About a year before the 2014 elections, a new sticker appeared on the backs of cars and motorbikes in Yogyakarta. It has a picture of a smiling Suharto. “Piye Le Kabare?” the Javanese-language caption asks. “Isih Penak Jamanku To?” (“How are you doing? Wasn’t it better in my time?”) At Suharto’s birthplace, the village of Kemusuk, on the outskirts of the city, a new museum opened with innovative visual displays about the high points of his career. It quickly became a thriving spot for domestic tourists, who were delivered in busloads. The museum has a small mosque attached. By contrast, the sprawling Suharto family house around the corner, built near the humble cottage of his birth, is decorated with images of Semar and other wayang characters. A servant proudly shows a spring where the young Suharto used to meditate. A large pendopo (pavilion) contains the reinterred remains of his two maternal forebears who were renowned kyai (holy men) in Javanese mysticism. Aspiring political candidates come here to meditate in the hope of imbibing some of the wahyu (authority) of the Suharto line.
At the end of the presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a decade widely seen as one that would “consolidate democracy” and launch Indonesia on a path to a more important global status in the twenty-first century, at least some in Suharto’s home region sensed that a nascent nostalgia for strong government was waiting to be harvested. It was based on a filtered view of an era slipping back into the past, one of which 60 million Indonesians of voting age in 2014 had no clear memory.
This was enabled by a widespread feeling that Yudhoyono had been, if not a failure, a disappointment. Three years into his first term, there was already a strong feeling in elite circles that he had “squandered” the mandate of his convincing victory over Megawati Sukarnoputri in the 2004 runoff, part of the country’s first direct presidential election. Nevertheless, in the 2009 election he had been so popular that he defeated Megawati in the first round with 60.8 percent of the vote; the PD, newly formed as a personal vehicle for his candidacy in 2004, became the biggest party in the DPR, its share of seats rising from 10 to 30 percent. With an even bigger mandate, no reelection to worry about in 2014, and the liberal-minded economist Boediono as his vice president, Yudhoyono was positioned to make the reforms that would put Indonesia’s fearful past behind it and enable the nation to confidently seize the opportunities of the new century. Instead, his second term was a litany of hesitation and retreat in the face of pressure.
Returned to power in 2009, Yudhoyono convened a three-day “national summit” with business, academic, and regional government representatives to review shortcomings of governance. Then he ordered his new cabinet to prepare a “100-day plan” to make early use of the mandate and set priorities in some fifteen areas. First on his list was smashing the “legal mafias,” which had just shown their baleful power in the conspiracy of police and prosecutors to frame two commissioners of the anticorruption agency. Other priorities included the revitalization of domestic defense industries to reduce dependence on foreign-supplied equipment; better coordination of the police, intelligence, military, and social-religious agencies in overcoming terrorism; increasing the electricity supply; expanding food production; better land-use planning and controls to meet climate-change commitments; more investment in infrastructure; incentives for small enterprises; extending health insurance; and improving education.
Even before the one hundred days were up, however, the government’s momentum had dissipated and its attention been diverted by the Bank Century controversy, whipped up in the DPR by the Golkar faction, ostensibly one of Yudhoyono’s partners. As we have seen, the controversy led to the sacrifice in 2010 of one of his most highly regarded ministers, Sri Mulyani Indrawati. The government failed to apply an automatic adjustment to fuel prices, leading to periodic political crises over price hikes to prevent the ballooning of subsidies. An inordinate amount of revenue continues to flow to this form of “middle-class welfare,” instead of to measures such as the abolition of school fees in the upper secondary years or the financing of Yudhoyono’s ambitious health insurance scheme, launched in 2014.
As well, powerful ministries continued to subvert or contradict government policies, diverting more resources to nationalist symbols and deterring new foreign investment by applying conditions that mandated increased local equity and processing. Growth of formal jobs lagged behind the economic growth rate, and the informal sector actually started growing again as a proportion of workforce activity. An official survey in 2013 found that 37.2 percent of children under five had stunted growth, a slight increase from 2007.
Military reform halted when Yudhoyono took over. The territorial role was maintained, diverting resources from improving Indonesia’s external defense capability and perpetuating many corrupt and predatory moneymaking activities. Yudhoyono dragged his heels on the official divestment of military businesses, and it was carried out in a less than transparent manner, with some enterprises transferred to civilian proxies and the auditor in charge openly saying that the territorial role helped keep the military involved in illegal business. The military retained jurisdiction over its personnel for offenses against civilian law. Courts-martial jailed soldiers who were involved in shootings and murders, notably in the Theys Eluay and Cebongan prison cases, but for much shorter terms than civilian courts would have awarded.
Yudhoyono maintained impunity for military personnel who were involved in past human rights abuses and indeed kept some figures in high government positions, such as the defense department head Syafrie Syamsuddin (who was persona non grata in the United States over incidents in East Timor) and his cabinet secretary for some years, Sudi Silalahi (widely seen as an organizer of the Laskar Jihad militia, which had joined interreligious fighting in Ambon and Poso). This impunity stretched down to the lowliest members of the civilian militias raised in East Timor, as was clear from the immense pressure Yudhoyono placed on Dili to have Martenus Bere released in 2009. The acquittal of the retired general Muchdi Purwopranjono over the murder of the human rights activist Munir Said Thalib left unexplored the higher levels of the conspiracy within the BIN.
If nostalgia for the Suharto era has some political currency in 2014, Yudhoyono must bear some responsibility. He did not come out to question the mythology of the New Order. Toward the end of his presidency, he paid homage on October 1 at the Crocodile Hole, where the story of communist treachery is enshrined.
In 2012 came a moment in which Yudhoyono could grapple with the legacy of the 1965–66 massacres. His government’s own Human Rights Commission concluded a three-year investigation that found that the PKI massacres warranted redress. Survivors and family members of the victims emerged from the shadows to tell their stories to the media. Possibly influenced by the Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s moving apology to his country’s indigenous people in 2010, Yudhoyono floated the idea of an apology for the massacres, balanced by the inclusion of the shooting of Muslim demonstrators at Tanjung Priok in 1984 and the abduction and sniper shooting of students in 1998. His legal adviser Albert Hasibuan said he had been charged with drafting the apology.
