Prabowo and his running mate, president Joko Widodo’s eldest son Gibran Rakabuming Raka, need to get more than 50 per cent of the vote to avoid a late June run-off with the second-placed candidate. Opinion polls put them just above this threshold, or tantalisingly close to it.

Jokowi, as the current president is known, hopes to extend his dynastic foothold in the system by supporting the Indonesia Solidarity Party, or PSI, which is trying to enter parliament for the first time under the leadership of his second son, Kaesang Pangarep. PSI’s ubiquitous television adverts feature Kaesang’s image alongside that of his father, with the slogan “PSI is Jokowi’s party.”

This is no doubt news to Indonesia’s Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, which for now still counts Jokowi as a member. But a breakdown in president–party relations in 2023 accelerated Jokowi’s shift of support to Prabowo, capped with the appointment of Gibran as his running mate. PDI-P’s candidate, former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo, has seen his support collapse over the three-month campaign period as Jokowi’s supporter base has followed the president’s lead and defected to Prabowo.

The irony is that Jokowi’s betrayal of PDI-P in favour of Prabowo and his son’s candidacy has worked almost too well for the president’s own good. Ganjar has been overtaken for second place by former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan, a government critic who maintains ties to conservative Islamic opposition groups and is now attracting support from progressives who see him as the candidate best placed to challenge the Prabowo–Widodo alliance. But polls show Prabowo with a huge lead in a head-to-head with Anies, and PDI-P, despite its anger with Jokowi, would likely endorse Prabowo in a second round in exchange for an advantageous deal on representation in Prabowo’s cabinet.

But Jokowi is understandably not eager to see a four-month run-off campaign that would offer Anies a platform to dial up criticisms of his policy legacy and his government’s erosion of democratic norms. Efforts by Jokowi to use the levers of state to drum up support for Prabowo have become a major point of controversy in the media. Both Ganjar’s and Anies’s campaigns have alleged behind-the-scenes intimidation of voters, donors and campaign workers by police and other officials.

A more above-board mode of government favouritism is occurring in plain sight. During the campaign, Jokowi has wheeled out close to US$1.3 billion worth of cash transfers and food aid, justified as an emergency response to El Niño–related disruptions to food security. Nobody sees it as anything other than a well-timed attempt to boost goodwill towards the administration — and by extension, to Prabowo and Gibran.

Jokowi wants to reduce the risk of an unexpectedly tight run-off to zero, but a hole-in-one for Prabowo isn’t without its downsides if Prabowo enters office with too forceful an electoral mandate. No non-incumbent president has won a multi-cornered contest without a run-off since the introduction of direct presidential elections in 2004.

Not only does Prabowo have a strong chance of scoring an unprecedented first-round victory. His personal-vehicle party, Gerindra, could also beat PDI-P for first place in the legislative elections — allowing it by custom to claim the strategic speakership of parliament. If all breaks well on election day, Prabowo could become the most authoritative incoming president in the democratic era.

For Jokowi, such a landslide would only bring forward the point at which Prabowo no longer owes him anything. One son in the vice-presidency and the other as the head of a minor parliamentary faction would offer him only limited avenues to push back against any effort by Prabowo to sideline the Widodos in the course of asserting his authority over the political elite.

There remains uncertainty over the ends to which that authority might then be put. Prabowo’s 2024 campaign has been premised on continuity with the Jokowi era. His television advertisements and campaign speeches have featured Gibran prominently, listing off the hugely popular social programs that have been built by the Jokowi administration and promising to continue and expand them.

Yet the hallmark of Prabowo’s political career has been shifts in his political persona and alliances to serve his presidential ambitions. In 1997–98 he posed as a bitter-ender for former president Suharto’s foundering dictatorship, forging links with a rising Islamist civil society as part of his manoeuvring to succeed his then father-in-law. In the post-reformasi era he reinvented himself as a Sukarnoist ultranationalist, then later posed as a friend of political Islam in his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns against Jokowi.

More than twenty years of trial and error have now led Prabowo to mimicry of Jokowi’s secular, technocratic populism, with very successful results. But nobody — including Jokowi — can assume that this persona will hold fast if, or when, Prabowo has at his fingertips the powers of the overbearing presidency Jokowi has created, with the added bonus of a strong electoral mandate Jokowi helped him earn.

