The Coalitions Presidents Make: Presidential Power and Its Limits in Democratic Indonesia, Marcus Mietzner, Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2023, Pp. 285 + xvii, ISBN 9781501772641 (Hardcover)

Abstract

This book establishes Marcus Mietzner as the preeminent scholar of the democratic Indonesian presidency. Most individual chapters are masterpieces of analysis. They are based on a quarter century of research, extensive interviews from the presidents on down, thorough grasp of the scholarship, plus press coverage, including obscure media. Most originally, Mietzner asserts that the stability of Indonesia's two 10-year coalitional presidencies is causally related to Indonesia's widely observed democratic decline over the same period. ‘It substantiates the hypothesis that while coalitional presidentialism helps to explain Indonesian democracy's endurance, it also caused and sustained many of its defects’ (p. 30). The book's innovative causal argument, however, fails to persuade. This is partly because of sharp and in the end fatal differences in the behaviour of the two presidents he examines (the first obeyed the democratic constitution, the second systematically degraded it). Importantly, Mietzner also fails to understand the main drivers of the economy, which hobbles his ability to evaluate their economic policy successes and failures and the implications for democracy and modernity.

Coalitional presidencies in the comparative politics literature occur in democracies with presidential (as opposed to Parliamentary) governments and multi-party systems. To govern stably, minority presidents have to build majority coalitions. In Indonesia, Mietzner argues, presidents govern not just through the legislature, but also by adding other state and non-state actors to their coalitions. Their goal is to ‘fend off impeachment and allow for more effective governance’ (p. 24). Adding these actors, Mietzner claims, better explains the Indonesian case and broadens our theoretical understanding.

Mietzner begins by locating Presidents Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (2004–2014) and Joko Widodo (2014–2024) in their historical and institutional contexts. Indonesia's first two presidents, founding father Sukarno (1945–1965) and Army General Suharto (1966–1998), were autocrats with complex legacies. Mietzner's account is balanced and authoritative. The first test of his theory is to determine whether Presidents Yudhoyono and Widodo did in fact govern this way. How did each engage state and non-state actors: parties, legislature, military, police, bureaucracy, local governments, oligarchs, and Muslim organisations? In each chapter, the power resources, formal and informal, of the other actor (such as the parties, legislature, military and so on) are addressed first, followed by those of the president, then the engagement between them, followed by an illustrative case study. In many of these chapters, Mietzner's brilliant analysis is miles ahead of previous studies.

On parties, a puzzle for analysts is why have both presidents created oversized party coalitions in parliament? Mietzner shows that Indonesian parties perform multiple functions that overlap with the presidency, including nominating presidents and outsourcing fund-raising for campaigning to the coalition parties' legislative candidates. These are tied in turn to the ways in which coalitional presidentialism promotes stability. Admirable in this chapter is the extended discussion of how the party system, elections, and governance are impacted by the ideological cleavage between Muslims and nationalists. Parties are, on the one hand, heavily dependent on patronage, which tends to soften ideology, but there is still a recognisable split between those parties (and presidents) who swing Islamic or nationalist (pp. 66–67).

Still on parties, there are two telling differences between the presidents' behaviour. First, Yudhoyono never degraded democracy by meddling in the internal affairs of parties, while Widodo did so with a vengeance (p. 64). Second, Widodo is responsible for the 2019 decision to weaken the Corruption Eradication Commission. He was pushed to do so by parties in his coalition, but the decision was his. Yudhoyono, by contrast, let the Commission do its work of arresting corrupt politicians and business people. This is evidence of political corruption, defined as violating one's oath to the Constitution and the rule of law, on Widodo's part.

Separating the discussion of the legislature from that of the parties is valuable. It enables Mietzner to highlight how, following the insightful analysis of the Indonesian parliament by Stephen Sherlock, that body is different from other national parliaments. Its decisions are almost always unanimous. They are the product of negotiations among individual legislators in committees, in which party affiliations are often secondary to other considerations, and individual politicians' stances are mostly secret. This chapter captures well what the two presidents and members of parliament have wanted from each other and how they have gotten it. It also illuminates how presidential coalition-making is rooted in the thorough financial corruption of the political class. Financial corruption is the illegal offering and receiving of bribes by individual politicians, officials, and others, including all the actors Mietzner studies in their relationship to presidents.

The chapter on the military shows how entangled civilian governments have been with the armed forces. One major difference with other countries is the so-called territorial system, in which active-duty officers operate a nation-wide security structure. This institution was formalised under Suharto's autocratic rule from 1966 to 1998; it remains powerful today. With Reformasi, post-1998 democratic reform, civilian supremacy was established with constitutional amendments and Law No. 34/2004, banning armed forces and police officers from holding civilian government positions. Retired officers were eligible and not considered a threat to democracy. President Yudhoyono adhered to this reform, but President Widodo has not, especially in his second term. Law No. 20/2023 ended civilian supremacy by opening many civilian positions to active-duty military and police officers. Widodo's behaviour has undermined this important democratic pillar.