As it happened, that was the last that was heard about it. Yudhoyono’s military colleagues and the Muslim parties in his coalition persuaded him to drop the idea. It can be assumed that his wife and her family were also defensive: Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, the president’s father-in-law, was the general who had set off the massacres in his sweep across Java and Bali at the head of the Special Forces. The desultory investigation of the former first family’s moneymaking ended with Suharto’s death in 2008.
The issue would not go away, however, reemerging with the release of the chilling documentary film The Act of Killing in the United States at the end of 2012. The Indonesian magazine Tempo collected book-length material detailing mass execution after mass execution across Java in 1965–66, with the leading perpetrators coming from the Pemuda Ansor, the youth wing of the NU.
An example was given to Yudhoyono by the mayor of a small city in Central Sulawesi. As a sixteen-year-old in 1965, Rusdi Mastura had been delegated by his teachers to join those who were guarding three local PKI committee members. Men had come to take the prisoners away one night. When Rusdi became mayor of Palu, he started inquiries into their fate. Witnesses came forward. They had been taken by the Palu army garrison outside town to a prepared grave and shot. In March 2013 Rusdi stood up at Palu’s town hall and issued a public apology, promising help with health and education to the bereaved families and to build a memorial to the killings.
Yudhoyono’s retreat was further shown up in September 2013 when the Dutch ambassador issued a public apology for the killing of up to 5,000 villagers in South Sulawesi around the end of 1946 by Dutch commandos under Captain Raymond “Turk” Westerling and handed compensation to the surviving families of the victims. A month after the Dutch apology, some families of the PKI dead and former political prisoners gathered in Yogyakarta. They were attacked and dispersed by vigilantes who called themselves the Indonesian Anti-Communist Front. “It is legal for us to kill them, just like when we killed PKI members in the past,” the leader of the attackers proclaimed to reporters. The police stood by.
But it was over issues of religious tolerance that Yudhoyono has disappointed the most, at least among more secular Indonesians, educated women, and minorities. He gave unprecedented deference to the MUI, raising it to an almost judicial status. The decision to adopt restrictions on the proselytizing freedom of the Ahmadiyah sect in 2008, in response to the MUI’s urging of a ban, gave the signal (no doubt unintended) for repeated attacks on Ahmadiyah communities and places of worship (of which about fifty remain closed).
A 1969 regulation on the building of places of worship was tightened in 2006, giving more power to surrounding communities to veto new constructions. Since then, about 600 churches either built or under construction have been closed or demolished. Yudhoyono’s government has not enforced court orders permitting church projects to go ahead. Even a Supreme Court order allowing a congregation to enter the Yasmin church in Bogor, just outside the capital, was not enough for the national police to be ordered to protect worshippers from a local Muslim group that was blocking their access.
The forces of orthodoxy later moved on to the Shia community among the Muslim ummat, a minority in Indonesia, although in some eyes the traditionalist Sunni followers of NU also veer close to Shiism. Yudhoyono’s religious affairs minister suggested to displaced Ahmadiyah and Shia communities that the solution to their problems lay in converting to the mainstream. His home affairs minister praised the FPI as a potential national asset. Yudhoyono himself tended to speak more of the sentiments of the majority than of the rights and freedoms of the minorities.
Toward the end of Yudhoyono’s presidency, moves were afoot to rein in some of the democratic and constitutional reforms that had applied since he took office. When direct personal criticism cut, his circle floated the idea of reinstating the presidential lèse-majesté law struck down by the constitutional court. In 2013 his party tabled a draft amendment to the election law that would end the direct election of bupati and city mayors, in the third tier of government. Such elections were wasteful of funds, encouraged corruption, and were often accompanied by violence, the bill’s supporters argued. Instead, the executives would be appointed by a vote of the district legislature, a process that critics saw as bringing back an even murkier process and blocking the rise of independent reformist candidates. The Ministry of Home Affairs appeared to be on a collision course with the population of Aceh over the use of the former GAM flag as the province’s emblem. The drift toward splitting Papua into more provinces was unaddressed in proposals for enhanced Otsus (special autonomy) laws that were passed on to Yudhoyono’s successor.
All this added up to a presidential style that was widely seen as unduly passive even by Javanese standards, which value caution, quietness, and compromise. His critics said Yudhoyono acted “more like a referee” or “led from behind.” “We have a president, but do we have a leader?” asked the senior journalist August Parengkuan. The Aceh peace settlement might not have happened if the vice president, Jusuf Kalla, had not exceeded his authority. Reporting its talks with several of the president’s advisers in 2008, the US embassy said that the “thinking general” had a firm grasp of the issues coming before his cabinet and often spoke at length and listened to everyone in the room but would tend to conclude without issuing instructions or summing up. He was forgiving of incompetence and intent on maintaining harmony. In the Ahmadiyah decision, Yudhoyono overruled nine of his advisers and accepted the single voice of the MUI, telling his staff he needed to retain the support of conservative Muslims and to save the face of three ministers who had made public promises of some sort of decree.
The president’s former military colleagues, such as Agus Widjojo, say that no one should have been surprised at this. “That is SBY,” Widjojo says. Another former colleague, the retired general T. B. Silalahi, who became a presidential adviser, told the Americans in 2008 that Yudhoyono had been the “golden boy” of his military academy class, graduating as its medal winner, and had been promoted quickly and “protected from controversy throughout his career.” As a battalion commander in Timor, Yudhoyono had been kept at headquarters in Dili, and as second in command of the Jakarta garrison in 1996, he had remained disconnected from the infamous attack on Megawati’s party headquarters, Silalahi was quoted as saying. As we have seen, he steered through the turmoil of 1998 and the violence of 1999 in Timor on Wiranto’s staff without any taint being attached to him. Indeed, Silalahi claimed, Yudhoyono had supported students and “worked with moderates to ease Suharto out of power.”
Behind the Javanese reticence, some saw an individual diffidence in Yudhoyono. The son of a modest-income priyayi family in a small town in East Java, he married into the family of the illustrious General Wibowo and has often seemed more like the adoptive son of that family than the self-made career soldier that his academic and service records describe. His intellectualism and extensive foreign exposure—at American military colleges and universities, at courses in Malaysia and Europe, and in the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia—may have estranged him from his nationalist military colleagues, who were steeped in brutal domestic counterinsurgency campaigns, or he may have felt they did.