Prabowo has lately become proud of talking about how much he has learnt from Jokowi while serving as his defence minister since 2019 — and as PDI-P knows all too well, nobody but Jokowi is a better teacher of the art of the double-cross. •

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Coming just as candidate registrations opened for the 2024 presidential elections on 16 October, the five–four majority decision of the court created a loophole exempting elected officials from a rule that barred those aged under forty from joining the contest. It was all too convenient for the ambitions of thirty-six-year-old Gibran Rakabuming Raka, who had followed in the footsteps of his father, president Joko Widodo (known as Jokowi), by being elected mayor of their home city of Surakarta in 2020.

In recent months momentum had been gathering behind the idea of Gibran as running mate of defence minister Prabowo Subianto, the controversial former Soeharto henchman now widely seen as the frontrunner in the race to replace Jokowi. The court gave Jokowi, Prabowo and Gibran just the loophole they needed. Legal experts and the broader commentariat were scathing of its poorly reasoned decision, and of the crucial role played by the chief justice — who happens to be the president’s brother-in-law and Gibran’s uncle. Family Court, indeed.

But Jokowi didn’t become Indonesia’s most powerful president since Soeharto by caring much about the intelligentsia’s ideas of propriety. In brushing off criticism of the court’s decision and his son’s candidacy he struck a populist tone, declaring that “the people are the ones who mark a ballot, not we elites.” With approval ratings exceeding 80 per cent, he’s the most popular of any outgoing president in Indonesia; his endorsement provides a strategic advantage to any candidate looking to replace him.

Despite his disingenuous claims to neutrality, Jokowi is now well and truly off the fence in the contest between Prabowo and his main rival, Ganjar Pranowo, who — like Jokowi — is affiliated with the nationalist PDI-P party controlled by former president Megawati Soekarnoputri. The president’s disillusionment with the former Central Java governor — whom he sees as lacking independence from PDI-P and Megawati — has drawn him closer in recent months to Prabowo, who has carefully courted Jokowi’s favour by consulting him on key strategy decisions.

Prabowo and Gibran officially appeared together for the first time as running mates on 25 October, upstaging their rivals with a flashy stadium rally in Jakarta before leading a parade towards the electoral commission to submit their paperwork.

The unveiling of the Prabowo–Widodo alliance has changed the race to succeed Jokowi in important ways yet changed very little. Neither the constitutional court’s controversial ruling nor the nomination of Gibran appears to have had any immediate impact on any candidate’s popularity.

Polls still point to a two-round presidential election, with the likely elimination of former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan after an initial vote on 14 February giving way to a 26 June runoff between Prabowo and Ganjar. Prabowo’s success in the runoff will depend on the support of Anies’s voters, who mostly comprise the determinedly anti-Jokowi, and especially conservative Muslim, part of the electoral coalition Prabowo assembled at the last election in 2019. He’s counting on them voting for him, despite his accommodation with the Widodo family, out of antipathy to PDI-P and its secularist tendencies.

Jokowi’s support for Prabowo flies in the face not only of PDI-P’s preferences but also those of his own electoral base: about 55 per cent of those who voted for his re-election in 2019 tell pollsters they prefer Ganjar, while only 25 per cent have shifted to Prabowo. A key goal of pairing Gibran with Prabowo is to draw more Jokowi voters — largely concentrated in PDI-P’s Central and East Java heartland, where Ganjar has a sizeable lead — into Prabowo’s electoral coalition.

Nor is the vice-presidency the only front in the fight for a Widodo dynasty. In late September Gibran’s twenty-eight-year-old brother Kaesang Pengarep was appointed chairman of PSI, a minor party astroturfed into existence early in Jokowi’s presidency by sympathetic business and political figures, which recently endorsed Prabowo. The hope is that with the Widodo family halo above PSI, it will for the first time win the 4 per cent of the vote required to be awarded seats in the national legislature — and, now it has formally endorsed Prabowo, be rewarded with a share of cabinet seats if he wins. Speculation suggests that Gibran’s elevation to Prabowo’s ticket will be accompanied by his own defection from PDI-P to Golkar, the one-time regime party of Soeharto and another key member of the coalition supporting Prabowo’s campaign.

Take a moment to appreciate the sheer chutzpah Jokowi is showing in all this: putting one of his sons in control of a party whose principal strategy is to steal votes from PDI-P and putting another into a presidential campaign whose strategy involves poaching votes from PDI-P’s candidate — all while he himself is still a card-carrying member of the party.

PDI-P has little choice but to hold its fire. As one analyst puts it, Jokowi and the party are in a “mutual hostage situation” ahead of legislative elections to be held concurrently with the first round of the presidential vote on 14 February. For now, it’s not in PDI-P’s interest to have an acrimonious public split with a president who, even if his relationship with the party is becoming untenable, is still its most popular and influential cadre.

