Elite opposition and popular rejection: the failure of presidential term limit evasion in Widodo’s Indonesia

ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been an increasing body of scholarship analyzing the conditions under which incumbent presidents can launch successful attempts to evade existing term limits. It has generally been found that if presidents use multi-strategy approaches, the probability of their success is high. Failure of term limit evasion, on the other hand, is typically ascribed to opposition by judges or to popular disapproval. The case of Indonesia, presented in this article, challenges some of these assumptions. We show that President Widodo’s attempts to achieve a revision of term limit regulations or to delay the next elections failed despite a determined multi-strategy approach, and they did so primarily because of sustained elite opposition, including from his own party. Judges played no role, and popular rejection was relevant only insofar as it aligned with elite attitudes. Widodo’s failed term evasion attempts, then, highlight two contradictory trends in Indonesia’s contemporary democracy: they demonstrated both the erosion of democratic culture that made the initiative possible and the continued resilience of democracy that ultimately thwarted the plan.

KEYWORDS:

• Indonesia
• democratization
• term limits
• presidentialism
• democratic backsliding

In most presidential systems, term limits are an integral part of political culture. This is not only the case in democracies, but in many autocracies as well. In democracies, term limits prevent the entrenchment of incumbents in the power infrastructure and thus create a more level playing field in political competition. In authoritarian polities, term limits facilitate intra-regime regeneration, which in turn increases the autocracy’s chances for long-term survival. But just as common as term limits are attempts by incumbents to evade them (Corrales and Penfold 2014; Landau 2018; Heyl and Llanos 2022). The removal of term limits in China in 2018, which overturned the way the regime had refreshed its leadership since 1982, is only one example. In democracies, attempts to abolish term limits are less likely to succeed, but they are nevertheless frequently launched. One study that traced term limit evasion strategies of 234 incumbents in 106 countries since 2000 found that ‘no fewer than one-third of the incumbents who reached the end of their prescribed term pursued some strategy to remain in office’ (Versteeg et al. 2020, 173). If the world’s most consolidated democracies are removed from the sample, this number increases to half of all executive leaders. Out of the sixty cases of campaigns to evade term limits that the study analyzed, two thirds were successful, with a wide range of strategies applied.

Given how widespread term limit evasion is, and considering that non-consolidated democracies are particularly likely to witness them, it seems surprising that Indonesia – the world’s third-largest democracy – did not record such attempts for much of its post-authoritarian journey. When President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono reached the end of his second term in 2014, he left office without fanfare. He had considered a number of options to have family members succeed him (including his wife), but none of these were seriously pursued. At the end, he seemed genuinely confused about whom to support for his succession, and he largely sat on the fence as the 2014 presidential elections determined the next holder of the office (Aspinall, Mietzner, and Tomsa 2015). It was only when Joko Widodo, Yudhoyono’s successor, reached the end of his second period that systematic and forceful campaigns to let the president run for a third term, or to automatically extend his second, were developed and executed. These attempts, and their eventual failure, were momentous for Indonesian democracy in two ways. First, the fact that the previously sacrosanct term limit was now open for debate signalled that Indonesia’s democracy was increasingly volatile. Second, however, the lack of success of these efforts demonstrated the residual capacity of Indonesian democracy to resist full autocratization.

Hence, this article explores the structural trends in Indonesian democracy that enabled Widodo’s team to aggressively launch term limit evasion strategies, but also asks how these campaigns eventually failed. We argue that Indonesian democracy had weakened under Widodo to a point at which term evasion was not only possible but increasingly likely. However, counteracting these supportive opportunity structures were equally powerful forces that keep Indonesian democracy, for all of its flaws, competitive. Contrary to much of the literature that emphasizes the role of courts and popular opposition as the main causes of term limit evasion failures (Issacharoff 2015; Versteeg et al. 2020), we highlight the role of elite interests that viewed another term for the incumbent as minimizing their chances of renegotiating the conditions of their regime participation with a new president. Popular opposition, we argue, was relevant too, but it mostly consolidated existing elite opposition to the term limit evasion campaign run by the palace. This interpretation of term limit evasion failure allows us to make broader judgments about the state of Indonesia’s contemporary democracy: on the one hand, it is a democracy largely captured by elites – but on the other hand, it is also a democracy in which high levels of intra-elite competition secure its endurance.

The discussion proceeds in six steps. First, we analyze the importance of term limits for democratic competitiveness and their history in Indonesia. Second, we sketch the political context of democratic erosion that allowed Widodo’s team to push for term limit evasion. Third, we explore the various strategies applied by the palace, which ranged from a possible constitutional amendment and alternative methods of extending the existing term to stacking the constitutional court in charge of adjudicating the legality of a potential vice-presidential run by Widodo. Fourth, we investigate the elite interests that opposed allowing Widodo to overstay his term. Fifth, we look at the significance of popular opposition to abolishing or altering term limits, which was reflected in numerous opinion polls and helped weaken the president’s ability to pursue the matter. Finally, we contextualize the Indonesian case within the broader comparative literature on term limit evasion – a literature that so far had no reason to deal with Indonesia at all. We also highlight what the Indonesian episode tells us about both the country’s democratic vulnerability and its continued resilience.

