Left and Right: Sukarnoism and Suhartoism in Indonesian Presidency
Indonesia's at a crossroads
The Indonesian general election of 2024, a one-day election involving more than 200 million voters over 6,000 islands, has passed on peacefully. Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto is projected to win more than 55% of votes, beating former Governor of Jakarta Anies Baswedan and former Governor of Central Java Ganjar Pranowo.
For Indonesia’s creative class, this is a disaster. You might have read from international publications about how Prabowo, a former general, has been accused of several human rights violations, from the Indonesian occupation of East Timor in the late 20th century to the disappearance of human rights activists in the late 1990s. And yet, many adult Indonesians don’t have any problem with this.
What went wrong with the other two options? Ganjar was a strong candidate and was once thought to be a newer version of President Joko Widodo (Jokowi). Handsome, growing up in poverty, and hailing from the same province and the same party.
That momentum ended last year when his centre-left party, PDI-P, rejected Israel’s participation in the FIFA U20 World Cup. For Indonesia’s football fans (we’re often going with the adjective “football crazy”), it was a jerk move. Indonesia was reopening past COVID, we had the honour to host a global tournament, and the rejection didn’t come from Islamists. Eventually, FIFA moved the tournament away from Indonesia, and after 7 October, PDI-P supporters said that the party made the right decision.
PDI-P, after all, was true to its Sukarno’s root. The first president of Indonesia was a standard anti-West postcolonial leader, who refused to host Israel and the Republic of China during the 1962 Asian Games, a decision that led to Indonesia’s suspension from the IOC and Sukarno’s creation of an alternative Olympics.
Ironically, to this day many Indonesian football fans, pro-Palestine they are, still don’t forgive Ganjar for his stance, to the point of distinguishing the Israel football team from the IDF. An impossible stance elsewhere, with thousands of Nordic musicians calling for Israel’s exclusion from the Eurovision.
Jokowi himself was a PDI-P politician but had been exiled by the party for being bigger than the party. In this decade, Indonesia’s creative class came to hate him like the way the French students hate Macron: A centrist, a capitalist, a reactionary. Indeed, Jokowi is compared to former dictator Suharto, right to this day.
If Suharto was a dictator, wasn’t Sukarno a dictator too? It was Sukarno who appointed himself president for life. It was Sukarno who liquidated the parliament. It was Sukarno who only held one election over twenty years of his rule. It was Sukarno who pursued an unnecessary war to the point of leaving the United Nations.
By now, we know that a tyrant is a dictator if you dislike his politics. Otherwise, he’s a democratic leader (according to Washington) or an anti-colonial revolutionary (according to Moscow). This logic extends to the voters. Jokowi is a great president if you’re politically moderate, and a neo-Suharto if you’re a far left or an Islamist.
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If you understand the history of the 20th century, it’s easy to imagine how the history of Indonesia unfolded. Sukarno, a Dutch-speaking architect, went from a political prisoner in the 1930s into a revolutionary leader in the 1940s (he was never a fighting man, but wholly supported by the military), a conqueror/unifier in the 1950s, and then a paranoid “Great Leader of the Revolution” in the 1960s.
Suharto, born in poverty, fought Sukarno’s wars and toppled him in 1966, turning Jakarta’s allegiance from Beijing to D.C. While forcing Chinese Indonesians to assimilate, he incorporated them to develop Indonesia’s economy, and by 1985 Indonesia had it all: Toyotas and Sonys, American primetime shows, international airports, and franchises. We rode the wave of globalisation, believing we could follow the Asian Tigers, and it all crashed in the Asian Financial Crisis. Suharto stepped down and democratisation came in.
Jokowi seemed to be the synthesis of Sukarno and Suharto. He was a furniture trader, never a soldier. He’s not educated overseas and wasn’t comfortable speaking English. He was outside the aristocracy of the military or the technocracy. And yet, he focused on building and improving Indonesia’s roads, telecommunication, and infrastructures – a Suhartoist developmentalist. Just in ten years, he went from the Mayor of Surakarta to the Governor of Jakarta and then the President of Indonesia.
Ironically, he faced Prabowo twice in the 2010s and beat him. Ironically, in the 2010s Jokowi stood for the Sukarnoists, the left, while Prabowo stood for the Suhartoists, the right. And like Clinton or Blair in the 1990s, Jokowi brought a feel-good decade of economic stability, cultural renaissance, and safety.
No more pickpockets and carriage riders at train stations. No more pirated discs, as cheap broadband and 4G connections made streaming apps affordable. We even got MCU new releases mid-week, sooner than the US. Dozens of deliverymen on every street corner served as community safety volunteers. No more terrorist threats, no more religious and ethnic tensions.
In fact, the last ethnic tension was brought in by Anies Baswedan, who challenged Jokowi’s former ally Basuki Tjajaha Purnama in the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election. Ahok, as the Chinese Indonesian governor was popularly known, faced an accusation of blasphemy against Islam, confronted by large Islamist protests comparable to modern anti-Israel protests in the West (right down to the flags of Palestine), and was sentenced to jail. Baswedan became a capable governor but was never forgiven by supporters of Jokowi and Ahok.
There was also another fear of anti-Chinese riots following the 2019 general election, and after it ended, Jokowi impossibly picked Prabowo as the Minister of Defence. All of Prabowo’s vitriol against Jokowi ended, and together they worked past the COVID pandemic and the volatile new decade.
Right to last year, supporters of Jokowi still counted on Ganjar, but the World Cup stance changed the game. It wasn’t just about Israel or the tournament, but about his capability to become a new president. Again, Ganjar wanted to prove that, unlike Jokowi, he was loyal to the party and its Sukarnoist roots.
By this time, the Indonesian left, heavily influenced by American woke ideologies, had pictured Jokowi as a neo-Suharto, a brutal dictator, an enemy of the marginalised. Think of how American or Australian students paint Joe Biden or Anthony Albanese as “Genocide Joe” or “Genocide Albo”.
And so, their wish was…manifested. Jokowi put his second son, Gibran Rakabuming, also the Mayor of Surakarta, as the running mate for Prabowo. Ganjar made two good moves to recruit former Jokowi allies Mahfud MD and Ahok himself, but it was too late. The presidential candidate couldn’t prove that he was an independent man with his own vision, rather than a puppet candidate for Sukarno’s daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri, the perpetual leader of PDI-P.
Early 2024 polls put Ganjar as the weakest candidate, behind Prabowo and Baswedan, which was supported by a coalition of Islamists and the left youth. Yes, this is the case of Queer for Palestine, and indeed many of Baswedan’s young supporters put on the watermelon emoji on their X names. The Arab Indonesian served as the horseshoe candidate, uniting the far left and the far right. That’s how he got about 25% of the votes, but still not enough to cancel Prabowo’s majority.
Quite different from other countries, Indonesians have weak loyalty to parties and party leaders, hence although Ganjar lost heavily, PDI-P still emerged as the top winner in the parliament. Many PDI-P supporters question the logic, and the logic is many Indonesians voted for Jokowi – his son and his party, instead of Prabowo’s own party.
If you’re outside Indonesia, it seems that democracy is in danger, as a general with a violation history won the election. But isn’t that the point of an election? As a journalist or academic, you cannot say that liberal democracy is a capitalist or American imperialist plot, and then complain when the people choose the more conservative candidate, the “un-American” candidate, as is the case in Argentina, the Philippines, Italy, the Netherlands, and now Indonesia. Democracy is about what the people want, not who you want the people to choose.