Jokowi Broke the ‘Reformasi Coalition’

Picture: Wikimedia Commons / Liam Gammon

In an article by New Mandala, Edward Aspinall and Fauziah Mayangsari discuss the how Indonesian President Joko Widodo's tenure has led to a significant shift in the relationship between the government and civil society, resulting in the marginalization of pro-democracy groups that once played a crucial role in advancing democratic reforms in the post-Suharto era.

One of the legacies Joko Widodo leaves Indonesia is a dramatically changed relationship between government and civil society. For the first decade and a half of the post-Suharto period, pro-democracy civil society groups and government constituted a rough-and-ready “Reformasi coalition” in which a constant push-and-pull between these two sides—sometimes cooperative, often conflictual—slowly moved forward a process of democratic reform and safeguarded reform achievements from counter-reformist elites.

Jokowi’s presidency has seen the breakdown of that relationship. Civil society organisations (CSOs) have lost contact with interlocutors within government, and have few policy achievements to point to (and many losses) in the past decade. Mass protests haven’t ended, and there has been no wide-ranging crackdown on civil society per se. But as Jokowi prepares to hand over power to a successor who is viewed with great wariness by pro-democratic civil society, the progressive components of the erstwhile Reformasi coalition are more politically marginal than at any time since the regime change of 1998.

How and why did a president whose early political career benefited much from the support of civil society oversee a precipitous decline in its political influence and role in policymaking?