Indonesia’s President-Elect Prabowo Steps Back From Widodo’s Constitutional Shenanigans – Analysis

By Liam Gammon

With six weeks left in Indonesia’s presidential office, Joko Widodo continues to try tie up loose ends before handing over power to his successor, Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto, on 20 October. But as the political centre of gravity has shifted towards Prabowo, Widodo’s political obsolescence is frustrating his efforts to prolong his family’s power and influence.

Widodo has used the wave of local elections scheduled for November 2024 as a way to shape the political landscape of the first Prabowo term in his favour. Widodo, himself a local politician turned president, knows a thing or two about the nexus between local and national politics in Indonesia: not only about the potential utility of a prominent governorship as a launching pad for the presidency but also the power of subnational officials in press-ganging neighbourhood and village level officials into getting out the vote for national-level candidates.

One focus of this effort has been the big-ticket gubernatorial election in Jakarta. Widodo used Jakarta’s governorship as a launching pad to his presidency in 2014. The previous governor, Anies Baswedan, used the same position to become Indonesia’s de facto opposition leader during Widodo’s presidency and to position himself for an electoral challenge to Prabowo in the February 2024 presidential elections.

Polls suggest that Anies would easily have been returned to the governorship if he ran in November, and that would position him as a strong candidate to either run against Prabowo in the 2029 presidential elections, or to run with him as vice-presidential candidate if Prabowo chose to dump the incumbent, Widodo’s son Gibran Rakabuming, from his ticket that year.

Widodo’s interest is in stopping Anies’ political comeback in its tracks. Anies had assembled a coalition of parties that had more than the 25 per cent of seats in the local legislature that election laws set as the benchmark to be eligible to run. But in response to pressure from the Widodo administration, Anies’ party allies one by one defected to a government-aligned candidate, former West Java governor Ridwan Kamil, ahead of the nomination deadline on 29 August.

Anies’ path to a comeback was seemingly cut off, but a surprise Constitutional Court decision lowered the nomination threshold, allowing him to run with the nomination of only one party. The national parliament then rapidly drafted emergency legislation that effectively reversed the Court’s decision — and confirmed a related court ruling that lowered age limits on contesting local office to allow Widodo’s 29 year old second son, Kaesang Pangarep, to run in the November local polls.

Progressives reacted on social media and on the streets of cities around the country with fury to the parliament’s defiance of the Constitutional Court and its manipulation of electoral rules in the Widodo dynasty’s favour.

To the surprise of many, the parliament backed away from its legislation. But Anies’ hopes of running were nevertheless dashed after his one remaining supporter, the PDI-P party, declined to nominate him despite the Court opening up the legal right to do so, likely worrying that the government would strip it of the parliamentary speakership as payback.

Though civil society scored a rare victory in stopping the emergency election legislation, it wasn’t a case of all’s well that ends well.

The Widodo government’s determination to thwart Anies’ comeback highlights potential hazards toIndonesia’s democracythat arise from the combination of its election laws and the overbearing presidency that Widodo has normalised over the past decade.

The oversized party coalitions that Indonesian presidents form to support their governments have beendescribed as a political cartels, whose members compete at election times, only to collude afterwards to share the spoils of patronage and manipulate electoral rules to limit the viability of new entrants to the system.

What caused such alarm in Indonesian civil society about the campaign to thwart Anies’ comeback was how it represented an unprecedented effort to enforce compliance with a classic cartelistic goal of blocking a competitor’s ability to enter the arena. The crucial ingredient has been that mainstay of Widodo-era governance — behind-the-scenes coercion — with media investigations detailing how Widodo’s coalition partners were deterred from backing the obvious frontrunner for the Jakarta governorship by veiled threats from the presidential palace of legal prosecutions and loss of opportunities for patronage.

This is a troubling precedent for a democracy that, for all its illiberal tendencies, is still marked by free and fair electoral competition. Indonesia also applies a system of nomination thresholds in presidential campaigns that, in theory, could be exploited by an unscrupulous president to keep opponents off the ballot.

These scenarios may be still well over the horizon. The focus of the Indonesian press now is on speculation about how Prabowo’s interests and tactics are diverging from the incumbent’s in the twilight of the Widodo administration. Prabowo seems, for instance, to have beeninstrumental in lobbying for the parliamentto abort its attempt to reverse the Constitutional Court decision on local election eligibility, as well as in opposing efforts to get Widodo’s second son Kaesang a local government candidacy.

With thepresidency almost in his grasp, Prabowo has drawn a line around his willingness to back Widodo in controversial stratagems in which Prabowo has little at stake personally.

Prabowo is no defender of freewheeling electoral competition — he is the cartel politician extraordinaire. Indeed, after his election victory he has flagged his ambition to bring every party into his governing coalition, recently invoking the Suharto-era trope that the very idea of rivalry between government and opposition is something intrinsically alien to Indonesian culture.

Observers wary of Prabowo’s democratic bona fides will worry that the rhetorical and ideological foundation for curtailing electoral competition is already being laid.

• About the author: Liam Gammon is Research Fellow at the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the East Asia Forum editorial board.
• Source: This article was published by East Asia Forum