Presidential term limits and Indonesia

Presidential term limits have a long tradition. According to Ginsburg, Melton, and Elkins (2011, 1838), who studied term limits in post-1850 polities, ‘the majority of fixed-term constitutions have always had term limits’. But term limits went somewhat out of fashion after the Second World War, when many newly independent states in Asia (and subsequently Africa) did not impose them. At the same time, however, some consolidated democracies began to refine their existing regulations. The United States Congress, for instance, passed the Twenty-Second Amendment in 1947. This amendment prohibited persons who had been elected to the presidency twice from being elected again. Prior to this amendment, the tradition of US presidents serving only two terms was merely an unwritten convention, established by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Franklin D. Roosevelt had broken this convention with his 1940 and 1944 re-elections, highlighting the need to codify a term limit. It took until the onset of the third wave of democratization in the 1980s and 1990s, however, for the general post-Second World War recession of term limits to be overturned. As new democracies emerged in Latin America, Asia, and parts of Eastern Europe, term limits became a crucial element of their constitutional reform agendas (Maltz 2007). Today, 60% of all presidential and semi-presidential systems practise some form of term limit.

There are numerous types of term limits (McKie 2019). Many countries follow the US example of allowing only two consecutive presidential terms. Other nations, such as Russia, make it possible for presidents who have served two terms to run again after somebody else has held the position in the interval (Vladimir Putin famously re-set the clock on this arrangement through constitutional amendments in 2020, which would regard his likely re-election in 2024 as his first term). In addition to the variants of the two-term model, there are also various forms of one-term presidencies. In Chile, for instance, presidents can serve only one term but may run again after sitting out at least one period. This arrangement saw Michelle Bachelet and Sebastián Piñera alternating in the presidency between 2006 and 2022. Other polities, such as South Korea and the Philippines, stipulate one-term presidencies without the possibility of re-election (Gloria Arroyo convinced Philippine judges that she should be allowed to run again in 2004, after having served out Joseph Estrada’s term following his 2001 removal). What most of these cases have in common, however, is that even in autocratic states such as Russia, incumbents mostly stop short of removing term limits – rather, they try creative evasion strategies to stay in power. In this regard, Xi Jinping’s removal of term limits in China has been an exception rather than the rule.

The rationale for term limits differs slightly between democratic and autocratic states, but in both cases, the (at least theoretical) goal is to prevent the incumbent president’s excessive accumulation of power. In democracies, such an entrenchment in power would give the incumbent an undue advantage over his or her opponents in elections (Gelman and King 1990). The power resources amassed by the incumbent tend to grow over time, and thus limiting this time is seen as crucial in securing electoral competitiveness (In parliamentary systems, which mostly do not impose term limits, the task of limiting the prime minister’s power and time in office is given to the legislature and the incumbent’s party – and they rarely disappoint). Counterintuitively, term limits are even more important for autocracies. That is because they cannot use elections as a mechanism of leadership regeneration, and thus must rely on term limits to avoid the regime’s personalization.¹ As mentioned earlier, post-1982 China successfully regenerated its regime until Xi Jinping began the very personalization process that previous leaders had been so keen to avoid (Burns 2017; Feldman 2021). The consequences of his move for the long-term durability of the communist system are still unclear.

Indonesia adopted the model of only allowing two consecutive five-year presidential terms in 1999 after long-time autocrat Suharto had fallen amidst mass protest (Horowitz 2013). Suharto had been elected president seven times between 1968 and 1998, using the absence of term limits in the country’s original 1945 constitution. Prior to Suharto, founding president Sukarno had also stayed in power until being removed by force. He had himself declared president for life in 1963, but lost power in 1965 as a result of the escalating tensions between the army and the communist party. Accordingly, as Indonesia began its democratization journey in 1998, its new leaders were deeply aware of the fact that there had been only two presidents in fifty-three years, both of whom had stayed in power for so long that ultimately they were toppled from it. This was a strong incentive for the drafters of the post-Suharto constitution to make term limits a strategic priority (Crouch 2010). Indeed, the term limit stipulations were among the first constitutional amendments passed in 1999. There were three more rounds of amendments in 2000, 2001, and 2002, with the last introducing direct presidential elections that replaced the previous mechanism of appointment by the People’s Consultative Assembly (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, MPR), the country’s highest-ranking legislative body.

For the first two decades of Indonesia’s post-1998 democracy, the term limit was untouchable. Elites, the population, and the presidents themselves viewed it as a key lesson drawn from decades of authoritarianism, and as a cornerstone of the new democratic system. To be sure, there was a quick succession of short-term presidents between 1998 and 2004, none of whom had to contemplate whether to try evading term limits – B.J. Habibie failed with his re-election bid in 1999 before the term limit was even codified; Abdurrahman Wahid was impeached in 2001; and Megawati Sukarnoputri lost the 2004 elections. The first real test case for the term limit thus came as Yudhoyono (who had beaten Megawati in 2004) approached the end of his second term. The president had won an overwhelming re-election victory in 2009, and he remained popular, with only a few periods of temporary dissatisfaction in the citizenry (Mujani and Liddle 2010). It would have therefore not been surprising, and indeed almost to be expected, had Yudhoyono developed ideas of term limit evasion. But by all accounts, he never did, at least not in a serious fashion. Instead, his focus was on pursuing various succession scenarios, none of which proved successful – further pointing to his lack of autocratic resolve. Overall, then, Indonesia fit neatly into the category of countries that had imposed third-wave term limits, and had done so successfully.