While Gibran’s candidacy has yet to change the state of the electoral horse race, it nonetheless has significant implications for Jokowi’s approach to the elections, and the political significance of their outcome for him.

Even as he became Indonesia’s most powerful post-reformasi head of state, Jokowi’s roots in the country’s political institutions remained quite shallow. His authority has rested not on direct control of a party, a social movement, a large personal fortune or even a particularly coherent band of cronies, but rather on the deterrent effect his huge popularity has on would-be opponents of his policies, and his willingness to use the legal system to coerce elites into cooperating with his political goals.

A key question that loomed over all this was his likely ability to wield influence after losing office. His efforts to engineer a constitutional amendment to delay the election, or allow himself to run for a third term, resulted in a rare defeat. Jokowi now seeks to anchor his post-presidential influence in a political dynasty the likes of which Indonesia has never seen at the national level, succeeding where former presidents Megawati and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono have failed in their efforts to secure presidential or vice-presidential candidacies for their children.

Has Jokowi accurately judged the risks and rewards of this strategy? If Ganjar can eke out a win, Jokowi will surely be exposed to withering revenge from PDI-P for his alliance with Prabowo. But even if Prabowo prevails, Jokowi might prove to have overestimated the payoffs. On paper, a Prabowo presidency would place members of the Widodo clan not only first in succession to a septuagenarian president but also potentially heading a debutante parliamentary party (PSI) and a new power base in an established one (Golkar), both of which are members of the nominating coalition that would have the pick of key cabinet posts.

But the real-world influence of all this is uncertain. Once he has settled in as president, Prabowo would have no compunction about sidelining Jokowi as part of any effort to assert his dominance over the political scene. A likely scenario is that the Widodo clan comes to resemble the Soekarnos or the Yudhoyonos: just one among many factions in a political oligarchy whose collective power, especially under Prabowo, would be checked by the overbearing presidency that Jokowi has given rise to.

It’s also important to set this within the record of Indonesian dynastic politics more generally. While a rising proportion of parliamentarians and local leaders have family ties to other elected officials, these dynasties have remained localised and small-scale, with little of the staying power of those in the Philippines, India or Thailand — or even consolidated liberal democracies like Japan and Taiwan.

The emergence of a Widodo dynasty as part of the national political furniture doesn’t on its own imperil Indonesian democracy. The worry is that Jokowi’s decision to take such a large stake in a Prabowo victory gives him a powerful incentive to use all the levers of incumbency to help bring it about. This could encompass his influence over the bureaucracy, local governments, big business, the police, the military — and if recent events are any guide, perhaps even the constitutional court, which adjudicates legal challenges to the results of elections.

In the end, the hazards for democracy that lie in Jokowi’s dynasty-building might have less to do with the ends than with the means. •

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A huge domestic market, favourable demographics and vast reserves of newly “critical” minerals mean the fundamentals are there for Indonesia to become one of the world’s five biggest economies by mid-century. Despite its enormous governance and development problems, there’s a sense that the facts of Indonesia’s economic and geopolitical importance are finally catching up with its elites’ pretensions about their status as leaders of a negara besar — a great, important country.

It’s in this feel-good atmosphere that Indonesia is set to choose a replacement for Jokowi, who’s constitutionally limited to two five-year terms, in presidential elections scheduled for February next year.

Spare a thought for the opposition’s candidate, the former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan. Once a close ally of the president, Anies stoked Muslim grievances to win the 2017 gubernatorial polls in Jakarta after the Chinese-Christian incumbent was accused of blasphemy. Anies’s standing among religious minorities — about an eighth of the national electorate — has been at rock bottom ever since. That’s a big enough problem on its own without the strategic challenges involved in running as a repudiation of a president whose approval ratings are hovering in the high 70s.

Those numbers aren’t the only ones posing a problem for Anies. Indonesia’s electoral laws apply a “presidential threshold” that requires candidates to be nominated by a party or coalition of parties that won either 20 per cent of the popular vote or 25 per cent of seats at the previous legislative elections. Anies has secured the backing of three parties that together meet this threshold, but if he loses just one he’ll be off the ballot.

The one party for which the nominating threshold isn’t a problem is PDI-P, the nationalist party Jokowi is at least officially a member of. Having won just over 20 per cent of the popular vote in 2019, it’s unilaterally put forward its star cadre Ganjar Pranowo, the telegenic governor of Central Java province.

Ganjar has charted a Widodo-like path to national popularity, having used local politics as a platform to build a national profile based mostly on his personal charm, competent administration and avoidance of scandal. Not for nothing have Indonesian pundits been pre-emptively labelling a Ganjar presidency as Jokowi jilid dua — “Jokowi volume two.”

