Indonesia’s 2004 elections have encouraged the view among the international community that the post-Suharto democratic transition is now being consolidated. This assessment is supported by the fact that both general and presidential elections, which embraced more than 150 million voters, were conducted peacefully. Moreover, the victory of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a popular presidential candidate challenging the incumbent Megawati Sukarnoputri, is widely recognized as a victory for ‘public opinion’, which has been disappointed by Megawati and her political party, the PDI-P. The disenchanted public thus voted against them, resulting in the birth of the Yudhoyono administration. This may reflect the growing importance of ‘people power’ in Indonesia’s national politics.
However, the impact of the 2004 elections on local politics illustrates different dynamics. This article — based on extensive fieldwork by the author — argues that the elections significantly contributed to the strengthening of the local power elite who had governed everyday politico-economic life, and this in turn effectively shrank the space for civil society in promoting democratic change in local politics. How and why this development occurred constitutes the focus of this article.
A close look at the local electoral process shows how the elite use democratic institutions, such as elections, to preserve their politico-economic benefits. To clarify this, we first attempt to elucidate the way in which local political power has been restructured after the fall of Suharto. The removal of Suharto caused the elite ‘iron triangle’, comprising the Golkar (the ruling party of Suharto), local bureaucrats and business circles, to largely collapse, and opened up space for a new power elite involving PDI-P politicians, local informal bosses, military commands, hoodlums (
preman) and religious leaders, as commonly seen in West, Central and East Java. The growing competition for local power has radically facilitated money politics and political mobilization of
preman. The use of
preman for organizing ‘mass’ movement became an important device by which the elite gained access to local government resources, which effectively emasculated civil society in its effort to empower the ‘mass’ based on class/vocational identities. Assessing these changes is the key to understanding the impact of the 2004 elections in West, Central and East Java. Our comparative analysis demonstrates how elite practice has remained largely unchanged, how its power structure has even been fortified, and how there is now a grave risk that the sophisticated power elite will skilfully hijack the still-fragile democracy at the local level.
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