Indonesia’s democratic erosion

As noted, challenges to term limits are more common in young, unconsolidated democracies than in the more entrenched ones. By this token, the absence of term evasion attempts in democratic systems can be considered a sign of democracy’s health, while their occurrence (especially if successful) indicates deeper-lying problems with democratic quality. In Indonesia’s case, therefore, the strong respect for presidential term limits until the completion of Yudhoyono’s second term pointed to the effectiveness of the democratic polity. Indeed, international democracy indexes confirm this assertion. Most indexes agree that democratic quality in Indonesia peaked around 2008, at the end of Yudhoyono’s first term. Freedom House, for instance, upgraded Indonesia to ‘free’ status in 2006 and gave the country its highest point score in 2008. Similarly, the Liberal Democracy Index designed by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) shows a democratic peak between 2004 and 2008.² Subsequently, Indonesian democracy began to exhibit signs of erosion, especially in the fields of minority rights, government oversight of civil society groups, and the influence of money politics on elections. These trends led Freedom House to downgrade Indonesia to ‘partly free’ in 2013, but presidential aggrandizement was generally not seen as part of the country’s problems. Yudhoyono, as expected, left office quietly.

Indonesia’s democratic backsliding accelerated under Widodo (Power and Warburton 2020). Indeed, during his second term, in the early 2020s, the V-Dem index recorded the lowest levels of democratic quality in Indonesia since 1999. This outcome was not without irony: in the 2014 presidential campaign, Widodo had beaten Prabowo Subianto – Suharto’s former son-in-law – who openly advocated for the abolition of the democratic constitution. In that campaign, Widodo had strategically aligned himself with pro-democracy activists whose primary interest was to keep Prabowo away from the palace. But once in power, Widodo distanced himself from his liberal allies and displayed a shrewd instinct for expanding his power. One way in which Widodo showcased his ambition was by interfering in the internal affairs of political parties (Mietzner 2016). In Indonesia, the government holds the right to recognize (or to reject) the legality of incumbent party leadership boards. Under Yudhoyono, this authority was normally used to formally register party boards, but in Widodo’s period, it became a political tool of expanding presidential power. In 2015 and 2016, Widodo’s government used its recognition powers to delegitimize two pro-Prabowo party leaderships and replace them with Widodo loyalists. A third party switched its support to Widodo as well, pre-empting possible interference attempts. As a result, Widodo was able to transform his minority position in the legislature into a supermajority.

Another technique of power expansion was to gain control over Indonesia’s media landscape (Tapsell 2017). In this regard, Widodo achieved a remarkable turnaround between 2014 and 2019. When he ran for the presidency in 2014, many private television stations supported his rival, Prabowo. Among them was the MNC conglomerate, which included ‘three free-to-air national television networks that command some 40% of prime-time audience share’ (Suzuki 2017). Its owner, Hary Tanoesoedibjo, had presidential ambitions himself but decided to back Prabowo in 2014. The same was true for Aburizal Bakrie, then the chair of the Golkar party, who owned TV One. Thus, Widodo faced hostile coverage by key television stations, and, on election night, some of them broadcast ‘quick counts’ that falsely claimed that Prabowo had won. But after his inauguration, Widodo pulled one after another media tycoon into his government. Tanoesoedibjo switched sides after being threatened with legal action over a text message to a law enforcement officer, and Bakrie’s Golkar (one of the parties in whose affairs the government intervened) joined Widodo’s coalition in 2016. Other pro-government media owners included Erick Thohir, who became a minister in 2019, and Surya Paloh, owner of the Media Group (which includes Metro TV). Paloh had several representatives in cabinet. As Widodo started his second term, critical media coverage of the government was largely confined to a handful of outlets.

Government repression of critics has also increased under Widodo. The main instrument for this has been the 2008 Law on Information and Electronic Transactions, which allows for the criminalization of social media users who publish allegedly slanderous statements. In Yudhoyono’s second term (2009–2014), there were only seventy-four such cases (Hamid 2019); in Widodo’s first period (2014–2019), this number increased to 233, with eighty-two of them directly related to alleged insult of the president (several government critics were charged just prior to the 2019 election). Even when the president asked the police to be less tough on his opponents, law enforcement continued its intimidation campaign. In November 2022, police arrested a citizen in Bali who had uploaded a video critical of the president. The police charged him with defamation, but after the accused issued an apology and promised never to do it again, the charges were dropped. Actions such as these stifled the general willingness of citizens to openly state their view of the government. In a September 2020 opinion survey, 69.6% of respondents agreed that citizens were ‘increasingly’ afraid of stating their opinion (Nurita 2020). Evidently, Widodo presided over a significant decline in the quality of freedom of expression, protecting him from his critics.

Hence, while Indonesia’s democratic erosion had not started with him, Widodo added elements of presidential aggrandizement that were previously absent. Government interference in political parties, the use of the police and other law enforcement agencies to warn or repress critics, the integration of the vast majority of media empires into the broader infrastructure of the regime – all of these trends either began or strengthened under Widodo. Indonesia, while still a formally functioning democracy, was now more vulnerable to autocratization attempts than it had been at the peak of its democratic quality in the mid and late 2000s. It was this climate of democratic backsliding that eventually prepared the ground for term limit evasion campaigns – thus far unknown in the post-Suharto polity – to become a major element of political contestation.