But his wariness would have been encouraged by the precarious calm of Jakarta politics when he won office and the weakness of his backing, aside from the popular mandate. His Partai Demokrat had no deep base or great sources of funding and had to get its legislation through the DPR political casino. Powerful military rivals looked on, envious and contemptuous that a “thinking general” should overtake them. They and the political party leaders had the ability to whip up demonstrations and scandals in the DPR. The example of Wahid’s impeachment was all too recent. Fears of a military takeover took a long while to recede, as the alarm over the 2006 coup in Bangkok indicated.
Although these excuses were wearing thin by the second term, some of the criticism of Yudhoyono failed to appreciate the nature of politics and leadership in a democratic system of checks and balances. The powers of the presidency had been greatly limited by the reforms of 1998–2004, and those of the parliament, the judiciary, the provinces, and the regions greatly enhanced. The role of the military as the enforcer of the president’s policies had ended. The capacity of the police to win public trust or enforce the law had not yet grown. Extremist voices and unscrupulous cabals had less to fear.
To his credit, Yudhoyono supported the work of the KPK, the anticorruption commission, and its special linked courts, even when their investigations and prosecutions struck deep into his own party over the Hambalang sports complex scandal; by 2013 they seemed to have shattered his hopes of leaving a strong PD, one able to field a successor. He also identified himself closely with the effort to preserve Indonesia’s forest cover through the REDD+ schemes, an initiative that persists, despite the many obstacles it has faced. Suggestions of special laws to protect the president from personal criticism were not taken up in legislative attempts, and Indonesia’s remarkable media freedom came to be uncontested and largely uncontrolled, except through ownership strings. In short, Yudhoyono presided over a decade of unprecedented peace and prosperity in Indonesia, and although religious minorities suffered from the tyranny of the majority in places, Yudhoyono himself embodied a new kind of educated, worldly moderation in politics and religion.
If there was one contender to replace Yudhoyono and remedy his legacy of “indecision,” it was Prabowo Subianto. That the former Kopassus commander and former son-in-law of Suharto could emerge from the darker side of the past and become a serious challenger showed the failure of the reform-era leaders—Yudhoyono in particular—to address the brutal side of the New Order, assign accountability, and draw the historic lessons.
As we have seen, Prabowo carried a huge weight of suspicion arising from many incidents during his military career. He was a ferocious and successful proponent of the vicious counterinsurgency war in East Timor from the late 1970s. In August 1983 a ceasefire between the Indonesian army and the Falantil guerrillas under José Xanana Gusmão broke down at an area called Kraras. Timorese auxiliaries suddenly turned on a unit of Indonesian combat engineers—for shooting local men and molesting a woman, according to some accounts—and killed sixteen. The army sent in a battalion, scattering the population into the bush. At the end of August, Prabowo arrived with a Kopassus task force and began operations around Kraras. In early September soldiers selected thirty-two civilians, two for each dead soldier, and executed them.
The provincial governor at the time, Mario Carrascalao, later wrote in his memoirs that the East Timor military commander, Colonel Rujito, told him such reprisals were army policy. Some accounts put Prabowo on the spot and in charge of the executions; he has not given a clear account of his activities in Timor around that time. As part of his antiguerilla activities, Prabowo fostered Timorese irregular fighters; some of them later moved to Jakarta as street criminals for political hire. One was Hercules Rozario Marshal, who became a “godfather” of extortion in the capital for decades and who set up a movement to support Gerindra, with Prabowo as head of its advisory board.
Earlier in 1983, Prabowo and his Kopassus unit prepared to arrest the then army commander, Benny Murdani, and other senior generals for an alleged plot against Suharto. More senior Kopassus officers disarmed the unit, and the defense minister, General Mohammed Jusuf, later found Prabowo’s suspicions to be wide of the truth. By then, Prabowo had married Suharto’s daughter Titiek. He was moved sideways into the Kostrad command, not returning to Kopassus until 1995, when he was given three rapid promotions ahead of his peers. In 1997–98, Kopassus personnel under his command formed a hit squad called Tim Mawar (Team Rose), which abducted and tortured nine student leaders and democracy activists.
The influence of Prabowo has also been seen in a rash of media disinformation that blamed the economic crisis on the machinations of the United States, the IMF, Jewish international financiers, and unpatriotic Sino-Indonesian tycoons. It was noted that Prabowo had been cultivating an Islamist audience through the hardline Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia (Islamic Propagation Council of Indonesia) and several of his more devout military colleagues. One senior ethnic Chinese business figure, Sofyan Wanandi, has said Prabowo accused “Chinese Catholics” of trying to topple Suharto by taking their capital out of the country. Prabowo had told Wanandi he was ready “to drive all the Chinese out of the country even if that sets the economy back twenty or thirty years.”
In March 1998 Suharto promoted Prabowo to the Kostrad command, putting him in charge of most of the army troops ready for rapid action, including Kopassus. We have seen how, later in 1998, he attempted to overawe the newly installed replacement president, B. J. Habibie, the day after Suharto’s resignation; how the new administration court-martialed and jailed several of the Kopassus officers and soldiers belonging to Tim Mawar; and how a military “honor board” then expelled Prabowo from the army.
The most specific allegation against Prabowo derives from the Tim Mawar abuses. The senior-most Kopassus officer sent to court-martial and jailed over the abductions was only a major, Bambang Kristiono. He insisted it was all his initiative, done without informing his superiors. Prabowo accepted only command responsibility and claimed that, having been cashiered from the army, he had paid the penalty. His brother, the businessman Hashim Djojohadikusumo, even suggested that the abducted activists should be grateful for being returned alive.
As for the irregular forces Prabowo raised and unleashed in Timor, he has argued that local militias and self-defense forces were part of Indonesian military doctrine and common to any counterinsurgency campaign. “That’s what the Americans found out in Iraq,” he told one interviewer in 2009. He drew another analogy with the Iraq campaign, comparing the Tim Mawar case to the American abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. What was a human rights abuse for one regime was “extraordinary rendition” for another. Prabowo has scoffed at the allegations he was commencing a coup d’état, in the style of Suharto’s gradual moves against Sukarno, when he confronted Habibie in May 1998. With the thirty-four battalions of Kostrad behind him, who could have stopped him if he had wanted to seize power?