Just like Jokowi, PDI-P is also Ganjar’s biggest liability. The party’s chair, former president Megawati Soekarnoputri, feels that Jokowi hasn’t repaid her with the obedience she considers to be her due given her role in making him president in 2014. Determined not to have another of her cadres assert their independence once in office, Megawati has tested Ganjar’s loyalties by forcing him into taking a high-profile stand against the government while publicly belittling him as a “party functionary.” Ganjar’s poll numbers have stagnated as many voters — not to mention Jokowi — have come to see him as a cipher for Megawati, who remains a polarising figure outside the PDI-P base.

This is all to the advantage of defence minister Prabowo Subianto, the candidate polls suggest would be the favourite if the election were held now. Having fought and lost two brutal presidential campaigns against Jokowi before being co-opted into his second-term cabinet, Prabowo is in the unique position of being able to promise continuity while remaining the lesser of the two evils for Anies’s voters in the event their candidate doesn’t make it on to the ballot or is eliminated in the first round of Indonesia’s two-round voting system.

Eight months out from the election, in short, Jokowi has got all three likely candidates exactly where he wants them: Anies struggling while Ganjar and Prabowo compete for the aura of being the president’s natural successor. Which raises a question: with the opposition weakened and the contest likely to involve two government-linked candidates promising more of the same, is anything at all at stake in this election?

To say these elections are a “test of democracy” might be too much of a cliché, but it’s telling that twenty-five years after the fall of Soeharto every Indonesian national election is still routinely described in those terms. Certainly, despite the resilience of Indonesian democracy in the face of unfriendly odds, Jokowi leaves some of its foundations looking unsteady.

That 2024’s polls are even taking place as scheduled shouldn’t be taken for granted: Jokowi, despite public denials, lent behind-the-scenes support to an unsuccessful push in 2021–22 to extend his term in office via constitutional amendment. And if Anies Baswedan’s candidacy falls over before it can be officially registered in November 2023, it will be an open question whether it was because his coalition lost confidence in his ability to turn around his polling numbers or because his bid was sabotaged by the government sabotage. His nominating parties have been rocked by suspiciously timed corruption investigations and lawsuits, while Anies himself is a potential target of corruption charges relating to financial decisions he made as governor of Jakarta, despite dubious evidence of illegality.

Even if unsuccessful, a president’s efforts to evade term limits and his authorities’ harassing the opposition with legal threats aren’t exactly the hallmarks of a healthy democracy. But underhanded tactics like this are of a piece with Jokowi-era democratic backsliding, wherein the president’s “personal distaste for contentious politics” has dovetailed with the illiberal reflexes of the cops, soldiers, religious leaders and Soekarnoist ideologues who surround him.

One reason to doubt that Ganjar Pranowo would oversee a rehabilitation of democratic norms is that PDI-P looms large within this illiberal milieu. The party has demanded that Ganjar allow it to appoint its cadres to a suite of senior cabinet positions if he is elected. On his watch PDI-P would seek to entrench its influence at the commanding heights of the Indonesian state, continuing to push a “hyper-nationalism” it sees as the antidote to the increasing influence of conservative Islam in society.

Ganjar’s likely response to the threat of being dominated by PDI-P would be to do what Jokowi has done for nine years: counterbalance and dilute its power by co-opting as many parties as he can into his cabinet (with the implicit promise that they can siphon money out of the programs they administer) and cosying up to the police force and military — none of which spells good things for the quality of governance.

The disappointments of the Jokowi years and the dim prospects for democratic renewal under Ganjar provide the backdrop for relitigating the question of whether Prabowo Subianto still represents a unique menace to the system, and whether he ever did.

It helps the cause of Prabowo revisionism that he’s been on his best behaviour since being appointed defence minister. He’s moderated his angry-outsider pose and distanced himself from the Islamic radicals he previously courted, while getting sympathetic press for his efforts to boost Indonesia’s military capability. It might be intuitive to assume that his support is concentrated among older voters nostalgic for the Soeharto era, but Prabowo’s voter base in fact skews young. To many in a generation too young to remember his New Order incarnation, he looks like a worldly, straight-talking patriot beholden to nobody.

Those with longer memories know what lies below the surface: an explosive temper; a penchant for demagoguery, risk-taking and rule-breaking; and, as a former special forces officer in Soeharto’s army, a comfort with the use of violence as an instrument of politics. These features of his character could make Prabowo unpredictable in a domestic or international crisis.