Term limit evasion campaigns for Widodo

Incumbent presidents reluctant to leave office have deployed various strategies to overstay. Versteeg et al. (2020, 199) have identified six major approaches, and have assessed their success rates across their studied cases. The first is the attempt to amend the constitution to alter or remove term limits. This has been tried in 63% of the cases in which presidents wish to continue to rule beyond the term limit, and 60% of these attempts have been successful. Second is the ‘blank slate’ method – the writing of a new constitution that resets the count of terms (as mentioned, Putin chose this approach). This comprises 8% of all cases, with a 100% success rate. The third strategy is to rely on courts to issue interpretations of term limits that favour the incumbent keen on staying on. Often, this requires stacking the court with loyalists before such decisions. Arroyo opted for this way, as did Bolivia’s Evo Morales; 15% of cases fall into this category, and 83% of them were successful. In the fourth approach, incumbents nominate proxies to run for the presidency in their stead (Putin had done so prior to the reset of term limits). This was tried in 15% of cases, but only one-third of the campaigns succeeded. The fifth pathway is that of delaying elections (5% of cases, two-thirds successful). And finally, there is the multi-strategy approach, in which numerous methods are launched. Of the studied cases, 14% witnessed such approaches, and all were successful.

In Indonesia, the first serious proposals for a constitutional amendment to allow for a third Widodo term emerged in late 2019, just after he had been inaugurated for his second. It is plausible that Widodo at that time was not the direct initiator of these suggestions. Indeed, he issued his strongest rejection of the idea at this early time (Yahya 2022). He described the attempts as a ‘slap in my face’ and as designed to seek his attention. He also expressed support for the limit of two presidential terms and indicated that if notions of amending the constitution (which had been discussed for some time) focused on removing the limit, then the entire process of amendments should be abandoned. But over time, Widodo’s language on the matter changed significantly. In March 2021, he stated that he was ‘not interested’ in a third term and that the constitution forbade such a practice – setting the tone for his future statements that left the door open for him accepting a third term should the constitution be amended. Subsequently, the campaign for a third term gained steam, climaxing in early 2022 with an all-out and systematic action plan launched by his loyalists. Responding to these attempts, the president now vaguely said that he was ‘loyal’ to the current constitution (again evading the question what he would do if the constitution changed), and that calls for his third term were allowable in a democracy.

It appears that Widodo’s interest in a third term grew as he moved closer to the end of the second – not an untypical phenomenon in the pattern of term limit evasions. By late 2021, there was little doubt that Widodo not only tolerated attempts by his loyalists in this regard, but also actively encouraged them. In conversations with his aides, he expressed frustration that the COVID-19 pandemic had prevented him from completing his second-term agenda (confidential interview with the assistant to a senior minister, Jakarta, 7 June 2022). When the aides asked whether he wanted them to work on solutions that could allow him to stay in office longer, he invited them to proceed. Widodo’s endorsement was now also conveyed to party elites. According to one Golkar official, ‘We were reluctant to support the idea of a third term. But our chairman [Airlangga Hartarto] said that it was now clear that the president himself had ordered this, so we complied’ (confidential interview, Jakarta, 23 June 2022). The official also revealed an additional reason why Airlangga agreed: that is, he had been pressured by senior minister Luhut Pandjaitan – widely seen as Widodo’s political ‘fixer’ – who ‘hinted at the possibility of removing [Airlangga] from the post of Golkar chairman by using a corruption allegation, if he refused’ (confidential interview, Jakarta, 8 August 2022). Thus, Golkar staged a meeting with peasants in February 2022, during which the aspiration for a third Widodo term was expressed.

But the campaign for a third term was a difficult challenge for its proponents. It required a constitutional change, which was only possible if two-thirds of the members of the MPR attended a session to approve it. For the 2019–2024 period, the MPR consisted of 575 members of parliament (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR) and 136 members of the senate-style Regional Representatives Council (Dewan Perwakilan Daerah, DPD). Although Widodo’s coalition controlled 82% of the seats in the DPR, their stance on this particular matter was fragmented (more on this later), and the attitudes of the DPD members were altogether uncertain. In addition, the process of amending the constitution was cumbersome, consisting of many stages that normally have to be passed before an individual stipulation can be tabled. Given that in early 2022, there were only two years left before the next general election, it seemed like a long shot to get a third-term amendment approved before the country entered the pre-election period. And for all of the public appeals by Widodo loyalists, leaders of his volunteer groups, and other affiliated actors, palace aides had in fact not taken concrete steps to manage the practicalities of constitution change.

As a result, delaying the 2024 elections by about three years became the preferred option. How exactly this would be done remained unclear, but many in the government believed it would not require a constitutional amendment, or at least not a change to the term limit. Palace aides also thought that it was a more attractive option for many in the political elite as it would automatically extend their own terms and thus, in the case of legislators, save them money otherwise spent on campaigning. Indeed, the chairman of the National Awakening Party (Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa, PKB), Muhaimin Iskandar, confirmed in February 2022 that delaying the elections was his first choice (Yahya 2022). Government officials also went increasingly public with this idea, indicating that it was now the main strategy of the term evasion campaign. Investment Minister Bahlil Lahadalia claimed that the business community wanted an election postponement, while Luhut insisted that the government possessed ‘big data’ showing that at least 110 million Indonesians endorsed a delay because an election in 2024 would be too expensive during the ongoing post-Covid recovery period (Deddy Corbuzier Podcast 2022).