Drummed out of the army and divorced from Titiek Suharto, Prabowo spent two years in the political wilderness—appropriately, in the Biblical setting of Jordan, whose King Abdullah was an old friend from the days of their military training together in the United States. He then returned to Indonesia; his brother Hashim had restored his fortune through the sale of the Kazakhstan oilfield, and with his help Prabowo acquired a pulp and paper business from the jailed Bob Hasan and later moved into coal-mining leases, palm oil, and fisheries. His home base became a high-security ranch at Hambalang, in the foothills just outside Jakarta.
In 2004 Prabowo contested internal elections in Golkar to choose the party’s presidential candidate, coming last; his old army foe Wiranto was the winner. Prabowo decided he needed his own machine. That year he won election as chairman of the largely dormant Indonesian Farmers’ Association, his modern campaign tactics and funding overwhelming his rivals, and through the organization he connected with voters across Java, in particular. Prabowo also became leader of the association that promoted pencak silat, a form of martial arts similar to jujitsu in the Malay culture, and later of an association of traders.
In 2008 he resigned from Golkar and established Gerindra, declaring himself its candidate for president. At the 2009 elections, the party gained only 4.5 percent of the vote and twenty-six seats in the 560-member parliament, far below the threshold required to nominate Prabowo as a presidential candidate. He negotiated a written pact with Megawati Sukarnoputri: he joined her campaign as her vice presidential candidate; in return, she and her PDI-P would give him and Gerindra top billing in an alliance for the 2014 elections. The pair were trounced at the 2009 presidential election, winning 27 percent of the first-round vote, compared to Yudhoyono’s 60.8 percent.
Over the following five years, Prabowo worked hard to clean up his credentials and build grassroots support, helped by a lavish advertising campaign that he and his brother financed. Through the farmers’ association, he signed up millions of members for Gerindra; he toured Java, telling villagers how they were falling behind in Indonesia’s resources and commodities boom. He brought thousands selected as cadres for live-in training at his Hambalang ranch. All had to deposit their mobile phones and other devices and devote themselves for three or four days to mastering the Gerindra platform brochure and door-knocking techniques.
Prabowo studied the campaign of Barack Obama and became the leading user of social media among Indonesia’s politicians. He also hired a number of American political campaign managers, principally the controversial publicist and film-maker Rob Allyn, to apply more sophisticated and differentiated messaging than had been hitherto seen in the country’s politics. To educated audiences, at home and overseas, he delivered statistics-heavy speeches pointing to a future in which depleting natural resources and a growing population would meet in a great disappointment of hopes. Nearly half the money circulating in Indonesia was in Jakarta, and almost 40 percent more in other large cities. No wonder Indonesia’s Gini coefficient was showing greater inequality. Where others, such as Yudhoyono, blamed the weaknesses of government on corruption, Prabowo reversed the linkage: corruption and inefficiency derived from weak government.
One great source of weakness he saw was the proliferation of autonomous governments since 1998: where China had one autonomous body on average for each 42 million of its population and India one for each 34 million, Indonesia had one for every 484,000 people. With thirty-three provinces and 502 kabupaten and municipalities, Indonesia had created “gross inefficiencies” for itself. By the end of 2012, Prabowo pointed out, seventeen serving or former provincial governors and 138 bupati or mayors were in jail, facing trial or under investigation for corruption. Even local election campaigns were costing a thousand times the monthly salary of a bupati: how could that be recouped except by milking official funds?
Prabowo set out a “big push strategy” to ramp up food and biofuel production from new estates, to invest in more infrastructure and social services, and to “simplify and increase the efficiency of all executive, legislative and judicative institutions.” To encapsulate his vision of a prosperous and respected Indonesia, Prabowo was wont to cite the Kopassus motto, “Siapa Berani Menang”—a translation of the motto of Britain’s Special Air Services Regiment: “Who Dares Wins.” As the 2014 elections approached, opinion polls by Indonesian media organizations showed Prabowo to be among the top two or three preferences for president. A very young electorate, it seemed, had no memory of, or concern for, Prabowo’s past and liked the machismo he projected.
Human rights issues, however, continued to cast a shadow over Prabowo in elite circles and internationally. The 1998 military “honor council” had not been a trial, and he had been dismissed from the army not for the abductions but for “disobeying orders.” In 2000 Prabowo became the first person barred from entering the United States under the International Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Other governments of signatory countries feared that they might be obliged to allow prosecution over the Tim Mawar abductions, should Prabowo enter their territory.
In Indonesia, Prabowo tried to allay grievances by recruiting three of the nine acknowledged abduction and torture victims as candidates and campaign staff. But he also employed the former leader of the Tim Mawar, Major Bambang Kristiono, after he completed his jail term. Human rights organizations began questioning the fate of thirteen activists who had disappeared in 1997–98; Prabowo has denied any knowledge of them. Some suggest they may have been eliminated by the Jakarta military garrison, then under the command of Syafrie Syamsuddin (later the head of the defense department under Yudhoyono, and also persona non grata in the United States).
As much as any specific human rights cases, however, many of Prabowo’s former army colleagues and civilian contemporaries worried about his personality. To them, his 1983 attempt to arrest General Benny Murdani and the events of 1998 indicated an impulsive character prone to acting on conspiracy theories. Some were even reminded of Adolf Hitler’s use of his 1933 election gains to create a totalitarian state, suggesting that Prabowo was using populist support to recentralize power in the presidency.
The candidate himself worked to allay these fears. On the personality question, Prabowo was said to retain a professional “anger manager” on his staff. The very public conversion of his brother Hashim to an evangelical version of Christianity also sent conciliatory signals to the Chinese community and other predominantly Christian groups. Whereas other secular parties were setting up Muslim wings, Gerindra took the unusual step of starting an affiliate Christian association, with Hashim as its head. Prabowo himself vowed to get the contentious Yasmin church in Bogor built as soon as he was elected.
The brothers also made efforts to improve Prabowo’s standing in Washington, endowing a chair in Southeast Asian affairs at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, named after their father. A group called Business Executives for National Security—led by a wealthy mining executive, Stanley Weiss—promoted Prabowo as the potential Lee Kuan Yew of Indonesia, which might then emulate Singapore’s rise out of developing-country status.
