On February 14, Indonesia will hold the world’s largest single-day election to elect a president and vice president, along with nearly 20,000 representatives to national, provincial, and district parliaments from a pool of a quarter-million candidates.
Since Indonesia’s democratic transition in 1998, voting has become a highly celebrated act of civic life. Nearly 200 million voters go to the polls every five years and dismiss about half their lawmakers in free and fair elections.
Despite this vibrant electoral process, Indonesia’s democracy is still dominated by political, business, and military leaders who built their fortunes during thirty-two years of Suharto’s authoritarian rule. Under immense public pressure, they agreed to democratize but set the electoral rules to achieve two ends: create unfair barriers to entry for new players while ensuring fair competition among themselves.
Over the past two decades, power has mostly shifted hands between these elites, whose political parties decide who appears on the ballot and what the winners do in between elections. Joko Widodo, the country’s immensely popular president, is the first outsider to breach this clique. But he quickly learned that while popular support may have helped him ascend to power, exercising it in a system controlled by Suharto-era elites required playing by their rules.
In 2024, Indonesia’s septuagenarian powerbrokers are backing new and old hopefuls for the presidency, in what may be their last chance to define the field of political contestation. But Widodo, whose bid to seek an extra-constitutional third term in office was blocked by this old guard, is not ready to part with power and has publicly declared his intention to “meddle” in the race.
Unlike his predecessors, Widodo lacks the political pedigree that would give him influence in politics after exiting office. He is drawing, instead, on his enduring popularity and control over state institutions to ensure the election of a friendly successor and establish himself among a new generation of kingmakers.
An Inside Job
Indonesia’s democratic transition has been aptly described as an “inside job.” In 1998, the devastating impact of the Asian financial crisis galvanized mass opposition against then president Suharto, who had risen to power on the back of an anti-communist purge in 1965. In the face of growing public protests against Suharto’s authoritarian rule, his military and political allies forced him to resign. Free elections were held within a year.
The 1999 elections were contested by forty-eight parties, twenty-one of which were able to win seats in the parliament. The top performers, however, were the same three parties that had comprised Suharto’s rubber-stamp parliament. The biggest winner was the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP), led by Megawati, daughter of Indonesia’s first president, Soekarno, whom Suharto had deposed. In second place was Suharto’s own Golkar party, led by regime loyalists from business and military backgrounds. And third was the United Development Party, composed of Muslim elites representing different social and ideological groups.
In command of nearly two-thirds of the parliamentary seats, these regime insiders set about revising the rules of political competition. While public pressure to make the system more competitive was immense, they were determined to preserve their dominance within it. As a result, the constitutional amendments passed between 2001 and 2002 contain bold measures for improving representation alongside conditions that favor the large incumbent parties.
For example, the elimination of a quota for military seats in the parliament came with exceptionally onerous registration requirements for new political parties. Introduction of direct presidential elections was tempered with a nomination threshold, so that only parties with at least 20 percent of seats in the parliament could field a candidate. The switch to an open-list proportional representation system gave voters more say in the election of legislators, but the formation of big electoral districts cemented the advantage of old parties that had better campaign infrastructure.
The new rules ensured that the mass movement that had emerged to oppose Suharto and demand radical change never translated into a political organization. Indeed, all new parties that have had any success in entering the parliament after 2004 were led by Suharto-era businessmen and retired military generals, who had the resources to comply with the arduous administrative requirements.
The absence of new challengers gave rise to a predictable pattern of collusive power-sharing among Suharto-era elites. They competed against each other in highly charged presidential and legislative races through aggressive campaigns and widespread vote-buying. But rival parties rushed to form post-election alliances with the winner in exchange for appointment to lucrative ministerial posts.
An Outsider Masters the Old Playbook
Widodo’s victory in the 2014 presidential election briefly disrupted this pattern.
Widodo’s outsider status was a big part of his initial appeal. He first rose to national fame as the earnest mayor of a small Javanese city and then as the problem-solving governor of the nation’s capital, Jakarta. Moreover, he hailed from a middle-class family with no prominent links to powerful politicians.