But what Prabowo might do patiently and deliberately could be just as insidious. In the Jokowi years, corruption has become a central talking point for conservatives, who say that the immense cost of running for office in Indonesia encourages politicians to monetise their positions once elected — and for this reason direct elections for local executive positions (and, a few say, the presidency) ought to be limited or abolished.

It’s this context that had me in a suspicious frame of mind when I saw Prabowo say, in a recent interview, that “frankly, we have to study the democracy we’re implementing… the cost of doing politics is too expensive.” He agreed with his interviewer’s observation that this expense was incentivising corruption, saying that “instead, in the end, our political system isn’t making Indonesia a great, advanced and prosperous country, but could wreck it.”

He went on to call for “political parties, social organisations, religious leaders [and] intellectuals” to come together to “study and [consider] what do we want to fix” about the political system. He compared such an effort to the BPUPK, a body set up in the dying days of Japan’s wartime occupation to “prepare” Indonesia for independence, which became a central site for negotiating the constitutional underpinnings of the Indonesian republic proclaimed by Soekarno in 1945: not only between Islamists and secularists, but between democrats and their adversaries.

Prabowo’s offhanded invocation of this formative period in Indonesia’s political history could merely be pretentious — or it could be a hint of the scale of the political changes he imagines himself leading as president. At stake in February’s election, then, is the chance for Indonesia to find out. •

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As Dan Slater and Joseph Wong remind us in their new book, Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia, authoritarianism also tends to die not with a bang but with a whimper. They set out to understand the political effects of economic transformations in Asian countries where state-building and rapid economic modernisation have been the mutually reinforcing goals of government.

This “developmental Asia,” as the authors call it, has borders that are stark but porous: no South Asian government has driven capitalist industrialisation seriously enough to be considered part of it, but former laggards like China, Vietnam and Myanmar have been able to enter after socialist economics proved a dead end.

The starting point of Development to Democracy is the observation that democratisation in developmental Asia has not been prompted by a perception among authoritarian elites that their regime faces a revolutionary threat or a looming collapse. Rather, these elites have developed a “well-founded expectation of continued stability and even continued outright victory after democratisation takes place.”

The epitome of “democratisation through strength,” as Slater and Wong call this process, was Taiwan’s transition from one-party rule in the 1980s and 1990s. Facing rising demands for reform from civil society, a growing Taiwanese-nationalist opposition and the end of the cold war, the ruling Kuomintang lifted martial law and introduced contested elections. The gamble paid off not just for Taiwan’s people — who today enjoy the highest-quality democracy in Asia — but also for the Kuomintang itself, which now forms half of a stable two-party system alongside the Democratic Progressive Party, which has its roots in the opposition movement of the 1980s.

What we should want, Slater and Wong imply, is for authoritarian regimes to act like the Kuomintang or its contemporaries in South Korea: concede from a position of strength, just past the apex of their power and popularity, giving the regime’s legatees the opportunity to compete in free and fair elections by boasting they not only made the country rich but also made it free.

Democratisation through strength is Asia’s signal contribution to the global political landscape, having given birth to robust liberal democracies in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, and to a flawed but stable electoral democracy in Indonesia. Yet it also produced failed experiments with democracy in Thailand and Myanmar, and has been resisted in Singapore, China, Indochina and — until only recently — Malaysia.

Despite the book’s concern with the relationship between economic development and democratisation, Slater and Wong aren’t offering warmed-over modernisation theory: the puzzle they seek to explain is why “levels of economic development are not clearly correlated with levels of democracy in developmental Asia.”

In theory, the legacies of authoritarian developmentalism make it safe for regimes to concede democratic reforms. Having transformed the living standards of the average voter, these regimes believe that their popular legitimacy will transfer to their own party or its successor(s) in free and fair elections. The poverty reduction and social safety nets they initiated — as well as their repression of the left — means that they need not worry about distributive conflicts spiralling out of control once democracy arrives.

This “victory confidence” and “stability confidence,” per the book’s shorthand, are needed for regimes to democratise, but they don’t on their own provide the impetus for reform. Instead, Slater and Wong emphasise the contingencies that come into play when pressures for reform from below interact with the regime’s perceptions of its own strength.

Reform pressures can come in many forms, and can come simultaneously. A regime can be confronted with signals of declining legitimacy, including gains by opposition parties in stage-managed elections, the defection of middle-class groups to anti-regime movements, or nudges from democratic security benefactors (essentially, the United States).