In 2012 Prabowo at once showed off his political clout and created an immense obstacle for himself. The governorship of the national capital was coming up for election. Prabowo persuaded Megawati to bring in the popular mayor of the central Java city of Solo, Joko Widodo, as her party’s candidate. Widodo would face the Golkar incumbent, Fauzi Bowo, who was notorious for his huge payments to smaller parties to win their support.
A carpenter’s son, Widodo grew up in a house with woven bamboo walls, in a squatter settlement along a river bank in Solo, from which his father also ran a lumber business. Widodo did well at state schools and gained entrance to the prestigious Gajah Mada University in Yogyakarta, where he gained a degree in forestry engineering. After work in forestry concessions in Aceh, he returned to Solo and started up his own furniture making business, which made products for both domestic sales and export. Widodo had been mayor of Solo since 2005. Becoming known affectionately as “Jokowi,” he had protected its ancient buildings and historical precincts, cleaned up its parks and streets, and restored it as a cultural and tourism center. The city’s image as a recent host of Islamic extremists, centered on the Ngruki pesantren, had receded. Although he belonged to the PDI-P (his father was an avid follower of Sukarno and made pilgrimages to the first president’s grave in Blitar), Widodo had managed to avoid the label of “politician.” Skinny, modest, and prone to on-the-spot inspections and public encounters (known in Javanese as blusukan), he was seen as “one of us” by the Indonesian public, and not one of the political class.
Prabowo teamed him up with a seasoned regional politician from his own Gerindra party, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama—usually known by his Hakka-language nickname, “Ahok”—an ethnic Chinese former bupati on the tin-mining island of Belitung. The Gerindra cadres set to work, taking a detailed manifesto for city improvement around the capital’s neighborhoods. The combination of the down-to-earth Jokowi, Javanese and Muslim, and the blunt-speaking Ahok, ethnic Chinese and Christian, swept to victory, signaling a more inclusive mentality in a city that had a long tradition of backing Islamic parties and the Golkar machine.
Within a year, Widodo was so popular that calls mounted for Megawati to stand aside and make him her party’s candidate for president. Opinion polls showed him significantly ahead of the next most popular figure, Prabowo. Inside the PDI-P, the push for Widodo came from the realization that Megawati was unlikely to win the presidency herself; he was the only chance to get the party back into power. Moreover, he was so popular that numerous candidates could expect to win seats in legislatures on his coattails, without the usual campaign expenditure. Outside the party, it was a case both of Widodo’s own popularity and, for some, of the appeal of someone who could defeat Prabowo. Despite his perceived disregard for political guile, however, Widodo paid careful homage to entrenched power groups. On the day of the scandal of the murderous raid on Yogyakarta’s Cebongan prison by vengeful Kopassus soldiers, the Jakarta governor made a call at the Kopassus headquarters on the fringe of the capital—a gesture of support.
Megawati herself was reluctant to step back from the leadership. She had a strong sense of the party as the home of Sukarnoism. Would that family legacy disappear once Widodo took the leadership? While not rejecting Widodo as a possibility, she kept her options open until late in the run-up to the April 2014 parliamentary elections. Disguising his ambitions, Widodo held back from pushing the question for fear of offending her pride. Her followers floated the idea of Widodo serving an apprenticeship as her vice president. This offered Megawati a good prospect of the presidential election win that had eluded her three times before. For his part, an increasingly testy Prabowo tried to hold Megawati to her agreement of 2009. Her entourage could only vaguely remember the piece of paper. When they did recall it, they said it had lapsed because the Megawati-Prabowo team had lost in 2009.
Prabowo’s second line of argument was that Widodo had won Jakarta because of Gerindra’s initiative and campaign support. He had also promised the people of Jakarta to serve them for five years; he needed to show results from his governorship and would still be young enough to contest the presidency in 2019. All Prabowo’s effort and all the funding poured by himself and Hashim into Gerindra since 2008 (about $500 million in total, some of his supporters estimated) depended, it seemed, on Widodo’s sense of his obligations, as well as on Megawati’s stubborn pride.
Early in 2014, however, Megawati recognized what the opinion polls were saying and decided to hand the presidential candidacy to Widodo. The tactical question then arose: when to announce it? Going public too early, Megawati feared, would make her legislative candidates and party campaign managers too complacent. Widodo and his advisers argued that continued suspense would reduce the effectiveness of his contribution to the PDI-P campaign. Megawati held out until the eve of the official three-week campaign period before revealing that Widodo had been anointed to carry forward the Sukarno heritage.
Other parties and candidates trailed behind these two leading camps. In Golkar, the business magnate Aburizal Bakrie held control of the party machine and insisted he would run as its presidential candidate. He had won the party chairmanship in 2009 and had gotten himself nominated in a process that denied others the opportunity to put themselves forward for selection. Free advertising on his group’s two television channels and the publicity spinoff from owning several football clubs projected “Ical” (his preferred nickname) as a down-to-earth pragmatist who could get Indonesia moving.
Bakrie’s standing in the opinion polls languished, however. At Sidoarjo in East Java stood an effigy of him wearing a yellow Golkar campaign shirt, on the vast field of mud spilling from his company’s exploration well. The ongoing dispute in London with other shareholders in the Bumi coal enterprise suggested a business group that was veering from one loan crisis to another, with Bakrie perhaps out to use Golkar’s political power to keep the government agencies off his back.
No alternatives to Bakrie stood out as potential election winners. The former vice president and party chairman, Jusuf Kalla, had been knocked out in the first-round vote in 2009 when he stood as Golkar candidate with the ex-general Wiranto as his running mate. By 2014 his peacemaking in the eastern islands and Aceh was many years ago, and Kalla himself—turning 72 in May 2014—was regarded as too old for the youthful electorate. Scandal-tarnished figures from the New Order were visible elsewhere in the party’s senior hierarchy. Golkar, it was said, was a party that eats its young. And did it really need the presidency? Holding a consistent 20 percent or so of the vote and the parliamentary seats throughout the reform era, Golkar was highly useful, if not essential, for getting any difficult policy into application. Bargaining was what politics was all about.
