An Election to End All Elections

Picture: Garry Andrew Lotulung / Anadolu via AFP

In an article by Fulcrum, Ian Wilson writes the potential impact of a Prabowo presidency, especially on Indonesia’s fading democracy.

Candidate Prabowo has given assurances of his commitment to democracy, with the open-ended proviso that it “still has many deficiencies”. Less openly autocratic than in his 2014 and 2019 presidential campaigns, Prabowo’s 2024 rebrand is not just image- and personality-based but also political, responding to a changed landscape where public support for democracy remains high. This is even as democracy has been substantively hollowed out under a popular president. Constitutional autocracy, a la the Prabowo of 2014, has become unnecessary for Prabowo 2024 to consolidate and maintain power. Furthermore, it is risky to reveal such autocratic tendencies, insofar as it provokes backlash and generates opportunities for his rivals to criticise him or engage in populist posturing. This is not to suggest that Prabowo has abandoned his broader ideological objectives but rather that he has again recalibrated his strategy, using a different means towards a similar end.

A Prabowo presidency, then, may see an expansion of “opposition-less” approaches to governing, framed by nationalist tropes of safeguarding unity. The logic of this approach, already embraced by Jokowi, is to remove parliamentary opposition and curtail the emergence of rival power bases. This is done not by overt repression but co-optation into large ruling coalitions managed via negotiations and inter-elite deals. Prabowo has said that he intends to include “all sides” in any future government. This would resemble his preferred integralist “consensus” (musyawarah)-based model, as envisioned in Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution, and serve to further strengthen the power of the executive.