Since politicians overwhelmingly opted to revise legislation to defang the KPK in 2019, the institution has fallen into a deep torpor.

Besides ceding ground to the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) as a spearhead in the fight against corruption, the KPK has been prone to being misused to secure crass political gains, including the expulsion of persona non-grata and the criminalization of political rivals.

The KPK’s castration has been invariably accompanied by criticism of its infamous sting operations, which at least one senior minister has repeatedly disparaged as being “unsophisticated” and too fussy.

And the recent string of criminal and ethical controversies involving the KPK leadership has only served to accentuate the death of state-led antigraft efforts, although some still hold out hope for a resurrected superbody.

This diminished reputation has already started to haunt the KPK – Indonesia’s decline on global corruption indices and fewer received applications reflect the lack of interest in the current recruitment drive.

As many as 236 candidates are being considered this year to fill five spots on the KPK leadership rung and another five for its advisory board. In 2019, 376 people applied for the same job.

Alas, the job was never going to be a walk in the park, given how antigraft activists and even some applicants called for “a complete overhaul” of the institution, but the appetite for clean governance appears to have waned compared with the early days of the Reform Era.

The path to leading the KPK will be arduous and lonely; arduous because candidates will have to be vetted by the very same political interests that neutralized the KPK; and lonely because they will – out of necessity – make enemies out of most people they interact with, given Indonesia’s deeply embedded permissiveness for corruption and unchecked patronage mentality in all walks of life.

Crucially, the next batch of KPK leaders must know the difference between leading genuine corruption eradication efforts and wielding authority over an antigraft institution.

Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, who famously chided the ultra-rich at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2019, recently had this to say on social media: “If you’re powerful you’re more likely to think most people are lazy and unreliable, that they need to be supervised and monitored, managed and regulated, censored and told what to do. And because power makes you feel superior to other people, you’ll believe all this monitoring should be entrusted to you.”

The task of the next batch of KPK leaders will be to safeguard the integrity of the fight against corruption. It is likely to be all the more difficult given the potential return of New Order figures in government.

Fortunately, there are some good apples among the bunch in contention, including ex-KPK spokesman Johan Budi, former Kompas chief editor Budiman Tanuredjo and Giri Suprapdiono, one of 57 KPK employees dismissed after the KPK was coopted by the state in 2021.

There are also several red-flag candidates, however.

What is important is that we need courageous leaders with the integrity and grit to transform the KPK and carry on the future of the national anticorruption movement.

Recent comments from the grassroots movement suggest a “lack of exemplary behavior” from the current crop of antigraft leaders, and a word of warning that the government-sanctioned selection committee may seek to represent the interests of the government.

The extortion case implicating ex-KPK chair Firli Bahuri or anything involving the solicitation of favors from people under investigation serves to accentuate how important it is that the new KPK leaders are able to put integrity over “culture fit” or other group interests, and how the selection committee must work transparently to name the best people to fill the job.

We don’t need people who can simply slot into a broken system.