As the case of Malaysia shows, a regime’s ability to read the signs of its incipient decline makes all the difference to its capacity to engineer a transition to democracy on its own terms. In 1998, seventeen years into his economically successful twenty-three-year stint as prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad chose to repress rather than accommodate the reformasi movement that emerged after he sacked and prosecuted his politically ambitious finance minister Anwar Ibrahim amid a dispute over the Asian financial crisis.

Mahathir’s party, UMNO, endured as the cornerstone of the Barisan Nasional government for another twenty years, but electoral gerrymandering masked a gradual erosion in its popularity. The party’s decay reached its terminus in the extravagantly corrupt prime ministership of Najib Razak, who oversaw Barisan Nasional’s first-ever election loss in 2018. The victor in that election was an opposition coalition led by Mahathir, who’d become embittered in his retirement. Najib is in jail, and after a thrashing in last November’s general election the party has been reduced to a supporting act in a coalition government led by none other than Anwar Ibrahim.

Singapore — the place where modernisation theory goes to die — could go either way. The People’s Action Party, or PAP, is exceptionally well equipped to anticipate the signs of decline and position itself to thrive in a democratic system. It has a luminous track record of economic development and competent governance. Tightly controlled elections and grassroots “consultation” processes give it regular health checks on its popular support.

But the PAP reckons those feedback mechanisms haven’t set off enough alarm bells to incentivise it to embrace reforms. Slater and Wong suggest the PAP is taking a risky path: the slump in its vote in the 2020 general election might be written off as a pandemic-era aberration, but if the government underperforms in polls due by 2025 — by which time a leadership transition is also due — the PAP will be at a fork in the road: democratise from a position of dominance or risk going down the UMNO route.

China has a quite different set of problems. Conceding to demands for political reform in 1989 would have represented what Wong and Slater call “democracy through weakness” — the precipitous collapse of an authoritarian regime — to a degree never before witnessed in developmental Asia. With China’s turn to capitalism having yet to generate broad-based prosperity, and the traumas of the Mao era still fresh in elites’ memories, a fragmented and poorly institutionalised Communist Party regime couldn’t be confident of maintaining power or stability in a more competitive system. Too weak to concede, it cracked down violently.

The tragedy of today’s China, by contrast, is that the regime has become too good at repressing dissent to receive reliable signs that its own legitimacy, and political stability more broadly, would be better served by conceding reforms. Without even the ersatz electoral processes that marked East Asia’s other developmental authoritarian regimes, or their conditional tolerance of liberal civil society, Xi Jinping’s party-state is trapped in a black box of its own making, so paranoid about its hold on power that it can’t tell the difference between politically innocuous forms of civic activity and bona fide threats to its rule.

The idea of democracy as something vouchsafed by self-interested elites doesn’t readily gel with our more romantic ideas about how political freedom is won. The notion that democracy can be fortified by the socioeconomic legacies of dictatorship can be hard to swallow, too. But Slater and Wong’s work is part of a growing body of scholarship that analyses democracy not as the outcome of a zero-sum contest between authoritarian incumbents and “people power” movements but as a product of intra-elite pacts.

Slater and Wong’s book doesn’t break new ground in terms of fresh interviews or archival research. It’s a drawing together of their own and other scholars’ work into a big-picture framework for understanding the political economy of democratisation in East Asia — one that is compelling in its analysis and thought-provoking in its implications for how governments and civil society can support democracy across the world.

Fitting democratisation ­— an intrinsically complex and contingent process — into one neat explanatory framework has its risks, of course. While Slater and Wong stress the critical role that popular pressures put on regimes in developmental Asia to reform political systems, I suspect that some country experts and scholars of social movements will feel that they overstate how much room for manoeuvre Asia’s authoritarians actually had once pressure for reform grew.

Even in the exemplary cases of Taiwan and South Korea, sustained popular protest presented elites with the choice between reform or a campaign of repression that may well have triggered greater unrest. Different observers look at the same set of facts and ask: did these regimes jump, or were they pushed?

And for a work so explicitly grounded in theories of the relationship between socioeconomic and political change, I was surprised by the minimal discussion of the ambiguous role middle classes have played in both demanding democracy and sustaining it after experiments in “democratisation through strength” are launched. Witness the highly problematic role of Thailand’s middle classes in its post-Thaksin politics, or how Indonesia’s intra-middle-class culture wars are eroding the quality of democracy there.

Slater and Wong could have enriched their analysis with more serious consideration of how popular preferences and agency augment the elite machinations they examine. After all, the middle class needs “victory confidence” and “stability confidence” too.