Divided according to the different religious aliran (streams), wracked internally by personality disputes, and hit by various scandals, the Muslim parties also seemed set to remain in supporting roles. The PKS, or Prosperous Justice Party, which had once seemed the rising star in Indonesian politics, had sunk in public esteem after the unseemly multiple marriages of its top leaders and the involvement of some of them in the massive beef import corruption case, in which former party president Lutfi Hasan Ishaaq received a sixteen-year jail sentence in December 2013. The other three main Muslim parties—the PAN, under Yudhoyono’s senior minister Hatta Rajasa, the PKB, which was squabbling over Abdurrahman Wahid’s legacy, and the PPP, led by Yudhoyono’s contentious religious affairs minister Suryadharma Ali—were useful allies rather than serious contenders for majority support.
The steady Islamization of Indonesian society was reassuring for believers, who could look at parties that had ideas about improving their livelihoods and welfare. Their leaders were potential running mates for secular candidates. Nominations to run in the presidential election also required the backing of 20 percent of the parliamentary membership elected three months earlier (or 25 percent of the popular vote). The Muslim parties could help lift a candidate over this threshold—hence Yudhoyono’s careful inclusion of them all in his governing coalition, rewarded by ministerial positions. Prabowo, too, seemed alert to this contingency, with his longtime ally and controversial former Kopassus colleague Muchdi Purwoprandjono leaving Gerindra to join the PPP in 2011.
In the election for the DPR held on April 9, 2014 no party emerged with a very clear claim on power. The PDI-P gained the biggest vote, 18.95 per cent, but not quite yielding the 20 per cent of seats needed to nominate a presidential candidate on its own, and showing the effects of Widodo’s delayed anointment. Golkar won 14.75 per cent and Gerindra 11.81 per cent. These three parties were thus in the running to form coalitions around them for a presidential tilt. Yudhoyono’s Partai Demokrat won 10.19 per cent but lacked a magnetic candidate to succeed him. The Muslim parties faired surprisingly well: The NU-based PKB at 9.04 per cent, the Muhammadiyah-linked PAN at 7.59 per cent, the PPP at 6.53 per cent and the Muslim Brotherhood-influenced PKS at 6.79 per cent (the latter confounding predictions that its scandals might result in failure to reach the 3.5 per cent threshold to win DPR seats). Along with two secular parties led by rejected Golkar aspirants, retired general Wiranto’s Hanura at 5.26 percent and media tycoon Surya Paloh’s NasDem (National Democrat) at 6.72 percent, these second-echelon parties were candidates for courtship in the presidential dance.
With the Democrats tied to Yudhoyono’s weak legacy, and Golkar locked to a widely disliked leader in Bakrie, the presidential competition got down to a two-candidate race. A combination of horse-trading and fervent Islamic appeal gained Prabowo the support of PAN, after he chose its Hatta Rajasa as running mate, and the PKS, with the PPP also signing up, despite an internal revolt against its leader, Suryadharma Ali (by then sacked as religious affairs minister and facing corruption investigations). Prabowo also evoked New Order nostalgia for “firm” government in his overtures to Golkar, which eventually succumbed. This gave him, at least while he looked a potential winner, the backing of nearly 60 per cent of the DPR membership, a vital source of support for a president in a system lacking a US-style presidential veto over legislation. Widodo’s main support outside the PDI-P came from the PKB, from Paloh’s NasDem, and from a clutch of former army generals with deep distrust of Prabowo. These included Wiranto, who brought in his Hanura party, former Jakarta governor Sutiyoso, who had a small party of his own, and Luhut Panjaitan, by then an influential businessman. But from looking like a cakewalk for Widodo, in polling early in the year, the competition narrowed to the point where a month before the election, some polling institutions linked to interests fearful of Prabowo withheld their findings.
The theme of politics as SBY’s presidency drew to an end was the kind of government Indonesia needed after a decade of perceived indecisiveness. Prabowo made much of the scandals emerging among provincial and regional governments, suggesting that a tightening of Jakarta’s control was the remedy. Yudhoyono’s own party was floating a draft law to abolish direct elections of bupati and mayors. In official speeches, especially by military leaders, the term Negara Kesatuan (Unitary State) was increasingly attached to Republik Indonesia, which had sufficed until the reform period.
Prabowo ramped up this theme, launching his campaign with a mass rally at a Jakarta football stadium at which he arrived by helicopter and then, wearing knee-high boots, rode a chestnut horse around the perimeter along ranks of young men in red-and-white uniforms. Here and in other speeches in the Indonesian language, he railed against the “thieves” who were stealing Indonesia’s wealth or selling out to foreign interests, and made conspicuous Koranic references. To those with long memories, it looked like protesting too much: Prabowo was the son of the economist whose pupils had re-opened Indonesia to foreign investment and who at one time had been on the CIA payroll; his mother was a Christian from Manado, and his father from the aristocratic priyayi class known for its Hindu leanings; Prabowo himself had been educated outside Indonesia. Yet with 30 per cent of the 188 million eligible voters aged between 17 and 29, many had no memory of all this, nor of the old human rights cases. As the campaign drew on, Prabowo appealed to authoritarian as well as nationalistic yearnings. In one speech ten days ahead of the July 9 vote, he spoke favorably of “a return to the 1945 Constitution” (the charter that conferred wide emergency powers on the president in the desperate days after Japan’s surrender (and of decision-making by consensus rather than majority vote. The floating of this idea deepened fears that a victorious Prabowo would set about undoing all the democratic reforms since the fall of his ex-father-in-law in 1998. Even further, Prabowo’s campaign consciously tried to awaken millenarian hopes among the Javanese: his campaign workers handed out 50,000 rupiah banknotes with a stamp proclaiming him as the ratu adil, the “just ruler” expected in Javanese tradition to appear and come to the rescue when dynasties declined and disorder ruled.
There was a darker side to the campaign too, recalling the “birther” smear against Barack Obama. An unregistered tabloid newspaper appeared six weeks ahead of the vote, showing a fake marriage certificate purporting to show Joko Widodo was a Christian and of Chinese parentage. The newspaper was circulated around mosques and Islamic schools, evidently using a mailing list held at the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was allocated to the PPP in Yudhoyono’s government, a party by then allied to Prabowo. An official in the periphery of Yudhoyono’s advisory circle was identified as the publisher. This crude smear, playing to ethnic and religious prejudice, was patently false, but Widodo felt obliged to make his own Islamic faith more conspicuous (including by a quick umroh or short pilgrimage to Mecca just ahead of the vote).