The chapter on police politics is by far the best on the subject, but it also exemplifies Widodo's anti-democratic use of his power. A telling statistic: while Widodo prosecuted 244 critics under the 2008 anti-democratic law on information and electronic transactions in his first term, Yudhoyono had only prosecuted 74 in his second, after the law's passage (pp. 134–35). On the bureaucracy, Mietzner argues that coalitional presidents give-a-little-take-a-little to achieve some policy goals while not antagonising the bureaucracy tout court. Once again, however, we see a marked contrast in the consequences for democracy of differences in behaviour. Yudhoyono's civil service reform failed because he capitulated to powerful interests to avoid ‘chaos’, a huge concern for him. He lost power but did not weaken democracy. At the other end of the policy and power spectra, Widodo pursued aggressively his infrastructure development goals throughout his two terms, once again severely stressing democratic institutions.

In their mobilisation of the bureaucracy, Yudhoyono and Widodo differed markedly in the latter's heavy turn to State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) rather than private business to achieve his infrastructure plans, described by Mietzner in his chapter on The Oligarchs (p. 190). These are normal differences in a democracy. The SOEs are notoriously inefficient and corrupt, however, which raises a serious question about Widodo's sagacity as a policy maker. Mietzner does not address this because it is outside his model.

The chapter title ‘The Oligarchs’ suggests two things: that the group is a single actor, a business elite, and that its wealth is ill-gotten. Ill-gotten because the term is an epithet, never an analytically neutral term which would allow for good and bad oligarchs. Recast, we can see that the culprits are individual financially corrupt actors, operating in a political economy with low government salaries, ineffective law enforcement, and a deeply rooted culture of corruption. Early post-Suharto reforms were promising, but have been reversed by Widodo's malevolent hostility to rule of law and the Constitution, amply documented by Mietzner. Of the two directly elected presidents, only Widodo acted in this way.

Two further observations on the oligarchs' chapter. First, how do we account for the 2020 passage of the politically controversial Omnibus Law on Job Creation? Mietzner first points to the extreme wealth of Widodo's team members tasked with formulating the bill. Then: Widodo pursued the legislation because ‘By all accounts, he was a passionate defender of the initiative, believing that it would generate the money necessary to pay for his infrastructure projects (and help recover from Covid-19)’ (p. 196). In a chapter on the power of business elites, Mietzner's acceptance of Widodo's claim seems incomplete and insufficiently political. In 2006, President Yudhoyono failed to act on a similar bill. A better explanation: Both understood, from the good macro-economic theory practiced by their ministers of finance and Bank Indonesia governors, that open markets are the best route to enhancing growth. The omnibus bills were steps in that direction. Both faced intensive lobbying from labour unions and business interests. Yudhoyono did not have the political courage to act against the unions, while Widodo did. The results for the economy have been modestly positive.

Second, after a discussion of why businessman Aburizal Bakrie was side-lined from Widodo's government, Mietzner writes that ‘while presidents have the means to contain and remove individual oligarchs who have chosen to oppose them, they have been reluctant to use these weapons to challenge oligarchy as a whole’ (p. 202). In reality, in a capitalist democracy like Indonesia, there is no challengeable ‘oligarchy as a whole’, only individual business people with varying relationships to the government.

The chapter on Muslim organisations is excellent, building on the base established by Mietzner's 2009 classic, Military Politics, Islam, and the State in Indonesia. It is also one of the best examples of both presidents engaging with others to build and maintain power. Yudhoyono's coalition embraced the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party and seemed to want no enemies on the religious right, while Widodo in his second term banned the pro-Syariah Party of Liberation and Islamic Defenders Front. Both were legitimate strategies in the real world of limited choices, not evidence of democratic degradation. Unfortunately, there has also been much financial corruption in the presidents' dealing with these organisations, as described in this chapter. The behaviour surfaced again in 2024 (after Mietzner's book was published) when Widodo allegedly bought the support of two massive Muslim organisations, Nahdlatul Ulama (Awakening of the Religious Teachers and Scholars) and Muhammadiyah (followers of Muhammad), for his favoured candidate Prabowo Subianto.

Returning to Mietzner's theory, does this book make a persuasive case for his linked arguments about the causes of political stability and democratic decline? On the stability side, he builds a convincing case that each president's coalition-building choices cannot be explained entirely by the 1999–2002 constitutional amendments. Both presidents' seeming obsession with Parliamentary super-majorities require the additional incentives described above. Mietzner also shows, however, that both presidents' interactions with every other actor, within and beyond the state, involve financial corruption. Financial corruption lowers the quality of democracy. It substitutes monetary exchange between individuals for substantive policy choices and implementation benefiting collectivities. How determinative is this factor, compared to the multiplicity of others acting on Indonesians' political choices? This is an important subject for future research.