After the election delay approach did not find the necessary support in either the broader elite or the population, the most passionate advocates of Widodo’s continued stay in power were left only with the option of him running as vice-president in 2024. The candidate most open to this option was Prabowo – not because he wanted to extend Widodo’s time in political office, but because he believed (probably correctly) that such a ticket would secure victory in the elections. A close Prabowo aide confirmed that his patron wanted ‘to keep that option open until the last minute’ (confidential interview, Jakarta, 15 August 2022). While the constitutionality of the incumbent two-term president seeking the vice-presidency is doubtful, the Constitutional Court (Mahkamah Konstitusi, MK) initially signalled that it might affirm it. First, a court spokesman said that such a candidacy would be unproblematic (Koran Info Indonesia 2022) – which the court later clarified was not its official view. Subsequently, it rejected a petition on the matter by promoters of the Prabowo-Widodo ticket on a technicality, but by doing so gave them advice on how to refile the case with greater chances of success (Mahkamah Konstitusi Republik Indonesia 2022). However, as many actors started to lose interest in the option (including Widodo himself), the MK issued a ruling in January 2023 that seemed to disallow it (although even that verdict left room for interpretation).

In order to support its (ultimately fruitless) term evasion campaigns, palace circles had tried to solidify the president’s support in parliament and the most relevant court, the MK. In terms of expanding the presidential coalition in parliament, Widodo’s chief-of-staff Moeldoko made an attempt to take the leadership of the oppositional Democratic Party (Partai Demokrat, PD) in March 2021. If successful, this takeover would have increased the president’s legislative majority from 82% to 91%, improving his chances of achieving constitutional change. But Moeldoko’s move faltered amidst a public outcry, and the government retreated on its support for him. As far as stacking the MK was concerned, the president appointed three of the nine Constitutional Court judges directly anyway. However, in addition to that, in May 2022 Widodo presided over the marriage of his sister with the chairman of the court, Anwar Usman. Usman, who had been appointed by the Supreme Court rather than the president, was subsequently seen as a firm Widodo supporter on the bench. But as noted above, the MK ultimately did not become a decisive actor in the campaign – it wavered for a while on the Widodo vice-presidency issue but then put an end (of sorts) to an option that had been far-fetched from the start and increasingly unattractive to the actors involved.

The last chapter in the term limit evasion campaign was an attempt to achieve an election delay by the intervention of a lower-ranking court. In early March 2023, a state court in Jakarta granted a petition by an obscure party to suspend preparations for the 2024 elections because the party had been unduly excluded from running in the polls. Subsequent media investigations found that at least one former senior intelligence officer was a prominent functionary and financier in the party (Rikang 2023). But at this stage, even some government officials previously invested in the term limit evasion campaign had given up on the idea as election preparations were now in full swing. As a result, there was widespread criticism of the court’s ruling, including from ministers. The ruling was eventually overturned by a higher-ranking court, putting the last nail in the coffin of the concerted effort to keep Widodo in office beyond his second term. To be sure, one of the reasons for the campaign’s failure was related to the fact that the president had lacked the determination of a Putin or Xi – in all attempts described above, there was a clear unpreparedness to take that last ruthless step that is often necessary to make such campaigns work. But as the next two sections will demonstrate, the reasons for the campaign’s collapse go well beyond lack of cold-bloodedness. Indeed, we argue that the effort faltered primarily because the obstacles of elite opposition and (to a lesser extent) popular rejection proved too formidable.

Elite opposition

Given that Versteeg and his co-authors found that term evasion attempts pursued with multiple strategies tend to have a 100% success rate, Widodo’s failure in this regard seems rather puzzling. But we argue, quite simply, that outside of Widodo himself and his closest aides and allies, very few elite actors had an interest in him staying for another term. In Indonesia’s post-Suharto political culture of coalitional presidentialism (Mietzner 2023), presidents sit atop an alliance of elite forces, and while they play a central role in power and resource distribution, they are not hegemons. The members of the coalition, for their part, accept the presidents’ primus-inter-pares position but generally do not view them as their only option to participate in government. In most cases, coalition actors support the president because he or she is electorally popular and thus guarantees quick and easy access to power. But many leaders of coalition parties have presidential ambitions themselves and are therefore more than happy to see a president leave the stage because of term limitations. In other words, the attachment of political elites to the Indonesian president is institutional, temporary, and opportunistic, rather than based on deep personal loyalty and admiration. As Widodo had to discover, he was no exception.

Even Widodo’s own party did not support his ambition to overstay. In fact, it was the strongest opponent of this idea in the party landscape. While this may seem odd to outside observers, in the context of the history between Widodo and his nominating party, the Party of Indonesian Democracy-Struggle (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia – Perjuangan, PDI-P), it was hardly surprising. The chairperson of the party, Megawati Sukarnoputri, who had been president between 2001 and 2004, only agreed to nominate Widodo for the 2014 elections because she was too unpopular to run again herself, and because her daughter and heir-in-waiting, Puan Maharani, was even less attractive to voters. Widodo, a party member but never active as a functionary, appeared to Megawati as the only option to gain victory for PDI-P. Subsequently, the relationship between Widodo and the party remained strained – as indicated above, he ruled as the president of a multi-party coalition rather than as an ‘agent of the party’, as Megawati had expected (Rastika 2015).

