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Rising oligarchy harms Indonesia’s democracy
Democratic progress made since the start of the Reform period in 1998 has stagnated or backslid as a result of the strong and ever-growing influence of the oligarchs in Indonesia, according to political analysts.
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People march toward the General Elections Commission (KPU) office in Jakarta during a protest on Feb. 23, 2024, calling for investigations into what they said was a “rigged” election that brought Prabowo Subianto to the presidency. (AFP/Adek Berry)
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ore than 25 years since the start of the Reform period, Indonesia finds itself moving away from democratic reforms and on the slippery slope to illiberal democracy as a result of the growing influence of oligarchs, experts say.
The country’s predicament follows a trend that has unfolded over the past two decades in other democracies in Southeast Asia, where oligarchs have been consolidating power, said Richard Robison, a political economy professor at the University of Melbourne.
Robison coauthored Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Markets in 2004, one of the most widely cited political analyses of the fall of former president Soeharto’s authoritarian New Order regime.
Twenty years since the book was published, the Reform movement has grown weaker as civil society fails to make meaningful changes, such as the emergence of a strong labor party, the researcher said at a public discussion hosted by the University of Indonesia’s Asia Research Center (ARC) on Tuesday.
“Reformasi had largely been driven by the middle class and students,” Robison said. “But they have an inherent weakness: They don’t have enough space [in the political landscape].”
The weak civil movement in the country then allowed the oligarchs to reinvent themselves as prodemocracy figures and take control of public institutions, said the director of the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute, Vedi Hadiz, who coauthored the 2004 book.
“While [the New Order] no longer exists, the old forces have taken over political parties,” he said, adding that the oligarchs had been in conflict with others in the past 20 years, without any meaningful challenges from civil society.
