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View all search resultsThe soft coup against local democracy in Indonesia
The quasi-corporate approach to direct local elections is fundamentally flawed, as a price cannot be put on the democratic principle of popular sovereignty.
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Protesters holds placards that read 'Stop destroying democracy' (left) and 'Stop revoking our votes' (right) on Aug. 22, 2024, during a demonstration in front of the Senayan Legislative Complex in Central Jakarta to protest the House of Representatives’ plan to reverse the Constitutional Court ruling on nomination rules for regional elections. (AFP/Bay Ismoyo)
I
ndonesia’s democratic journey has long resembled a pendulum, oscillating between moments of openness and episodes of excessive control. The post-1998 reformasi era marked a decisive break from authoritarian centralism, most visibly through the introduction of direct local elections.
Yet today, that hard-won achievement is once again under threat. A growing discourse proposes returning the selection of governors, mayors and regents to regional legislative councils (DPRD), cloaked in the rhetoric of budget efficiency, social stability and anticorruption.
This debate must not be reduced to a technical disagreement over electoral design. At its core, it represents a systematic attempt to dilute popular sovereignty at the local level. Replacing direct elections with legislative selection would amount to a quiet but profound dispossession of citizens’ political rights, one that risks unraveling the democratic foundations painstakingly built over the past two decades.
Wrapped in managerial language, the proposal has been presented as pragmatic reform, yet history suggests otherwise.
Indonesia’s past experiments with political control by the elite rarely delivered genuine efficiency or stability and instead entrenched patronage, weakened accountability and distanced citizens from decision-making. The return of such ideas should therefore be read not as innovation but as regression.
At stake is more than an electoral mechanism. The proposal strikes at the normative core of decentralization itself: the idea that power, legitimacy and responsibility should flow upward from citizens, not downward from party elites.
The proponents of indirect local elections frequently argue that direct elections are prohibitively expensive and incentivize corruption as candidates seek to recoup campaign costs once in office.
