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40 years covering the rise, retreat of RI democracy
The Post, in its early decades, bore witness to and outlasted Soeharto’s repressive New Order regime, going on to cover five democratic elections, with the sixth one, to be held in February next year, just around the corner.
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President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo delivers a speech to members of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) in this undated photograph. (Tempo/Marifka Wahyu Hidayat)
“Indonesia's democracy is among the world's most important both to understand and to defend,” writes American political scientist Dan Slater.
“The world's largest Muslim country,” he asserts in his latest piece in the Journal of Democracy, “has proven that democracy can emerge and endure in surprising ways and in a surprising place, with intriguing lessons for democratic emergence and endurance elsewhere.”
The article, titled “What Indonesian Democracy Can Teach the World”, may conjure a sense of optimism with its glass-half-full assessment of our political system at a time when the country – like a number of other democracies – is experiencing democratic backsliding and a resurgence of past authoritarian tendencies. But his judgment is also a testament to how difficult and painful the struggle for democracy has been for Indonesia and how stubbornly fragile it remains two decades after its revival.
The Jakarta Post, which turned 40 on Tuesday, can attest to such a sentiment, having reported on the rise, and periodic retreat, of the nation’s democracy from the heyday of Soeharto’s oligarchic regime to the meteoric rise of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.
The Post, in its early decades, bore witness to and outlasted Soeharto’s repressive New Order regime, going on to cover five democratic elections, with the sixth one, to be held in February next year, just around the corner.
The paper has not always been optimistic. On Nov. 9, 1998, its editorial wondered aloud whether BJ Habibie’s government, “which is often referred to as the Soeharto regime without the old man inside – is capable of holding a fair election”. But if the past 20 years of democratic growing pains have taught us anything, it is that free and fair elections are one of the nation’s strongest democratic institutions and must be defended.
The Post’s election coverage seeks to contribute to that cause.
