Red, not Green, Politics Brought Down Indonesian World Cup Dream
This is why we can't have nice things.
Indonesia won the bid to host the 2021 FIFA U-20 World Cup football championship in October 2019. By luck, stronger contenders like Myanmar & Thailand, Bahrain & Saudi Arabia & UAE (those were co-hosts’ bids), and Brazil withdrew their bids for different reasons.
Then COVID got in the way and the tournament was canceled, but Indonesia’s hosting right was transferred to the 2023 tournament. COVID had gotten out of the way, and Indonesia regained its optimism. A youthful nation with a stable economy and growing international prominence.
One of the talking points of the championship was the qualification of Israel as a European representative. Indonesians had expected opposition from Islamists, but they would not be able to stop the tournament.
And yet, a stronger opposition came from a very unexpected side just before the draw for the group stage of the tournament in Bali. The governor of Bali, I Wayan Koster, declared that he refused to welcome Israel to Bali, both for the draw and the matches.
It snowballed from there. FIFA, Federation International of Football Associations, canceled the draw. Koster told journalists that the decision was not his, but the central government’s. Naturally, foreign press interpreted this as the decision of the Joko Widodo administration. Eventually, FIFA canceled Indonesian hosting rights.
Average Indonesians turned their ire to Koster and his party, PDIP. The party digs down, claiming that the Indonesian constitution is anticolonial, while Israel is colonial. Various PDIP figures insisted that the party stays true to the idealism of Sukarno, who constantly rejected engagement with Israel in sports in the 1950s and the 1960s.
PDIP happens to be the party of Joko Widodo, but he has outgrown the party for the last 10 years. The party fast-tracked his political career from being the mayor of Surakarta into the governor of Jakarta in 2012, to eventually the president of Indonesia in 2014. Indonesian bourgeois dislike PDIP but they like Jokowi, who got reelected in 2019 and will end his administration in 2024. After hosting the G20 summit in Bali in November 2022, the U-20 World Cup was supposed to be another international prestige for him.
PDIP is a leftist populist party that has its roots in Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia. Sukarno built his reputation in the 1950s as an anti-colonial figure and grounded his opposition to Israel in accordance with socialist anticolonialism. He owed other Arab nationalists who supported Indonesian independence, and this was also the position of both the USSR and the People’s Republic of China.
In 1962 Indonesia expelled both Israel and the Republic of China from the Jakarta Asian Games. International Olympics Committee’s sanction against Indonesia led to Sukarno creating his own Olympics, Games of New Emerging Forces, while holding an undeclared war against Malaysia. Years of living dangerously indeed. After the fall of Sukarno, Indonesia still doesn’t have diplomatic relations with Israel but maintains tourism and even (covertly) security relations.
It didn’t take long for Indonesians to deduce the motive of PDIP’s rejection in Bali, and of course, appeasement to hardline Islam wasn’t one of them. Megawati’s jealousy of Jokowi’s popularity has been cited as the most popular cause. Politically this is counterintuitive: Indonesia’s success in hosting the World Cup would reflect positively too on PDIP. The man favored to succeed Jokowi, Ganjar Pranowo, has expressed his loyalty to PDIP instead and sided with Wayan Koster in rejecting Israel.
That is why I believe that Megawati Sukarnoputri’s loyalty to her father’s legacy is genuine. PDIP Secretary General Hasto Kristiyanto has invoked the main football stadium in Indonesia, Gelora Bung Karno, as the testimony of party loyalty to Sukarno. In other words, it’d be sacrilegious to welcome any symbol of Israel (such as its flag) in the stadium.
In the end, PDIP figures stated that they never wanted the tournament to be removed from Indonesia at all. Wayan Koster made another excuse, saying that he worried that Israeli presence in Indonesia, including in Bali, could heighten security risk. Deputy Speaker Hidayat Nur Wahid from the Islamist party PKS said that the tournament should have stayed in Indonesia, and FIFA should ban Israel the way it bans Russia.
The woke class, who hates Jokowi (and PDIP) and the Islamists equally, didn’t say much throughout the controversy. After Indonesia lost its hosting rights, however, they said that it was the right decision. Indonesia should have not hosted the tournament after the police response to a pitch invasion in Malang in October 2022 killed 135 people.
Any Israeli presence in the West would invite a coalition of woke white, Islamists, and Arab nationalists under the banner of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), but the situation is a bit different in Indonesia. The bourgeois woke don’t want to share the frame with the far-right, and in Indonesia, the far-right are the Islamists. BDS Indonesia didn’t have its profile uplifted (its Instagram account only has 270 followers), and even it was grouped together with PDIP and Islamist figures as the killjoys.
And yet, the damage’s done. No World Cup festival for Indonesia. Sure, FIFA and the Football Association of Indonesia might have given up too easily, but everyone blames PDIP for that. Ganjar Pranowo, who was favored to be the next president, has jeopardized his strong lead for 2024.
Only PDIP still cares about Sukarno. Not the woke, not the conservatives, and not the centrist public. PDIP itself still can count the loyalty of the Javanese and Christian provinces – along with Bali, who traditionally vote for the anti-Islamist and populist party.
Interestingly, this cancellation might have done more to erase the legacy of Sukarno, compared to the passage of time or any online history war. Whether in 1963 or 2023, the man and his idea have worked hard to keep Indonesia isolated and backward.