Indonesian President Jokowi Was Convincingly Re-Elected. Will He Now Push for Bolder Reforms?

Indonesian president Joko Widodo has been re-elected for a second and final term. Quick counts suggests a margin of 55 percent to 45 percent, which is a slight increase on his victory five years ago against the same opponent, former military general Prabowo Subianto.

In his election campaign of 2014, reformist-minded civil society groups and activists were important actors for the Jokowi side. Within a few months of his presidency, they were being told by Jokowi’s advisers that human rights would not figure prominently. They should wait until his second term to push for difficult reforms, they said, as Jokowi didn’t need to worry about upsetting influential people as he pushed for re-election.

Jokowi’s first term also disappointed many of the younger Jakarta-based relawan (volunteer) and student groups. They gave up on gaining access to the palace. Rather, they saw Jakarta Governor Basuki Purnama, or Ahok, as their reformist candidate, forming the group Teman Ahok (Friends of Ahok). But these youth campaigners were then disappointed when they were somewhat abandoned by Jokowi prior the 2017 governor’s election. Ahok went on to lose the election and was subsequently jailed for blasphemy.

Watch: VICE Votes: Young Indonesian Voters Speak Up On The 2019 Election

Still, many of those civil society actors and pluralist youth campaigners supported Jokowi again in this election, although overall less vociferously. They continued to do so partly because they believed he might indeed be more reformist in his second term, but largely because for them, it was “ABP”: anyone but Prabowo.

Will these civil society actors operate differently in working with Jokowi in his second term? Or is the democratic backsliding that occurred in Jokowi’s first term likely to continue into his second?

Sandra Hamid of Asia Foundation explained that Civil Society Organisations are not monolithic, that “organisations working on the environment found Jokowi’s first term very productive in pushing forward their agendas” but “organisations working on human rights found their agenda rather neglected”. She expects Jokowi to be stronger on human rights issues in his second term. This sentiment was echoed by a hopeful Ririn Sefsani who said activists such as herself plan to hold numerous meetings with Jokowi in the coming months, and that the president “will be more open for proposals…because he has less political pressure” this time around.

Other activists are more cautious.

Darmawan Triwibowo of TIFA foundation said progressive civil society needs to reflect on its mistakes made in Jokowi’s first term. They joined too easily in “partisan politics” and “relied too much on what we hoped he was but was not factually the case—a reformist government,” he told me.

Usman Hamid, Head of Amnesty International Indonesia, said activists “need to bring back human rights agenda to his table, including the quality of free speech that has been declining under his leadership”. Amnesty recently released 9 agenda points for the next presidential term, which included ending the death penalty, “respect of human rights in Papua”, and “end harassment, intimidation, attacks and discrimination against LGBTI people”.

Meanwhile, Andreas Harsono of Human Rights Watch explained that in Jokowi’s first term “many religious and sexual minorities felt vulnerable because of his government’s failure to protect them”, but that his re-election “resets the stage for his government to tackle the many critical human rights issues that went unaddressed during his first term”. Harsono said discriminatory regulations could be fought through political parties, with Partai Solidaritas Indonesia (PSI), one example of a new, progressive party.

But PSI’s results yesterday were a disaster for the party. Despite selling themselves as a party for youth and progressives, they achieved around 2 percent of the vote, failing to meet the required 4 percent threshold to enter national parliament. They have vowed to focus more on local parliaments. Legislative results are still coming through, but there are signs that conservative Islamic female candidates, for example, are a new force for politics in district and city levels.

Nonetheless, Triwibowo agrees with Harsono in that the new parliament is the best way to push for reforms: “The fact that parliamentarians will be jockeying [for presidential and vice-presidential candidates] for 2024 will open room for us to influence them. Working with parliament will be more promising than working directly with the Jokowi administration.”

Much depends on whether a new force for reformist politics actually emerges, perhaps from a political party or civil society organisation. And while it’s quickly become a cliché to generalise millennial voters in Indonesia, youth activism does matter here too, particularly in the way they engage with new media platforms to influence online discourse around certain topics.

It’s worth recalling that when Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was re-elected in 2009, a lot of civil society groups were hopeful he would be more bold and decisive in his second term. He wasn’t, and was very quickly seen as a lame duck. He spent part of his second term writing his autobiography, with an approval rating of around 30 percent by May 2013.

So Jokowi should know that he doesn’t have much time to show that he is ready to face the more difficult challenges that he ignored in his first term. He will have to stand up to conservative religious and military figures and their supporters who attack LGBTQ and other minority groups, and at times make decisions that may upset the majority. If he doesn’t, the reformist, liberal crowd will either quickly move to another “new hope” of Indonesian politics, or we’ll see more online messages such as the golput (abstain from voting) online campaign, which portray disillusionment in the formal structures of Indonesian politics.

Ross Tapsell is the Indonesia specialist at the Australian National University.