Ahead of the 2024 elections, therefore, there was a strong desire to replace Widodo with somebody who PDI-P would have more control over. Hasto Kristiyanto, PDI-P’s secretary-general, conceded as much when he stated that ‘we want a president who acts more according to the guidelines given by the nominating party’ (interview, Jakarta, 28 June 2022). Even though Puan was still not popular, the party had other alternatives – such as the high-polling governor of Central Java, Ganjar Pranowo. Hence, Megawati expressed her rejection of term limit changes very early on. When Luhut brought up the issue of ‘big data’ in support of keeping Widodo in power, Megawati even felt insulted and firmly resolved to counter his operations aimed at extending Widodo’s presidency beyond 2024 (confidential interview with a special staff to the president, Jakarta, 10 August 2022). In April 2023, Megawati finally nominated Ganjar as PDI-P’s presidential candidate, and she asked Widodo to be present at the announcement. The symbolism of the event could not have been stronger: PDI-P had prevailed in its plan to move beyond Widodo’s presidency in an orderly fashion, and he was forced to acknowledge that fact by witnessing the anointment of the man that Megawati wanted to succeed him.

In comparative terms, the lack of support from his own party put Widodo in a much weaker position than his peers who had succeeded with their term limit evasion plans. In the latter case, the support by the president’s party was conventionally the basis from which the campaign was launched. Without such a basis, Widodo had to rely on non-PDI-P parties to generate enthusiasm for the third-term campaign. But such excitement was not forthcoming. As noted earlier, Golkar – the party of former autocrat Suharto – had to be strong-armed into organizing a highly staged event in which the party expressed some sort of backing for a third Widodo term or delay of the elections. Golkar leaders did not see much benefit in keeping Widodo in power – they had not held the presidency since B.J. Habibie’s short stint in the office from 1998 to 1999, and there was much ambition to change that. The 2024 elections without an incumbent offered Golkar the chance of renegotiating its position in Indonesia’s political landscape – while another Widodo term would have just extended the party’s role as a minor supporting actor. Other parties in the coalition held the same view – they preferred a shake-up of the power constellation to a continuation of the Widodo presidency. Consequently, some coalition parties – such as PKB or the National Mandate Party (PAN) (Partai Amanat Nasional) – only paid lip service to the third term agenda, while others did not even do that.

A key role in thwarting the term limit evasion plans fell to Prabowo Subianto. Seeking the presidency since 2004, he had lost twice to Widodo in the process (Aspinall 2015). In 2019, he joined the Widodo government, hoping to sharpen his profile as a team worker with government experience – something that voters had found lacking in previous campaigns. For him, the elections of 2024 presented the last chance of becoming president as he would be seventy-three years old in that year. Thus, another Widodo term was a major obstacle to his own ambitions, and he was unlikely to support it from the start. Even an election delay until 2027 did not serve his interest, given his age. As a result, while Prabowo did not express his opposition to term limit revision openly – he was courting Widodo voters for the upcoming campaign – he left it to the leaders of his party, Gerindra, to shut down the idea.³ Without PDI-P and Gerindra, and with other parties only half-heartedly in support, Widodo had no majority for constitutional change in the MPR, and an election delay was also unlikely to be approved if the government had put it forward officially (which it never did). In this constellation, Prabowo remained the last hope for Widodo loyalists – through a joint Prabowo-Widodo ticket. But as we have seen, this option quietly dissipated as the MK issued ever more critical verdicts on it, and Widodo himself grew increasingly cold on it as well.

While most parties were opposed or uncommitted, Widodo did not fare much better with large socio-religious organizations that were also part of his government coalition. Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia’s largest Muslim group, had been instrumental in Widodo’s 2019 re-election, with the group’s spiritual head, Ma’ruf Amin, becoming his running mate. But NU was cold on the third-term agenda. In September 2021, its chairman said that the issue was up to the political parties to decide. One NU-affiliated intellectual even warned that removing term limits might put Indonesia on the same path as Guinea, which saw a military coup in 2021 after the president tried to overstay his constitutionally allowed term in office (Sonia 2021). For NU, Widodo had been a useful president – he had supported legislation that channelled more money into the organization’s network of boarding schools. But NU also did not forget that he took the ministry of religion temporarily away from it in 2019 – which its leaders viewed as an affront. Hence, in NU’s perception, there was no compelling reason to keep Widodo in office, as any successor was also certain to lobby the group for its support.

In short, it was first and foremost the self-interest of Indonesia’s key political actors that undermined the prospects of Widodo’s term limit evasion initiatives. Widodo’s State Secretary Pratikno reportedly reminded him of the impossibility of overcoming this opposition, and the latter seemed to be persuaded (confidential interview with a member of the special staff to the president, Jakarta, 10 August 2022). While Widodo had engaged in acts of presidential aggrandizement more forcefully than his predecessor Yudhoyono – and the third-term agenda had emerged as a logical consequence of this – he still was not able to control the political system in a manner that could secure the success of his plans. The ambitions and power of each coalition member stood in the way of such control – as they had done in the case of the other four post-Suharto presidents as well. This elite-based competitiveness, which frustrated Widodo’s term evasion agenda, does not mean that democracy is secure from further erosion – far from it. But it does provide for a minimalist democratic framework in which rivalry between patronage-seeking actors has thus far prevented renewed authoritarian rule.

