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Indonesia’s democracy is on the line. Its defenders are stuck in a Sisyphean loop

Progressive civil society forces have long been relegated to the “bourgeois public sphere”, where they serve limited roles as “watchdogs” or “advocates” for democracy and human rights.

Ary Hermawan (The Jakarta Post)
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Melbourne, Australia
Thu, March 17, 2022

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Indonesia’s democracy is on the line. Its defenders are stuck in a Sisyphean loop Young and hopeful: Indonesia Solidarity Party (PSI) legislative candidates (left to right) Milly Ratudian, Mikhail Gorbachev, Dedek Prayudi, Daniel Tumiwa and Rian Ernest speak during a discussion titled “Cleaning up the House of Representatives” at the PSI central board headquarters in Jakarta on Oct. 25, 2018. (The Jakarta Post/Dhoni Setiawan)

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or a self-proclaimed millennial party, the Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI) is doing an awful job at presenting itself as such. It may have a strong social media presence, but its campaigns are mostly perceived as corny, if not painfully cringeworthy.

The nascent political party has a branding issue. There is no doubt about it. But the real deal-breaker for many progressive voters is not that the millennial party often acts like an embarrassing baby-boomer uncle but the fact that it is bound by the same logic of predatory politics that has defined Indonesian electoral democracy since the downfall of Soeharto.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the party is unashamedly backing the proposal to grant President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo another term, even though the 1945 Constitution — for eminently good reasons, given our history with two despotic leaders — clearly states that a president can only stay in power for two five-year terms.

There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with proposing a constitutional amendment. But doing so just so that we can give a lame duck president another term is dangerously myopic. And the fact that we are debating it now, only two years before elections, is unreal. This was unthinkable before.

Nonetheless, the PSI’s actions are by no means shocking, given its nature as a middle-class party par excellence, its alleged connections to, and patronage from, members of the oligarchy and the fact that it is a small, struggling party with zero seats in the House of Representatives. Its undying support for Jokowi could easily be interpreted as a desperate attempt for survival.

But it is not the intention of this article to bash a minnow party. In the grand scheme of things, the PSI – and all that is wrong with it – is just a tragic reminder of the longstanding failure of progressive forces within civil society in post-colonial Indonesia not only to build a broad social and political alliance capable of foregrounding progressive ideas, but also to form a political vehicle to make these ideas a reality.

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Progressive civil society forces, including NGOs and media institutions, have long been relegated to the “bourgeois public sphere”, where they serve limited roles as “watchdogs” or “advocates” for democracy and human rights and have little real power in shaping public policies, let alone countervailing the entrenched oligarchic interests in our political system.

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