The generals on Widodo’s side threw back what seemed to be rather more truthful negatives on Prabowo’s part. They said that as his seniors, they had seen military records which allegedly included adverse psychological assessments; Prabowo had been held back a year in the military academy for indiscipline; he had mounted the coup attempt against the army command in 1983; his dismissal in 1998 had been for authorizing the Tim Mawar abductions.
Nonetheless, the Jokowi campaign started weakly. It was badly organized, with the candidate’s daily scheduled hopelessly overloaded, so that local support groups were left carrying expenses when he failed to show up and busloads of reporters were trapped in traffic trying to reach venues. A coherent policy document appeared only five days before the vote. The campaign pitch was mild, emphasizing the candidate’s simple lifestyle, modest upbringing, and reputation for honesty. The slogan was “Jokowi is us.” Widodo used the word publik (the public, emphasizing citizenry with rights) rather the rakyat (the people, suggesting a passive mass) that Prabowo tended to employ. Prabowo evoked an agrarian dream of vast new agricultural zones in the outer islands keeping the bellies of the rakyat full, harking back to Suharto’s drive for self-sufficiency in rice; Widodo talked of smarter consumption of resources. Both spoke of promoting domestic enterprise and keeping foreign investors in their place. Where Prabowo offered a more tegas (firm) leadership that would take the necessary decisions, Widodo talked of administrative systems to take discretion out of the hands of politicians and officials, at least in routine transactions, and to involve the public in consultations ahead of major decisions. At least initially, Widodo looked like an ingénue wandering onto the national political stage. Some Javanese compared this to the episode Petruk Dadi Ratu (Petruk becomes king) inserted into wayang (traditional theatre) versions of the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. In this, the thin one of four clownish figures picks up a talisman of power accidentally dropped by a powerful warrior and becomes king, with comic and chaotic results. Yet as the campaign wore on, centered on five televised debates, Widodo showed more firmness in his grasp of policy issues, while Prabowo noticeably moderated his vehemence, apparently out of fear his strident appeal could evoke fear rather than respect. The vice-presidential candidates were also influential. On Prabowo’s side Hatta Rajasa delivered a welter of figures on demand. Widodo had meanwhile resisted pressures to enlist Megawati’s daughter Puan Maharani as running mate; instead he enlisted Jusuf Kalla. On television, the former vice-president put in some telling blows, including a jibe at the various “mafias” represented in a Prabowo coalition supposed to be resolute against kebocoran (leakage) of state funds.
The election became a stark choice between two kinds of leadership. As one businessman and writer in Surabaya, Johannes Nugroho, put it: “Prabowo embodies the quasi-feudal Indonesia in which leaders emerge from ‘lineage’ families such as his, the continuity of tradition and privilege of the ruling class. His brand of power is paternalism in its highest form. In complete contrasts Joko Widodo is a self-made businessman who ventured into politics, whose ancestry is no different from that of most Indonesians. Yet this is the essence of his mass appeal. Jokowi is the Indonesian Dream in the making.” Another election watcher in the East Java city, political scientist Suka Widodo, saw it as contest of old and new political styles. “In Java, there is a belief that the leader has to be impressive, handing out benefits,” he said. “By contrast Jokowi is asking for volunteers and donations from the voters, instead of handing out money to the people. Prabowo looks the part.”
If Prabowo drew on some of the George W. Bush campaign methods, Widodo’s campaign adopted part of the Barack Obama model in 2008. Large numbers of young volunteers turned out to campaign and monitor officialdom. This became critical in the count which began immediately after some 134 million of the 188 million eligible Indonesians voted on July 9, the largest one-day election so far held anywhere. The potential for bribery with so-called uang saksi [witness money] or straight-out intimidation of officials making the first count at 460,000 voting stations across the archipelago was a real worry. That these counts were then aggregated through five stages before the final result was tallied by the Komisi Pemilu Umum [KPU, General Election Commission] in Jakarta on July 22 increased the risk of interference. But “crowd-sourcing” brought thousands of young netizens into play as a safeguard: they photographed voting tallies with their smartphones and relayed them to ad hoc networks like Kawal Pemilu [Guard the Election], set up by a young Singapore-based technology graduate, Ainun Najib, and a clutch of tech-savvy friends.
The long wait between the vote and the official count was tense for Indonesia. Early estimates by most private polling institutions, based on samples, showed Widodo with a lead. Prabowo’s camp produced their own forecasts from somewhat less credible groups. On the eve of the announcement, Prabowo appeared to announce his withdrawal from the election, claiming systemic cheating in the count; his headquarters called for a massing of supporters outside the KPU for the announcement; it appeared to some analysts that the expected loser might create unrest. Yudhoyono was concerned enough to sack his army chief, General Budiman, that night. Reports of the army’s village-level monitors, the sergeants known as babinsa, making the rounds of households to urge votes for Prabowo had been widespread. The military had a strong stake in the election, hoping Prabowo would wrestle back anti-terrorism and internal security responsibility from the police if he won.
But support was melting away from Prabowo. His running mate, Hatta Rajasa, failed to appear with him at press conferences, and his chief legal adviser resigned. The result confirmed Widodo had won with 53.15 per cent of the vote, a margin of some 8.5 million votes too big for a challenge in the Constitutional Court to disqualify. The Jokowi era was about to begin. In his victory speech, delivered late that night from the deck of a traditional wooden ship docked in Sunda Kelapa, Jakarta’s old port, Widodo declared a duty to show that “politics is full of fun, that there is happiness in politics, that there is goodness in politics, and that politics is a liberation” and that Indonesia’s “long-lost voluntarism is now back with a new spirit.”
His authority would face challenges from within and without. While the nation was distracted by the tense election, the new parliament had cunningly changed many of the rules concerning its membership. The DPR speakership no longer went to the party which had the largest number of seats in the customary way but would now be appointed by majority vote, meaning the PDI-P could not expect the key role for Megawati’s daughter, Puan Maharani. Corruption investigations against DPR members could be stayed indefinitely by the president, instead of the previous maximum of 30 days. A powerful audit committee was abolished, and wider authority given to DPR members to “suggest” spending on projects in their districts.
