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Jokowi should not take votes for granted
President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has set the tone for how he intends to run the government in his second term
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span>President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has set the tone for how he intends to run the government in his second term. In his victory speech in Bogor, West Java, on Sunday, he laid out five areas to focus on, namely infrastructure, human development, investment, bureaucratic reform and the state budget.
These areas are interrelated; but it is easy to see that the five are intended to speed up Jokowi’s economic vision.
In the speech, a continuity of “Jokowinomics” was very pronounced.
Other than human development and the state budget, the other three were programs during Jokowi’s first term.
Thus, when he mentioned them, he had a better grasp on Indonesia’s fundamental economic problems and expressed determination to fight for them.
Jokowi has often unequivocally reiterated his frustrations with the failure to materialize much of his targeted economic programs. He has also pointed out the main obstacles in the bureaucracy and the widespread inefficiency of government institutions.
With a better understanding of the economy, coupled with stronger support in the House of Representatives and his double-digit margin over his rival Prabowo Subianto, one would think Jokowi’s second term would be much easier for him.
But the many stories of a second term president show otherwise. It is very common for reelected presidents to win with a much more convincing margin than their first term but end up being hamstrung in their presidencies.
The case of president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) is noteworthy. Jokowi’s predecessor was reelected in 2009 by mustering more votes than Jokowi in 2019. Competing in the election with two other rivals, SBY managed to get a clear majority of 60.8 percent of the vote, so that the election was carried out only in one round.
But SBY’s second term has been generally considered a period of squandered years. Unlike his first term when the economy thrived quite impressively, thanks to the rise of commodity prices in the mid-2000s, Indonesia’s economy in his second term largely stagnated.
The economic reform needed in SBY’s second term could not be fully implemented, partly because of the president’s tendency to be too cautious in making political and economic breakthroughs.
He was also caught up in political intrigue involving members of his political coalitions. A case in a point was the Bank Century bailout case, a scandal that curbed the administration as it led to the right of inquiry from the House against the government.
In the United States, president George W. Bush came to power in 2000 after competing fiercely with Al Gore. He lost to Gore in terms of popular votes but managed to win the election because of the peculiar electoral voting system adopted in the US.
When Bush sought reelection in 2004, he ran with rather stronger support following popular images created from his post 9/11 leadership and his focus on security. He then won in a landslide victory over John Kerry in 2004, marking a major change from his tenuous performance in the previous election.
Yet it was during his second term that Bush saw a drop in his approval ratings. He was perceived to have failed to deal with the destructive Hurricane Katrina, a disaster that led to more than 1,000 fatalities.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continued but were not generally considered worth fighting. And the last years of his presidency saw the global financial meltdown that took years for the US to recover from.
If we can take two points from the perils of reelected presidents from the above cases (and others), they are what scholars often refer to as second term hubris and governance fatigue.
The former refers to the condition in which the reelected president is less vigilant about his political strengths. A convincing electoral victory makes him prone to belittle the potential slip in politics. The winner understates the need to act less in partisan fashion and prefers a more one-sided approach.
These at times will come with reactionary responses from other groups who oppose the elected president. If this condition persists, a prolonged political stalemate may occur, leading the president to divert from his policy agenda.
Because of these perils, the winner cannot take the votes for granted. Despite winning with a greater margin, he should be alert that people had cast their votes for various reasons — and not necessarily because they genuinely liked who they voted for.
The second, governance fatigue, refers to the condition in which the most important units of government, such as ministries and agencies at the national and local level fail to perform well, according to mandates given to them due to a lack of norms, vague goals and low competence.
This failure does not necessarily mean that bureaucracies are inherently bad. But it could be driven by the fact that they have been working in the same fashion for quite some time.
The same president may not induce novelty as he is supposed to govern in a predictable way, as bureaucrats may see during his first term in office.
Therefore, President Jokowi’s insistence on bureaucratic reform, however dull that term may seem, should be taken with utmost urgency.
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The writer is a researcher with the department of politics and social change, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
