business world. While Indonesia’s New Order-era conglomerates were undoubtedly hit badly by the Asian economic crisis – overleveraged as they were in foreign debt – it is also clear that many soon recovered and returned to the commanding heights of the private sector of the Indonesian economy (Chua 2008). Many were able to “game” the banking recapitalisation scheme led by the IMF by misusing large injections of funds by Bank Indonesia in the form of so-called liquidity funds (BLBI). Although these funds were intended to enable the banks to remain liquid, they were commonly sent offshore to prop up other parts of the conglomerates that owned the same banks (Hadiz and Robison 2014, 48–49). In other words, big business was soon in a good position to influence the workings of an increasingly expensive democratic system, where the funding of electoral campaigns was the purview of a very murky world of operators and fixers. Though relatively new businesspeople like Chaerul Tanjung (allied to former President Yudhoyono’s Democrat Party) or Hary Tanoesudibjo (linked to the Suharto family) have emerged, as companies like the property developer Podomoro (said to be behind Ahok’s controversial Jakarta Bay reclamation project) have also become newly prominent, the broader fusion of business and political interests that was such a hallmark of the New Order is a continuing feature of the democratic period.

The point to highlight here is that democratisation in Indonesia has not unleashed a wave of politico-economic and rights-based liberalism in spite of the dramatic institutional transformations that ensued following the fall of the particularly rigid and centralised authoritarianism of the New Order. Reform in distinct arenas of contestation has been about what kinds of social interests can attain ascendancy, and to what extent established predatory alliances could be sidelined. The question that follows is whether emerging newer alliances have an abiding interest in pursuing reform in a liberal direction. Though some local contexts may diverge from the norm, and some early victories may be difficult to wind back, it appears that the constellation of social interests within Indonesian state and society has provided the broad setting for the turn to a more distinctly illiberal direction that we have witnessed in recent years.

Conclusion

We have argued that while there has been an illiberal turn in Indonesian politics and society, it has been uneven – sub-nationally, sectorally and in particular arenas of contestation. The illiberal tendency is growing, however, alongside agendas of economic and resource nationalism. But the “illiberal turn” has been driven too by the deepening inequalities in Indonesian society. Such inequalities have fed into the competition among a wider range of actors especially in sub-national arenas that nevertheless continue to emphasise patronage networks and predatory practices to advance particular interests. Variation in the outcomes of different arenas of contestation is basically contingent on the prevailing constellations of interests, the strategic politico-economic value of what is at stake and the coherence of organised public pressure within those arenas. Also important is the speed at which new actors that espoused liberalising or pluralist agendas were able to capture political spaces in the early years of democratisation.

In particular, where the state or the market has failed to address social injustices, more illiberal models of Indonesian politics have emerged, some under the guise of populist discourses that nonetheless continue to serve predatory elite interests (Hadiz 2017). Reclaiming and reshaping the discourse on the role of the state in providing social justice is not necessarily new, however, but is something which permeates through modern Indonesian history. It was evident as much in the development discourse of the New Order, as it was in the discourse of the reformers in the early years of reformasi. The examples we provide suggest that elements within civil society will support statist policies and particularist notions of Indonesian democracy that entail a larger role for the state where the latter is notionally able to produce redistributive affects beneficial for wider society. The result of this could be both the unwinding of market reforms together with the growth of new and more localised network of predation and patronage – no less than two decades into Indonesia’s era of reformasi.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.