Yet my familiarity with Indonesia predisposes me to agree with Slater and Wong’s emphasis on the self-interested calculations of elites as a decisive factor in the emergence of durable democracies. While profound political change in Indonesia was almost inevitable once protests and riots threatened to make the country ungovernable by May 1998, the experiment with democratic reforms in the years thereafter was an “inside job” overseen by New Order holdovers. Slater and Wong are on solid ground when they observe that Indonesian democracy has survived against the odds in no small part because the old regime’s elites were assured of their ability to thrive in the new system.

But as Thailand and Myanmar make clear, democratisation through strength is a “reversible experiment” that doesn’t always bear fruit for those running it. Attempts to democratise through strength collapsed in Thailand (after Thaksin) and in Myanmar (after the National League for Democracy’s landslide election victories) because the conservatives who oversaw liberalisation realised they couldn’t effectively compete in the new system.

So what do we do with the insight that an essential precondition for democracy to take root in Asia has been authoritarian elites’ belief that democratisation won’t spell their political obsolescence?

Slater and Wong aren’t shy about taking their arguments to their logical conclusions. As they acknowledge, “one way to interpret the argument and evidence offered in this book is that democracy should only be pursued through strength.” They reject that sweeping idea, noting that it is possible for durable democracy to be born of people power movements.

Yet evidence from developmental Asia suggests that, on the probabilities, “by laying a stronger foundation for eventual stable democratic transition, gradual authoritarian strengthening is generally a preferable outcome to sudden and total authoritarian collapse” and the often-brittle democracies that emerge from the ashes.

For this reason, “we” — presumably, Western academics and policymakers — “should be looking at authoritarian regimes through lenses other than the standard lens of ‘democracy promotion.’” Instead, “authoritarian regimes that make genuine collective efforts to promote economic development, improve popular welfare, and build more predictable and durable political institutions should be offered the international community’s conditional encouragement rather than unrelenting pressure.”

As Asia feels the chill of a new cold war, it’s perhaps apt that Slater and Wong strike a retro note about the importance of encouraging state-building and development and hoping that, with a bit of luck, democracy might emerge as a side-effect. But their prescription seems oddly less relevant to Asia than to other parts of the world; indeed, it probably already describes what Western governments are doing in the region. Western aid programs and private foundations might still pay the bills for liberal civil society across developing Asia — supporting the “demand side” of the democratisation equation — but when it comes to top-level government engagement, Western policy already reflects the realpolitik that competition for influence with China demands of them.

Slater and Wong are less explicit about what their arguments offer to opposition parties and civil society. But the implication is that any struggle for change ought to prioritise reassuring authoritarian elites about their prospects in a democratic system. Perhaps one of this book’s most important contributions is to leave us with the unanswered question of how movements for democracy might thread that particular needle. •

From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia
By Dan Slater and Joseph Wong | Princeton University Press | $62.99 | 368 pages

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That fear of a democratic comeback for Prabowo — one of the most odious of Suharto’s henchmen — was palpable among Indonesian progressives in the last weeks of the 2014 campaign. It galvanised them in 2014, notwithstanding Jokowi’s own entanglements with the legatees of Suharto’s New Order era. When Prabowo stood again earlier this year, many stuck with Jokowi for the same reason, long after it was clear that their president was not the reformer many (including me) had hoped he would be.

You can only imagine, then, how those progressive voters felt this week when Prabowo gracefully accepted the offer of a senior position in Jokowi’s second-term cabinet. Amid a process which is already being panned in the Indonesian press for its accommodation of political parties and vested interests, his appointment as defence minister has dominated international attention. As one Australian academic quipped, “What was that election for again?”

Prabowo is a grossly inappropriate choice for the defence portfolio. After Suharto’s resignation he was dismissed from the military for organising the abduction and torture of anti-regime activists, and he faces serious questions over his role in atrocities during the occupation of East Timor. Not that Western governments are likely to care: Prabowo has recently expressed the right concerns about an “ever-expansive” China, and will be a reliable ally in the fight against terrorism, his own election-time alliances with Islamic hardliners having been sidelined in favour of reconciliation with the nationalist and moderate Islamic parties that dominate Jokowi’s coalition. But Prabowo is ambitious, and nobody knows whether he is joining the government in order to white-ant it, or to inherit it when Jokowi leaves office in 2024.

On the one hand, Prabowo’s appointment seems extraordinary — somewhat like Hillary Clinton being appointed to cabinet not by Barack Obama but by Donald Trump. At the same time, the circumstances of Prabowo’s return to public office are emblematic of some broader pathologies of post-Suharto politics. Democratic accountability, most people would think, rests upon the idea that the public votes leaders and parties out of office as much as into it. But in Indonesia, ideological and political economy factors encourage the formation of oversized ruling coalitions, of the kind Jokowi has pursued, that are designed to accommodate a broad swathe of elite factions and social groups — including the notional election “losers.”