Popular rejection

In much of the literature on term limit evasion attempts, failures are attributed to popular opposition (Versteeg et al. 2020). These analyses are important, especially as correctives to earlier assessments that highlighted the role of courts in preventing term limit revision (Issacharoff 2015). But we argue that in the case of Indonesia, popular rejection of the third-term agenda was only relevant insofar as it helped key elites to justify their self-interested opposition to the plans. Had there been popular support for another Widodo term, it would have been harder for these elites to sustain their opposition. As it turned out, however, the interests of elites and the majority stance in society converged, allowing the former to draw from the latter to strengthen their position. There is little evidence either that popular opposition was the main reason that Widodo and his team ultimately dropped the initiative for a third term or an election delay. The president was certainly disappointed at the lack of societal enthusiasm for him staying on, but he had proven previously that he was willing to ignore public opinion to push through policies he strongly believed in. Thus, it is most plausible to point to elite resistance as the factor that convinced the president of the unviability of term evasion, while popular opposition supported elite preferences.

Before analyzing the Indonesian public’s view on term limits, we must first evaluate the role of public opinion in post-Suharto politics in general and the attitude of presidents towards it in particular. After forty years of authoritarian rule under Sukarno and Suharto, public opinion emerged in post-1998 democracy as a major influence on Indonesian politics. Not only has it determined the outcome of elections, it has also informed the kinds of policies leaders promote. As a result, a massive public-opinion polling industry has developed (Tomsa 2020), the clients of which have been mostly politicians and other elites who try to understand what the public wants in order to adjust their policy platform accordingly. To be sure, this approach has not always been supportive of democracy – politicians have absorbed the increasing socio-religious conservatism in the populace as much as some of them have nurtured it for political purposes. Presidents have been part of this dynamic too – they have been major clients of polling institutes, and have often altered policies in order to boost their ratings in the surveys. Yudhoyono was the first president who regularly consulted pollsters (in one case even on what kind of funeral arrangements he should make for Suharto, who passed away in 2008), but Widodo continued this practice. Indeed, he has been known for spending many hours on briefings from pollsters, asking detailed questions about specific items.

But there has been one significant difference between Yudhoyono and Widodo in terms of how to deal with public opinion. Yudhoyono often dropped ideas and plans once he learnt from the polls that they were unpopular. Consequently, he gained a reputation for risk aversion. For instance, he terminated several attempts to revise the labour laws (which employers viewed as too generous to workers) or the anti-corruption legislation (which party leaders urged him to revise because it led to the arrest of many politicians). Each time, he feared a public backlash after studying polling results and thus abandoned his revision attempts. Yudhoyono also overturned a policy he and therefore agreed to – rescinding in 2014 a law that abolished direct elections for governors, mayors, and district heads. His government had earlier endorsed this bill, but after being told by his pollster how strongly the public rejected it, he changed course. Widodo, by contrast, has been more willing to go against public opinion. In 2019 and 2020, he proceeded with both the revision of the labour and anti-corruption legislation despite continued public opposition. He even endorsed police crackdowns on protests against these laws. Accordingly, while Widodo has deeply studied public opinion, he developed a history of being selective about following it.

It is in this context that public opposition to term limit revision needs to be read and understood. All surveys in this regard showed strong opposition to a change of the constitution or election delay. In one poll in September 2021 (SMRC 2021, 21–23), 84% of respondents said that the existing term limits should be maintained (an increase of 10% over the previous poll in May). Widodo could take some comfort in the fact that the answers changed when his name was brought into the equation, but a majority of citizens still did not want him to run in 2024. When asked whether Widodo should be allowed to be a candidate in 2024, 30% of respondents agreed while 48% were opposed (this obviously meant that some respondents wanted the existing term limits to remain in place but Widodo nevertheless be able to run – it is not clear whether they were aware of this contradiction in their answers). As far as an election delay to 2027 was concerned, 82% of respondents rejected the idea. Hence, there was little Widodo could reference in the existing data to support the campaign for a third term. He was presented with these numbers by several of his pollsters throughout 2021, but rather than dropping the initiative at that point, his public statements on the issue continued to leave the door open to pursue the plan. It was only after it was clear that he had no elite support for a third term or election delay that the campaign slowly fizzled out and eventually came to an end.

Consequently, while it is tempting to interpret the failure of the term limit evasion attempts in Indonesia as a victory of societal activism, the reality is more nuanced. Public opinion mattered, but it did not determine the outcome. Instead, it provided additional material to the political elite outside of Widodo’s inner circle to resist his efforts to stay in power beyond his second term. It also made it harder for Widodo’s aides to defend the idea in public – Luhut Pandjaitan retreated quickly when challenged to present the ‘big data’ that allegedly showed public support for Widodo staying on. But the convergence of elite and public opposition to term limit evasion makes it difficult to speculate what would have happened had the elite strongly supported Widodo’s third term agenda. Arguably, its chances of success would have been hugely increased, up to a point where the president and the elites in his coalition could have afforded to ignore public opinion – as they had done several times in the past without major political damage to their positions. At the end, then, the story of term limit evasion failure in Indonesia was written by elites, with the public adding the footnotes.

