And of course, “new normal” has become part of our daily lexicon since the coronavirus pandemic, along with work from home (WFH), online schooling, social distancing, wearing masks and frequent handwashing. However, most people aren’t feeling so positive toward this new way of life, with feelings ranging from acceptance to resignation, to frustration, anxiety, depression and severe mental stress.

What if the word “new” is applied to a political system? Well, those of us who lived 32 years under the repressive New Order regime (1966-1998) are wary of the word “new”.

Soeharto, Indonesia’s second president, assumed power after the alleged communist coup in 1965 and called his rule the “New Order” to distinguish it from the Sukarno regime, retroactively named the “Old Order” by the so-called “smiling general”.

Then recently, I came across the term “new despotism” used to refer to a number of world leaders, including President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.

Really? Many, myself included, have known for a few years that democracy has been sliding under his presidency, but to call him a despot? That’s a bit extreme, I thought.

I got my aha moment last month, when I came across “The New Despotism and the Decline of Democracy” webinar, the 10th in the 100 Social and Political Scientists Forum discussion series of the Institute for Social and Economic Research, Education and Information (LP3ES).

The webinar featured three speakers: Dr. Airlangga Pribadi Kusman from Airlangga University in Surabaya, Dr. Milda Istiqomah from Brawijaya University in Malang and Asifinawati, director of the Legal Aid Foundation. Wijayanto, the LP3ES Media and Democracy director, opened the webinar by saying that democracy in Indonesia had been suffering serious decline.

Indeed, several foreign and Indonesian scholars have used different terms these past few years to describe this decline: “defective democracy”,  “democratic deconsolidation” and “authoritarian innovation” (M. Mietzner, 2016 and 2019), “democratic setbacks” (V. Hadiz, 2017), “democratic regression” and “illiberal democracy” (E. Aspinall and E. Warburton, 2018), “democratic decline” and “authoritarian turn” (T.P. Power, 2018), “democratic backsliding” and “democratic recession” (E. Aspinall and M. Mietzner, 2019), “non-democratic pluralism” (E. Aspinall & M. Mietzner, 2019), “recession of democracy” (M.F. Aminudin, 2020), “neo-authoritarianism” (H.P. Wiratraman, 2018) and “authoritarian turn” (Wijayanto, 2020).

Whoa! That’s a lot of terms to mean more or less the same thing! Trust academics to do that! But none used the term “despotism”, which traditionally means a way of governing whereby an individual rules with absolute power in a backward country over poor and uneducated people. Think Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-Tung, Idi Amin, Pol Pot and many others.

In his new book The New Despotism (2020), politics professor John Keane of the University of Sydney revived the term derived from ancient Greek.

Publisher Harvard University Press describes the book as, “A disturbing in-depth exposé of antidemocratic practices of despotic governments now sweeping the world.”

Sweeping the world? Yessiree!

It continues: “...Keane shows how governments from Russia and China through Central Asia to the Middle East and Europe have mastered a formidable combination of political tools that threaten the established ideals and practices of power-sharing democracy. They mobilize the rhetoric of democracy and win public support for workable forms of government based on patronage, dark money, steady economic growth, sophisticated media controls, strangled judiciaries, dragnet surveillance, and selective violence against their opponents.”

What about Indonesia? This is what the LP3ES webinar was about. Two of its speakers, Airlangga and Milda, are co-authors of “Indonesia’s ‘New Despotism’”, published in the Melbourne Asia Review on Jan. 11, 2021.

In it, the authors write: “The new despotism is characterized by wealth, and the expansion of executive powers by controlling the judiciary and undermining the rule of law, despite continued elections and the retention of constitutional protections related to the separation of political and judicial power and the law.”

In short, it’s a way of defending the oligarchic concentration of wealth and power while maintaining public support at the same time. Nice.

Airlangga and Milda cite as examples Turkey under Erdogan, Brazil under Bolsonaro, Hungary under Orban, the Philippines under Duterte and Tajikistan under Rahmon.

The fact that even established democracies like the United States, the United Kingdom and India are not immune to this trend shows how deplorable the situation is, they say.

In Indonesia, the development of the new despotism was made possible by “hijacking” the political reforms that occurred after the Soeharto era, such as “building a multi-party system, freedom of the press, and the decentralization of state administrative authority”.

Airlangga and Milda point to a “brief euphoria after 1998”, but “the oligarchic system remains intact” and that it managed, chameleon-like, “to adapt to democratic institutional arrangements and build new and pervasive social and political alliances”.

And instead of the rule of law, the practice of Indonesia’s “new despotism” is “rule through law”, quoting Keane to mean that “the ruling elites ensure that the law, the courts and law enforcement institutions side with the powerful”. Way to go!

One of the most egregious examples of this new despotism in Indonesia was “the weakening of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK)” in 2019. Under Jokowi, “the majority of political elites ... were united in reducing the authority” of the KPK “on the pretext that it had become too powerful”.

Hello? Indonesia ranks 102 out of 179 on the Corruptions Perception Index (CPI), guys! We need to empower the KPK even more, not weaken it! Talk about Machiavellian!

Besides webinars discussing various aspects of democracy, the LP3ES has published a Democratic Outlook series. The 2020 edition was titled Menyelamatkan Demokrasi (Saving Democracy), while the Jan. 2021 edition in is titled Nestapa Demokrasi di Masa Pandemi: Refleksi 2020, Outlook 2021 (Plight of Democracy in the Pandemic Period: 2020 Reflections, 2021 Outlook).

These titles clearly reflect the trend, don’t they? Thanks to Indonesia’s new despotism!

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The writer is the author of Julia’s Jihad.