Throne of Blood

LIKE ITS NOMENCLATURAL sibling, India, Indonesia is the other large Asian country gearing up for a 2024 General Election. Indonesian President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have been in power for parallel terms, both having been elected to office in 2014 and then again, in 2019. However, given the term limits of Indonesia’s presidential system, Jokowi will not be eligible to return to the political helm next year.

But recent developments show that a Jokowi dynasty might be in the offing. This is especially ironic, given that the Indonesian President’s popularity is largely owed to his persona as the anti-dynast.

In both India and Indonesia, the 2014 elections were heralded as a watershed moment, promising a break from the nepotistic, venal politics of the past. Widodo was from humble origins, the son of a carpenter before he became the mayor of Solo, a mid-sized city in Central Java. His main opponent, on the other hand, was the embodiment of the political establishment: Prabowo Subianto, a military general and former son-in-law of the Indonesian dictator, Suharto. Both election contests that the two faced off in were marked by “black campaigns” run by the Subianto camp, including claims that Jokowi was a Chinese Christian, when in fact, he is a Javanese Muslim.

However, this is all evidently water under the bridge. In a political googly, Jokowi is now, tacitly, supporting his former rival’s presidential bid for 2024. The deal is nepotistically sweetened by Subianto naming Jokowi’s son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, as his vice-presidential running mate.

The move challenges democratic norms in multiple ways. To begin with, Indonesia’s Election Law mandated a minimum age requirement of 40 years for presidential and vice-presidential candidates. However, in mid-October, this was conveniently removed with the Constitutional Court ruling an exception to the age limit if the candidate has previously held elected office as a regional head. Raka, who is 36 years old, happens to be the mayor of Solo (a post formerly held by his father) and so is now eligible.

The conflict of interest deepens given that the court’s chief justice, Anwar Usman, also happens to be Jokowi’s brother-in-law and Raka’s uncle. Ultimately, the case was decided by five judges in favour of the age exception, and four against it. Usman, who did not recuse himself, had the deciding vote. The joke doing the rounds on social media in Indonesia these days is that the Constitutional Court should be rebranded as “Mahkamah Keluarga”, or the “Family Court.”

The independence of the Constitutional Court has been key to Indonesia’s nascent democratic ecosystem, which began to evolve after the fall of General Suharto’s dictatorship in the late 1990s. But during Jokowi’s tenure, other ostensibly independent institutions have also come under attack. A case in point is the once-formidable Anti-Corruption Commission, which was defanged in 2019 by revisions to the law governing its activities, stripping it of its formerly stringent law-enforcement capabilities. Moreover, on Jokowi’s watch, several of the new commissioners appointed to the commission were themselves graft suspects.

To be fair, the Indonesian president has not had an easy time governing. He has not only had to generate consensus amongst the unwieldy coalition that he heads but has also had to face down challenges to his authority from within his own political party, the PDI-P.

The PDI-P is the fiefdom of former President Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of independent Indonesia’s first leader. The party backed Jokowi as their presidential candidate in 2014 only reluctantly. And Sukarnoputri very much sees herself as the true power behind the throne. The PDI-P-Jokowi alliance was a thoroughly opportunistic one, which allowed the former to piggyback on the latter’s popularity, while Jokowi, a political outsider, was able to leverage the party’s electoral machinery to his own benefit.

The problem with Jokowi’s (still tacit) support of his former arch nemesis Prabowo is that the PDI-P’s official candidate is Ganjar Pranowo, the former governor of Central Java. Messrs Pranowo and Prabowo are likely to find themselves in a neck-to-neck race, with Jokowi’s supporters forming the cohort that will tip the balance one way or the other.

Sukarnoputri believes that Jokowi owes his political fortunes to her patronage, and she will undoubtedly see any evidence of his support for the Prabowo-Gibran ticket as a massive betrayal.

In the past, I have argued that the PDI-P-Jokowi alliance held lessons for India’s own dynastic party Congress. In 2014, despite all her power-clinging tendencies, Megawati had the sense to see that which the Gandhis appeared unable to, regardless of the very large writing on the wall. The Sukarno scion realised that the only way for the PDI-P to have continued political relevance was by elevating a family outsider to the ranks of a presidential contender.

Consequently, in both 2014 and 2019, Sukarnoputri recused herself as a presidential candidate in favour of Jokowi, a non-party loyalist, for the excellent reason that he was popular and electable, while she was neither. It is widely accepted that Sukarnoputri only tolerated Jokowi by viewing him as a placeholder for her own children. She has spent his terms in power trying to groom her daughter, House Speaker Puan Maharani, to succeed him. The problem, however, is that Puan Maharani consistently polls terribly and remains widely disliked.

And so again, Megawati has had to curb her familial proclivities in favour of a non-family candidate, Pranowo. But while the PDI-P has repeatedly chosen electability over family, a lesson that remains relevant for India’s own main opposition party, dynastic politics in general, appear entrenched in the archipelago’s political landscape.

Jokowi’s elevation to president, as a political outsider, has failed to herald a broader change in that aspect. Not only is his son now a leading candidate for vice president, but his son-in-law Bobby Nasution runs Medan— Indonesia’s fifth-largest city.

Rather than fostering a politics of merit, Sukarnoputri’s petulant power-sharing may therefore have only helped found an unlikely new political dynasty.

VALENTINE’S DAY 2024 will be an election big bang in Indonesia. On February 14, the archipelago will hold simultaneous polls for the president, the national parliament, and for all executive and legislative representatives at all administrative levels across the country that day. About 205 million of Indonesia’s more than 270 million people are eligible to vote, making it the world’s third-most populous democracy.

The simultaneity of Indonesia’s polls will make it the planet’s biggest one-day election. Also, the elections will be notable for the role played by the youth. Those between 22 and 30 years of age will account for 56.4 per cent, or around 114 million of the total voters nationwide. Half of them will be first-time voters.

As India also explores the idea of “One Nation, One Election”, Indonesia is a nation whose electoral developments, Indian policymakers would do well to keep an eye on.

dynastic politicsGeneral ElectionGibran Rakabuming RakaIndonesiaJoko Widodopolitics