Michael Vatikiotis has written about Indonesia for more than four decades and is the author of three books on Southeast Asian politics, including, most recently, Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia.
Pop music blared and a pair of blow-up dummies waddled on stage in a downtown Jakarta theatre complex in early February accompanied by a troupe of gyrating young dancers. The crowd of mostly twentysomethings went wild.
The dummies bore a passing resemblance to the two leading candidates in this year’s Indonesian presidential election – Prabowo Subianto, the Defence Minister and a former army general standing for president, and Gibran Rakabuming Raka (the incumbent President’s son) running to be his vice-president.
There is some 40 years’ age difference between them, but their blow-up avatars depict them as a pair of cute and cuddly figures. A light-blue jacket worn by many of the young crowd of several hundred identifies them as the “Cute Squad.”
The symbolism is beguiling but misleading.
On Feb. 14, almost 205 million people will vote in one of the biggest of the many elections being held across the globe this year. For the past two decades, every five years these mighty electoral contests have celebrated Indonesia’s liberation from a long era of autocracy and repression that ended in 1998. But many Indonesians are concerned that this year’s vote marks the first since then that could be subject to state manipulation and produce a skewed result, amounting to a democratic regression.
There is widespread reporting of state resources being used to influence voters and the use of law-enforcement agencies to undermine the challenge to Mr. Prabowo and Mr. Gibran by two rival candidates. Specifically, there are allegations that regional election boards are being pressed to ensure victory for Mr. Prabowo and Mr. Gibran, who most polls show maintain a narrow lead of more than 40 per cent, still short of the more than 50 per cent they need to win in a first round.
The main reason this may be happening is that in this election incumbent President Joko Widodo, who has reached the end of his two-term limit, has thrown his weight behind Mr. Prabowo and his young running mate, who happens to be the President’s son. The fact that the President, better known by his nickname Jokowi, still enjoys more than 70-per-cent popularity ratings, means that his preference, and the power of the presidency, can easily skew the race.
Mr. Prabowo is a formidable candidate in his own right. The former general is making his third bid for president and came close to defeating Mr. Joko in 2019. The 72-year-old has benefited from a significant social-media makeover that has transformed this temperamental soldier’s soldier haunted by accusations of human-rights abuse into an avuncular figure given to spontaneous outbursts of dancing that have endeared him to the young generation of under-thirties, which makes up half the voter base in this country of 273 million people.
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Mr. Prabowo is an old-school nationalist: His father was one of the country’s pioneering economists. He believes passionately in food self-sufficiency and has pledged to address the country’s chronic social-welfare needs, something that surveys show young people care about. For all the contrast between his actual age and the caricatured cuteness cultivated by the campaign, many young Indonesians are inclined to support the strongman nationalism he projects in his fist-thumping speeches.
He is up against two younger, more sophisticated and mild-mannered candidates. Anies Baswedan, 54, is an overseas-educated former university rector who was elected governor of Jakarta and served briefly as education minister in the Joko administration. He presents a quiet competence, but worries some because of his conservative Muslim support base.
Ganjar Pranowo, 55, was Mr. Joko’s first choice to support in this race, but the silver-haired former governor was seen as too close to the party machinery of former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, who has sparred with Mr. Joko because he has refused to submit to party discipline and her will.
Both Mr. Anies and Mr. Ganjar trail Mr. Prabowo by around 20 points in most published polls, though the trend shows they are catching up and many of those polled have not been willing to express their preference.
Here lies the challenge for Indonesia’s democratic future. Despite almost three decades of democratic reform, personality and patronage are the main drivers of political power. There are more than two dozen political parties, but they tend to just be vehicles, or escalators, for political ambition and power.
In addition to this, Mr. Joko has effectively concentrated executive power over the past decade, often using authoritarian means. Civil society feels constrained by regulations governing freedom of expression and police intimidation. Student activists who once spearheaded noisy protests against corruption and the abuse of power have had their phones hacked and visits to their families by police.
There are therefore those who see the seeds of democratic decay in Mr. Joko’s bid to retain influence and engineer continuity for his policies. Ahead of this election, Mr. Joko considered ways to extend his term in office.
So why hasn’t there been more popular concern about this threat to democracy? Indonesia has enjoyed a remarkably long era of untrammelled freedom. But that hasn’t translated into well-being for ordinary Indonesians – rural poverty rates hover around 12 per cent, but the numbers of “precariously non-poor” are much higher. Not surprisingly then, the stress Mr. Prabowo lays on social welfare and top-down policies to build new homes, provide subsidized food and increase access to health care strikes a chord with voters.
If he wins, Mr. Prabowo could pursue the kinds of centralized developmental policies that were favoured by ousted autocrat General Suharto in the 1980s, which came at the expense of democracy. (Incidentally, Gen. Suharto’s daughter Titiek, who was Mr. Prabowo’s wife for 15 years, is standing for election under the banner of Mr. Prabowo’s Gerindra Party in Central Java.)
Behind the slick TikTok videos promoting Mr. Prabowo’s cuteness with their disarming disco-music accompaniment lies a potential resurgence of hard power in the name of national development. The hope for supporters of both Mr. Anies and Mr. Ganjar is that voters will deny Mr. Prabowo a first-round victory. Then the question will be whether, in a second round of voting almost four months later, Indonesians will be more alarmed about the threat to their democracy and cast their vote for reform rather than regression.