The leader of Widodo’s party, PDIP’s Megawati, was reluctant to nominate a candidate who lacked a political pedigree but relented in the hopes that his pull with the public could improve her party’s electoral fortunes.
Widodo soundly defeated Prabowo Subianto, Suharto’s son-in-law and a former general with a blotted human rights record who epitomized the privileged, out-of-touch politician. Keeping with his reformer image, Widodo refused to honor the prevalent practice of offering ministerial posts to opposition parties to lure them into his parliamentary coalition, which only held a one-third minority.
This publicly announced break from old-style politics backfired even before Widodo could be sworn into office. Opposition parties began obstructing his policy agenda and denying PDIP the leadership positions in parliament that would traditionally go to the biggest winner. The crisis threatened Widodo’s ability to govern and deepened tensions with leaders in his own party, who were already trying to curb his independence.
While he appointed a new generation of business elite and technocrats in his cabinet to implement his developmentalist agenda, Widodo began relying on Suharto-era politicians to solve his political problems. These experienced tacticians soon turned Widodo’s one-third parliamentary minority into a two-third supermajority by coercing leadership changes in two major opposition parties and forcing them to switch sides.
In 2019, Subianto challenged Widodo’s reelection bid in one of the most polarized elections in Indonesia’s history. But this time, a more confident Widodo, flanked by his own team of formidable old-timers, sought a convergence of interests with the old guard.
He appointed Subianto as his defence minister, and Subianto’s party joined the governing coalition, giving Widodo nearly total control of the parliament. To clear the way for his ambitious economic agenda, Widodo also granted long-standing elite demands to defang Indonesia’s highly popular Corruption Eradication Commission, an institution he had previously championed. Widodo further secured support for his plans to move the nation’s capital by giving his allies an economic stake in the $44 billion megaproject.
Emboldened by this success, Widodo began angling for ways to seek a third term in office. Several party elites voiced disquieted concern, but it was Megawati who decisively blocked efforts to amend the constitution and compelled the government to schedule elections in 2024.
New Hopefuls, Old Hands, and a Meddling President
Entering the fray for the fourth time in 2024 is Subianto (who is seventy-two years old). For a man who has wanted to be in power for this long, we know very little about what he intends to do with it. He appeared as a patriotic soldier in his 2009 bid for the vice presidency as Megawati’s running mate, then as a rabble-rousing nationalist in the 2014 presidential race, before polarising the public as an aggrieved Islamist in 2019 to challenge Widodo’s reelection.*
In his latest avatar, Subianto is steering clear of hard policy messages. Instead, he is trying to woo Widodo’s numerous young supporters by mimicking his relaxed style through curated social media posts. This appears to be working. He has achieved a sizeable lead with voters between seventeen and thirty-nine years of age who comprise more than 60 percent of eligible voters but are too young to remember his violent past.
Subianto has long faced credible allegations of human rights abuses during his father-in-law’s rule, and he was banned from entering the United States until recently. He was dismissed from his army post after storming the presidential palace to threaten Suharto’s successor in 1998. Subianto has long denied these claims, but even today, stories about his temper tantrums are raising concerns about his fitness for high office.
Subianto is competing against two younger rivals, both of whom are being fielded by his Suharto-era contemporaries. One is Anies Baswedan (fifty-four), the former governor of Jakarta. He is running on the promise of “change” but has been nominated by the National Democrat Party, an influential member of Widodo’s governing coalition for the past ten years. It is owned by the media mogul and former Golkar leader, Surya Paloh.
In his relatively short career, Baswedan has demonstrated a singular talent for being anyone he needs to be to win power. A U.S.-educated political scientist, he first rose to national prominence as the rector of a liberal Islamic university and served briefly as Widodo’s education minister. In 2016, Subianto nominated him for the highly charged Jakarta gubernatorial race, during which he openly courted hard-line Islamist groups. Now, he wants to shed his conservative image and woo mainstream Muslims in Java, without whose support he cannot win.
Subianto’s second rival is Ganjar Pranowo (fifty-four), the former governor of Central Java. He is well-liked for his youthful charm, but his most remarkable achievement so far is getting a presidential nomination from PDIP’s Megawati, who was wary of backing another popular governor after her experience with Widodo. This, however, is also turning out to be his biggest liability.
