In May 2013, Indonesia celebrated the 15th
anniversary of the downfall of President Suharto’s authoritarian New Order
regime. Yet while Suharto and his rule are more and more relegated to the
history books, there is still no agreement among observers and ordinary
citizens about the character of the state that emerged after 1998. Some view
the post-Suharto state as a model Muslim democracy that has proved to be much
more resilient than any of its Arab Spring counterparts. Others believe that
Suharto’s associates simply hijacked Indonesia’s new democratic institutions
and thus survived the transition unharmed. Others still are convinced that the
state is controlled by both old and new oligarchic forces, making democracy a
sham.
So what is the state of Indonesian democracy 15 years after
the end of authoritarianism? Unsurprisingly, the report card is mixed. The democratic transition has been marked by both
significant successes and dramatic failures — as one would expect from a state
trying to overcome deeply entrenched legacies of military hegemony, political
and societal corruption, communal tensions, and low levels of economic
development. But overall, the bottom line is that Indonesia today has a
functioning electoral democracy. According to Freedom House, it has been
Southeast Asia’s freest society since 2006. This is a remarkable achievement
given the chaos surrounding Suharto’s departure in 1998.
To begin with, Indonesia avoided territorial disintegration
in a period in which the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia (to name
only a few) decided to dissolve their unitary states. To a large extent this
was due to the unprecedented program of decentralisation launched in 1999 which
silenced secessionist calls in Bali, East Kalimantan and Riau. In combination,
democratisation and decentralisation allowed Indonesia’s regions to express
their local identities and formulate their own policy priorities — something
that had been impossible under the centralist regimes that had governed
Indonesia since 1945.
Similarly, Indonesia has successfully marginalised the
military in political affairs — in contrast to Egypt, for example, where the
army aborted the democratic experiment after only two tumultuous years. The
story of Indonesia’s democratisation after 1998 is primarily a narrative of
comprehensive civilianisation, both in the centre and in the regions. At the
end of Suharto’s rule, 40 per cent of Indonesia’s governors were retired or
active military; by 2013, a mere 6 per cent. It is difficult to overstate the
significance of this development, especially given widespread predictions in
1998 that another coup was only a matter of time.
Equally remarkable is the ease with which Indonesia
institutionalised electoral procedures that are widely viewed as free, fair and
competitive. There have been three national elections since 1999, two of which
led to peaceful changes in government, and almost one thousand ballots at the
provincial and district level since 2005. While administrative problems,
vote-buying, and corruption in electoral dispute resolution persist, elections
are now generally accepted as the only game in town. In a country that did not
witness a free election for an entire generation (the last democratic poll
before Suharto’s fall was in the late 1950s), such a seamless transition from
autocracy to electoral democracy could not be taken for granted.
Finally, post-Suharto democracy also destroyed the long-held
myth that only authoritarian rulers can guarantee sustained economic growth.
Indeed, it was Suharto who was responsible for the country’s economic collapse
in 1998, after which the democratic polity cleaned up the mess. Growth has
averaged between 5 and 6 per cent throughout the 2000s, and the debt-to-GDP
ratio now stands at 25 per cent — a figure many Western democracies would envy.
All these successes notwithstanding, there is frustration
among the Indonesian populace about a slow-down in the reform process since the mid-2000s. Under the government of Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono (who came to power in 2004 and whose second term will end in October
2014), democratic gains were consolidated but no further ground-breaking
reforms were launched. In fact, many democracy activists have noted that
Yudhoyono presided over an erosion of democratic quality in a number of key
policy areas.
Most importantly, the level of political corruption in
Indonesia has increased in recent years. While the country’s Anti-Corruption
Commission has carried out a number of high-profile arrests (ranging from
ministers to the Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court), the incentives for
corruption still outweigh the risks of being caught. Crucially, Yudhoyono’s
decision in 2005 to cut state subsidies to political parties by 90 per cent has
led the latter to intensify their predatory fundraising practices — party
cadres in public office have increasingly siphoned off money from national and
local budgets in order to fund the parties’ operational expenses. Of course,
the corrupted money is also used to fund exceedingly lavish lifestyles among
the political elite.
At the same time, some conservative circles in the Home
Ministry and other political agencies have tried to roll back electoral reforms
introduced since the early 2000s. The Home Ministry submitted a proposal to
parliament in 2013 that, if passed into law, would lead to the abolition of
direct elections for mayors and district heads (who, not coincidentally, hold
great political and fiscal powers under Indonesia’s decentralisation regime).
The move reflected anxiety among some political leaders about the extent to
which Indonesians have been democratically empowered since 1998, and it also
signalled that there are elite groups determined to recapture the privileges
they enjoyed before the vast expansion of electoral rights.
There is also a noticeable deterioration in the protection of
religious minority rights in post-Suharto Indonesia. Attacks on Christian
churches and Islamic non-mainstream groups such as the Ahmadis and the Shiites
have increased dramatically under Yudhoyono’s government, with the president
unable or unwilling to confront the radical militias responsible for the
violence. When Yudhoyono received an award in New York in May 2013 that
honoured him for efforts in promoting religious freedom in Indonesia, the
president was showered with ridicule and sarcasm by both concerned citizens at
home and democracy advocates abroad.
Yet on balance, Indonesian democracy is more stable, more
advanced and more deeply rooted in society than most observers would have
expected in 1998. It is obviously far from fully consolidated, and equally far
from becoming a liberal democracy in which the rule of law, civil liberties and
minority rights are upheld without prejudice. But given the almost complete
absence of democratic experience at the beginning of the transition,
Indonesia’s stability as a functional electoral democracy 15 years later is a
noteworthy achievement, and one that many young democracies in the Middle East
and elsewhere would like to replicate.
For Indonesia, the next challenge is to organise an orderly
transfer of power from Yudhoyono to his democratically elected successor. The
alternatives couldn’t be clearer: the front-runner so far — hugely popular
Jakarta governor Jokowi Widodo — stands for a reinvigoration of the reform
process. His most serious rival, Suharto’s former son-in-law Prabowo Subianto,
calls for tougher leadership and a nationalist revival. Ultimately, the choices
Indonesians make in this contest will reveal a lot about the kind of democracy
the country has become since shaking off authoritarianism.
Dr Marcus Mietzner is Senior Lecturer in the College of Asia
and the Pacific, The Australian National University.
This article appeared in the most recent
edition of the East Asia Forum Quarterly,‘Indonesia’s choices’.
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