Conclusion

What, then, do the attempts at term limit evasion, as well as their failure, tell us about Indonesia’s democracy? And what can their analysis contribute to the comparative discussion on such campaigns? From the assessment above, it is clear that the initiative to achieve a third term for Widodo or to delay the 2024 elections revealed increasing weaknesses in Indonesian democracy. Without such weakening, these attempts would not have occurred. The drivers of the campaign, including Widodo himself, were aware that trying to go beyond the constitutional term limit regulations meant breaking a major political taboo. Yet they were also aware that Indonesian democracy had reached a point at which such a move had become possible. In their view, term limits were no longer the holy cow of Indonesian democracy, and the wish to revise them was now not only tolerable but held a significant promise of success. Widodo’s control of the mainstream media, his supermajority in parliament, his continued high popularity ratings despite narrowing civic freedoms – all these seemed to suggest to the president’s supporters that he had accumulated sufficient political capital to pull off the previously unthinkable and seek another term. In this regard, the term limit evasion campaign marked the end of two decades in Indonesian democracy in which the aim to prevent another long-time autocrat was an inviolable consensus.

But the failure of the campaign also pointed to Indonesian democracy’s continued reservoirs of resilience (Setiawan 2022) – and to a misreading of the political map by the president’s team. In this political map, the members of Widodo’s large coalition were allies of the president and sought to extract benefits from him as long as he was expected to be in power, but they were not personally committed to him. Holding either their own ambitions to obtain the presidency or convinced that working with a new president might be even more beneficial than cooperating with Widodo, key Indonesian elites had no motivation to keep the latter in power beyond two terms. Without their support, Widodo did not have the majority in the MPR he needed to achieve constitutional change, and the initiative faltered as a result. Palace circles did not grasp, therefore, that Widodo was not Putin or Xi, and neither was he Erdogan. In all of these cases, leaders had created a culture of personal – rather than institutional – allegiance to them, backed up by the ability to instil fear and threaten opponents with retribution. In the Indonesian case, by contrast, loyalty to the president has been time-limited and conditional. Presidents are powerful while they hold office, but the existing term limit serves the elite’s interest in regeneration and new opportunities. The ability to punish adversaries is hence term-limited too, and most elites like it that way.

This raises the question, of course, how Indonesian democracy has been able to resist full autocratization despite alarming signs of democratic erosion. Given that other countries have gone down the path of democratic reversal – including in Indonesia’s immediate region, South East Asia – this should not be taken for granted. The reason for this outcome is the significant power fragmentation that emerged from the messy post-Suharto transition between 1998 and 2004. This power fragmentation has been codified in the constitutional amendments of the early 2000s, as well as in numerous laws and regulations. The latter include decentralization laws that delegated much fiscal and political power to the regions (Honna 2006) – an arrangement that any president would find impossible to fully overturn. Local and central elites have become so used to this power dispersal that attempts at autocratization by a single political actor are seen as irreconcilable with the vested interest of Indonesia’s wide array of elite players. No Indonesian president since 1998, including Widodo, has been able to alter this constellation. Thus, the failure of Widodo’s term limit evasion campaign mirrored the post-Suharto polity’s long-standing power structure. In this power structure, elite actors rule in a coalition within which its members keep a watchful eye on each other in order to prevent any one player from becoming too powerful.

Democratic pressures from below have been important to support the existing competitive order, but they are not the dominant factor keeping Indonesian democracy functional. This was once again reflected in the term limit evasion episode. A majority of the Indonesian population rejected attempts to allow Widodo to stay in power, but these attitudes accorded with those of most elites. What from the outside could easily be read as an example of successful popular opposition against an autocratization move was, in fact, fully in line with the vested interests of those elites who were not personally tied to Widodo – in other words, the majority of elite players. The opinion polls rejecting term limit evasion served as material for these elites in order to make their case – while the Widodo loyalists running the campaign either ignored or misrepresented them. Public opinion, then, was an instrument in a game of elite competition.

These insights from the Indonesian case contribute new nuances to the comparative debate on term limit evasion attempts around the world. As noted, studies have found that multi-strategy campaigns by incumbents tend to be successful (they were not in Indonesia), and failures were mostly due to court interjections or popular disapproval – factors that were not decisive in the Indonesian case. The courts played no role in stopping Widodo’s campaign – indeed, some judges initially sent encouraging signals that they were willing to allow him to run for the vice-presidency, and one lower-ranking court even issued a verdict that would have delayed the elections. The importance of public opposition, for its part, needs to be contextualized within the intra-elite power struggle over term limits. Indonesia, therefore, is, then, is that more attention needs to be paid to the nature and details of power distribution in particular polities. High levels of elite contestation, even in otherwise weakening democracies, set important barriers to term limit evasion campaigns and autocratization initiatives more broadly (McKie 2019). If elites see their interests best served by ongoing intra-elite regeneration – as was once the case in the Chinese Communist Party prior to Xi – the chances of term limit revision are low. Successful term limit revision campaigns, on the other hand, require a level of personalization of political power that, at least in the Indonesian case, most incumbents fail to achieve.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In addition to Russia and pre-Xi China, other examples of authoritarian states practising term limits include Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Vietnam (in practice), Algeria, Egypt, Congo (both the Republic and Democratic Republic) and Mali, to name just a few.

2 See V-Dem (2023).

3 Prabowo eventually expressed his rejection of any delay to the 2024 elections in March 2023, after the Jakarta state court’s ruling that – if upheld – would have resulted in a suspension of election preparations.