Burned by Widodo’s independent streak, PDIP is aggressively asserting its ownership over Pranowo by making him toe the party line on divisive issues. This public display of fidelity to the party is costing him support from key voting blocs. In March, Megawati ordered Pranowo, along with other PDIP governors, to refuse to host Israel’s national team in FIFA Under-20 World Cup matches. FIFA responded by stripping Indonesia of its hosting rights and shifting the tournament to Argentina. This disappointed millions of young football fans and led to a significant drop in Pranowo’s support.
With six months to the election, opinion polls are predicting a neck-and-neck contest between Subianto and Pranowo. But in a runoff between the two, which would be held if no candidate is able to shore up more than 50 percent of the votes in the first race, Subianto is likely to draw Baswedan’s Islamist supporters and win the presidency.
But Widodo is not leaving the election of his successor to chance. He has publicly declared his intention to intervene in the race to secure his legacy. All three of Indonesia’s democratically elected presidents since 1999 hail from powerful political, religious, or military families and have retained influence in politics as heads of their political parties.
Widodo lacks these social and institutional connections, but he is trying to secure his political future by drawing on the two things he does have: a sky-high approval rating and control over state institutions.
Survey results persistently show that Widodo’s approval rating can boost votes for any candidate or party he supports. While avoiding a politically risky endorsement, Widodo is increasingly leaning toward his formal rival Subianto, who has publicly committed to continuing the Widodo government’s policies. To make this commitment credible, Subianto is considering Widodo’s eldest son to be his running mate. Gibran, the thirty-five-year-old mayor of his father’s hometown, does not meet the age threshold for the nomination. But a petition to dismiss the age limit is currently under review in the constitutional court, which is headed by Widodo’s brother-in-law.
Securing an institutional basis for power is also a priority for Widodo, who is widely rumoured to be eyeing the chairmanship of the Golkar party or Subianto’s Gerindra party. Meanwhile, Widodo’s younger son, Kaesang, who has never competed in any election, was recently proclaimed the head of the Indonesia Solidarity Party, a new organization that emerged in 2019 but has yet to win a seat in the national parliament.
In addition to boosting his favored candidate, Widodo has been accused of abusing his power to block the chances of his most disfavoured candidate. Baswedan, who defeated Widodo’s former ally in the religiously charged Jakarta election, drew the president’s ire when he criticized his government’s handling of the pandemic. The once widely respected anti-corruption agency that has now become an attack dog for harassing government opponents has opened corruption cases against Baswedan and against Widodo’s former allies who have joined Baswedan’s camp.
Efforts are also underway to broker a deal for Pranowo to run as Subianto’s vice presidential candidate, which would knock Baswedan out in the first round. Such an alliance between Indonesia’s largest parties would be the most egregious attempt by the political elite to curtail public choice in the elections.
Beginning of the End?
The collusive power-sharing practiced by the old guard over the past two decades has given Indonesia’s democracy a predictable inertia: they have obstructed reform but have also blocked individual attempts to concentrate power.
Widodo initially challenged this setup, first by refusing to engage in transactional politics and then by seeking an extra-constitutional third term. Both times, the system persevered by course-correcting an outsider president who eventually learned to get his way by playing by the old rules, rather than defying them.
But a critical weakness of the system is that it depends heavily on the personal involvement of its ageing leaders, who share both a common interest in maintaining their dominance as well as a common understanding on how to do it.
The 2024 election is bringing Indonesia to the cusp of an impending generational change. The old elite are still in charge of picking the candidates, and following the long tradition of dynastic politics in the country, several of them have taken measures to bequeath the leadership of their parties to their children. Lacking this kind of lineage, Widodo is using his incumbent power to position himself among the next generation of kingmakers.
Ironically, however, the way Widodo is securing his future—by forging alliances with old rivals, using family to concentrate power, and blocking newcomers—suggests that the tactics that have been used to dominate politics in the world’s third-largest democracy for the past two decades might outlast the original tacticians.
*Correction: This piece misstated the date of Prabowo’s bid for the vice presidency. It was in 2009, not 2004.