Announcing the new cabinet, Jokowi exhorted his new ministers not to be corrupt, but he knows that opportunities for rorts are the whole point of these “fat” coalitions. Much of the viability and influence of parties and religious organisations is dependent on their delivering patronage — pork-barrel projects, jobs for the boys, government contracts, favourable regulatory decisions — to their clienteles. For parties, kickbacks collected in this process are an important source of operational funds. The prospect of controlling a ministry and its budget is one reason why, though parties compete vigorously with each other in elections, they then “enter power-sharing agreements that effectively void voters’ preferences.”

Even when viewed in light of these conventions, and judged by the standard Jokowi set in his first term, the new cabinet is qualitatively worse than those that preceded it. It hews less to the tradition of representational diversity that Indonesian presidents usually honour. At a time when Papuan grievances are driving civil unrest and observers worry that anti-Chinese prejudice is growing, there is no indigenous Papuan or ethnic Chinese Indonesian in the ministry, and only five out of thirty-four portfolios are held by women, a decrease from Jokowi’s first term.

And it’s not as if those ministers who did make the cut are an impressive bunch overall. The new health minister is a controversial army doctor who was sanctioned by Indonesia’s medical association over his promotion of an unproven “brain wash” therapy for stroke patients. The pro-Jokowi media tycoon Surya Paloh had a politician from his Nasdem Party installed as communications minister and now has the luxury of regulating his own media empire. Last month, tens of thousands of Indonesian students were protesting the weakening of anti-corruption laws, a draconian new criminal code, and the government’s persistent failure to discipline industry for its role in Indonesia’s forest-fire crisis. Yet forestry and environment minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar, another Nasdem Party cadre, has been kept in her portfolio. The hapless justice minister, Yasonna Laoly — whose ministry co-authored the bills most forcefully rejected by the protesters — has likewise been kept in place.

After Jokowi was re-elected in June, he told the Associated Press that he no longer had a “political burden.” His cabinet just confirms the observation of one Indonesian academic that the “burden” he was thinking of wasn’t the demands of his elite coalition partners, but those of voters and civil society.

The abandonment of any pretence of institutional reform is not all that has changed after the election. This cabinet reflects much more clearly than in Jokowi’s first term a renewed atmosphere of ideological conflict between proponents of the religious pluralism that has long dominated the political mainstream and the Islamism that is ascendant in an increasingly pious society — and particularly among the urban middle classes who play an outsize role in cultural and political life.

The former national police chief Tito Karnavian, a political ally of the president, has been appointed as home minister, a position with wide powers over the civil service and regional government. In one of his more surprising appointments, Jokowi has chosen Fachrul Razi, a former army general, as minister for religion — the first time since the New Order that a military man has held this post. Presidential palace officials briefed the media this week that the two will spearhead a “deradicalisation” agenda within Indonesia’s civil and religious bureaucracy, which pluralist and moderate organisations have long worried is being colonised by sympathisers of radical groups like the now-banned Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia or the mainstream Islamist party PKS.

Indonesian pluralists and many westerners will be encouraged by the idea that the Islamic far right will no longer be indulged by the state, as it was under former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who saw conservative Muslims as an important part of his political coalition. But those who know what the rhetoric of “deradicalisation” signifies in the current political climate in Indonesia — and recall what it meant during the New Order — are wary of what such a crackdown on an ill-defined “radicalism” might mean in practice.

Indeed, what has (re)emerged under Jokowi is a strain of “nondemocratic pluralist” thinking, which sees the threat to Indonesian social cohesion and national identity posed by Islamism as so acute as to justify restrictions on freedom of association (such as the decree used to ban Hizbut Tahrir in 2017) and purges of Islamist sympathisers in the bureaucracy, something which anecdotal evidence suggests has been quietly under way for some time under Jokowi. One need only look to the experience of the Arab world, or even the New Order, to see how ineffective the promotion of an aggressive nationalism — combined with the delegitimisation of Islamist movements and discrimination against their followers — is likely to be as a remedy for the spread of Islamist ideals in society.

The new cabinet, then, embodies both what has been rotten about Indonesia’s post-Suharto politics since the beginning and the new problems being created and exacerbated by Jokowi’s leadership. It’s tempting to say that Indonesians had better hope they get lucky with their presidential candidates in the 2024 elections — yet if there’s one idea that Jokowi’s presidency has put to rest, it’s that Indonesian democracy needs a saviour. •

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