10 - Indonesian parties revisited: systemic exclusivism, electoral personalisation and declining intraparty democracy

Summary

As key actors in democratic states, political parties are necessarily part of the crisis that is affecting democracy (Cyr 2017; Lisi 2018). Even in the established democracies of the West, the increasing inability of parties to represent the aspirations of a broad spectrum of voters has given rise to anti-party, anti-establishment populism (Lochocki 2017). In newer democracies, this trend has been even more pronounced, with the weakness of institutional checks and balances making it hard for such polities to constrain authoritarian populists in the way that most established democracies still manage to do (Lupu 2016). Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, whose drug war has killed thousands of people, and Narendra Modi in India, who initiated citizenship policies that discriminated against Muslims, have used widespread anti-system sentiments to pursue illiberal agendas that might have been softened or prevented by a stronger tradition of party-based deliberative democracy. In the Philippines and India, but elsewhere too, the crisis of democracy is thus primarily a crisis of conventional party politics (Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein 2017).

Indonesia is no exception in this regard. In both the 2014 and 2019 elections, a moderate populist (Joko Widodo) faced off against a radical one (Prabowo Subianto), and while the moderate prevailed (Aspinall and Mietzner 2014, 2019), the absence of established party actors in both presidential races highlighted the parties’ increasing marginalisation and deterioration. Under President Widodo (Jokowi), the trend of party and party system weakening continued, and expressed itself in three major ways. First, it became apparent that the post-Suharto party system was excluding significant segments of the electorate by erecting ever-increasing hurdles to the formation of new parties. Second, the entrenchment of the proportional, open party-list electoral system led to an escalation in the personalisation of elections, with parties forced to pick non-party figures to represent them in both executive and legislative elections. And third, the already weak procedures governing intraparty democracy were hollowed out further, with even formerly contested party leaderships now often in the hands of incumbents who could easily engineer reappointment to their posts. Overall, then, Indonesia's party system has become less representative, while the parties have been institutionally weakened.