However Prabowo’s majority support in the parliamentary ranks started to fracture too. Moves began in Golkar to oust Bakrie as chairman and bring this party of deal-makers back into alignment with its former leader now returning to the vice-presidency, Jusuf Kalla. Yudhoyono’s Democrats were also moving towards the emerging new government.
Widodo’s other rival power center was Megawati. Her presidency had begun with the murder of Theys Eluay in Papua and ended with the poisoning of the human rights advocate Munir, with the return to an attempted military solution in Aceh in between. Numerous former generals, some with sinister records of political violence, remained embedded in the PDI-P, and were no doubt keen on positions of power. This group could be a brake on further military reform. As president also, Megawati had turned against the decentralization she had earlier supported (except in the divide-and-rule case of Papua).
Yet Widodo himself is a product of political devolution, and his achievements in Solo show its better side. Some provinces had become notorious for the corrupt political dynasties that emerged since the reforms—notably Banten, in the industry. But apart from Widodo’s record in Solo, which has been maintained by his former deputy mayor and now successor F. X. Hadi Rudyatmo, there are many other success stories. In the Jembrana regency, on the western side of Bali, an academic turned bupati named I Gede Winasa introduced touch-screen voting machines for local elections and biometric time clocks to keep bureaucrats at work, and extended free education and health services. In the northern Sulawesi province of Gorontalo, a Muslim region carved out of the mostly Christian province of Manado in 2001, the first governor, Fadel Mohammad, set out to run his government like a “chief executive officer,” introducing more salary incentives for officials, abolishing such perks of office as personally assigned cars, introducing information technology, and sending staff to management courses at leading universities. Alex Noerdin, who was elected governor of South Sumatra in 2008, was able to reorganize the province’s finances to extend free education through to the senior high school year.
At his Jawa Pos media group in Surabaya, proprietor Dahlan Iskan set up the Institute for Pro-Autonomy in 2001, and began evaluating all the regional governments in East Java. The newspaper continues to publish an annual ranking of their performance. Within a few years, the survey was influencing elections. In the Bojonegoro regency, a negative evaluation by the institute outweighed the endorsement of the incumbent bupati by two influential kyai (religious leaders), and he was thrown out. Local budgets used to be shrouded in secrecy; now they are made available online and dissected by the institute’s analysts.
In the Blitar regency, a network of public health clinics published a schedule of services and standards of staff behavior, an initiative copied across East Java. In Surabaya municipality, the government introduced online registration for places at public schools to avoid favoritism, with examination scores the basis for selection to the most sought-after senior high schools. The institute has extended its surveys to several other provinces in Java, Sulawesi, and Kalimantan. Rohman Budijanto, its director, admits there is a “Jakarta syndrome” that tends to deride regional autonomy, while ignoring the scandals besetting the central government (where the parliament is routinely cited as the most corrupt institution in public opinion surveys). The autonomous regional governments continue as wells of creativity in Indonesian governance, he says. “It is impossible for us to re-centralise power in Jakarta.”
The quality of performance by a region’s government is generally in inverse proportion to its natural resource wealth, it has to be said. The electoral laws also serve to maintain the Jakarta syndrome. Local political parties are banned, except in the special case of Aceh under the 2005 peace agreement. Everywhere else, parties must have a nationwide organization to run in the national elections. They must win at least 3.5 percent of the vote to gain any representation at all in the national parliament. The system so far has been weighted against the rise of local heroes outside the existing parties. Given the corruption within these parties, there is still a risk that people will become disillusioned with democracy. A new political movement requires the harnessing of a broad-based social network that is already in existence. The case of the PKS was one example. Another emerging force is that of organized urban labor, which is showing its muscle with mass strikes and demonstrations to win increases in minimum wages.
One figure gaining a national profile is Said Iqbal, president of the Konfederasi Serikat Pekerja Indonesia (Confederation of Indonesian Trade Unions), who has a master’s degree in engineering. The distinctive flavor of contemporary trade unionism came out one evening at his headquarters in the down-market Cililitan district on the eastern side of Jakarta. Tens of thousands of his members had swarmed into the center of the city that day, stopping all movement, to demand a wage rise. Iqbal and his colleagues broke off an interview to make their evening prayers facing Mecca. The New Order regarded independent trade unions as nascent communism; repressing them became a large part of the duty of army garrisons as factories spread in the 1980s. This repressive policy gained notoriety with the 1993 abduction, rape, and murder of the activist Marsinah after a protest at a factory in East Java. Educated, devout, and using the label pekerja (a classless term for “worker”), rather than the name buruh (laborer), once favored by the PKI, the trade unions are considering the formation of a political party. Such an Indonesian labor party would be a counterpoint to the big-business representation in Golkar and other existing parties.
As Indonesia faced the 2014 elections, the constitutional court signaled a further evolution of the country’s democracy, in the direction of openness. It had sat for ten months on its judgment in a case arguing for simultaneous elections of the president and parliament, to prevent the bargaining and extempore coalition formation that was occurring between the separate elections. The court accepted this argument, effectively abolishing the requirement for presidential candidates to have the support of 20 percent of the DPR membership or members representing 25 percent of the electorate. However, to prevent “chaos and legal uncertainty,” it deferred application of its ruling until the elections of 2019. Why the court had not published the decision promptly in March 2013, in time to be applied in 2014, remained shrouded in judicial mystique. But looking forward, it pointed to coalitions and policies being formed behind presidential candidates well ahead of elections, instead of in the final weeks of campaigning. It also strengthened the hand of Widodo, who would have the option of standing for re-election in 2019 without the support of the PDI-P or the Sukarno dynasty if his personal popularity remains high.
As the Yudhoyono decade came to its end, Indonesians were taking lessons from the failure of a democratic experiment in a nation with which they were often compared. While watching Egypt’s overthrow of a long-running military-backed dictatorship, similar in many ways to the New Order, and its return to martial law two years later amid chaos, Indonesians counted their blessings. Their military had not returned to the barracks and frontiers but had abandoned a direct role in politics. Their political parties were diverse and were required to compromise and work together. A plurality of political institutions allowed creative thinking as well as malfeasance, but both sides of the picture were exposed in a remarkably open society. Indonesia under SBY had not done its theoretical best, but nor was it doing badly.