On the causes of democratic decline, we are burdened by an N of two directly-elected presidents. Both built coalitions with multiple state and non-state actors, as Mietzner shows, but only Yudhoyono lived within democratic constraints. Widodo systematically, and I believe wilfully, set out to destroy those constraints. In his conclusion, Mietzner claims that democratic decline began with Yudhoyono's second term. This argument was first made in The Yudhoyono Presidency: Indonesia's Decade of Stability and Stagnation, edited by Edward Aspinall, Mietzner and Dirk Tomsa (2015). Aspinall, Mietzner and Tomsa blame Yudhoyono in his second term for sins of omission in internal security, gender equality and human rights protection—in my view thin reeds on which to charge the president with stalling democratic development. More problematic is the passage of a new law restricting freedom of association, for which the country's democratic rating was downgraded in 2014 by Freedom House. Outweighing these considerations, however, is Yudhoyono's consistent defence of democratic institutions and practices throughout his presidency, as detailed chapter by chapter in Mietzner's book.

Yudhoyono may be faulted for lack of leadership skills. He failed, most consequentially, to pass the first version of the Omnibus Bill on Job Creation. Enacted this Bill might have modestly increased the supply of surplus laborers absorbed into the formal job market. Indonesia might then have moved a bit more rapidly toward the transition point to a modern economy famously identified by economist W. Arthur Lewis. Widodo's failures, however, are deeper and more consequential. His political corruption threatens the existence of democracy. In the early years of democratic reform, the good faith of Indonesia's main democratic actors was not seriously challenged. From 2019, however, Widodo did many things that were widely believed to be in bad faith and indeed acts of political corruption. I have noted above many instances, from meddling with party leadership to excessive use of the police.

The final blow was his violation of his oath of office by corrupting the Constitutional Court, established in the third amendment to the Constitution in 2001. In October, 2023, he manipulated the Court by deploying his brother-in-law, the Court chair, to change the rules of presidential and vice-presidential nomination, enabling presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto to nominate Gibran Rakabuming Raka, his nephew and Widodo's son, as his running mate. The pair was elected; they took office on 20 October 2024.

After October, Mietzner's N of two directly elected presidents increases to 3, still a tiny number. Will President Prabowo be more like the cautious, democratic-norm accepting Yudhoyono or the democracy-degrading Widodo? Or will he choose his own course? Prabowo's campaign rhetoric, and much else in his past, is concerning on two fronts: democracy and economic policy. As Gerindra party leader, he has proposed returning to the pre-amended Constitution. The president would be chosen indirectly by the People's Consultative Assembly, composed in Sukarno and Suharto's times of members of parliament and representatives from the regions and corporate groups such as labour, farmers, and students. In the original Constitution, the method of election of none of these groups is specified, giving both Sukarno and Suharto free rein.

If pursued, this project steps backward politically and constitutionally. One of the main achievements of Reformasi was regularising institutions and elections. Direct election of the president, and indeed of regional executives, was also an extremely popular move and if reversed might occasion street protests reminiscent of the 1997–1998 period. In August 2024, Widodo and Prabowo collaborated behind the scenes in the unceremonious replacement of the incumbent Golkar Party chair with a Widodo loyalist. The second largest party in parliament, with 15 per cent of the seats, Golkar has also been one of the most institutionalised. One of Widodo and Prabowo's current goals is to limit competition in the November gubernatorial elections. Whatever this portends for post-inaugural relations between the two presidents, it is a further blow to democracy.

In economic policy, every democratic president from Habibie to Widodo has tried to match President Suharto's nearly 8 per cent per annum growth over the last quarter century of his rule. This created the foundation of a modern economy and society. One key has been prudent macro-economic leadership, first under Suharto's economic guru Widjojo Nitisastro and during most of Widodo's presidency under Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati. Prabowo is reported by his main economic adviser, Drajad Wibowo, to have been angered by Sri Mulyani's rejection of his budget proposals as minister of defence. In 2016, Wibowo objected to her appointment as minister of finance, labelling her a ‘neoliberal creature of the Washington Consensus school’. If Prabowo's choice of finance minister and other key macro-economic posts is governed either by narrow bureaucratic interests, as the defence ministry example suggests, or by ideology, as the ‘neoliberal’ calumny suggests, Indonesia's economic future will be put at risk. A third possibility, equally grim, is to remove income tax collection from the ministry of finance and place it directly under the president's control, as Prabowo has pledged.

It should go without saying that Indonesia's continued growth, combining prudent macro-economic policy with openness for local business to domestic and international markets, is critical to future modernity. Since 1965, the triennial Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies (BIES), housed at The Australian National University, has provided us with the world's best analyses of the Indonesian economy, its problems, and their economic and political solutions. While I may have missed something, I found no citations to BIES articles in this book.

On 24 August 2024, Prabowo delivered a major speech calling for economic autarky and restrictions on democracy in line with his campaign pledges. What will most mark his government now appears to be a worsening of financial corruption, because elites will be even less constrained in their rent-seeking, and political corruption, as Prabowo illegally and undemocratically deploys law enforcement against recalcitrant elites and citizens. In sum, we need to be cautious about accepting Mietzner's causal argument because of the stark differences between Yudhoyono's and Widodo's presidencies. What we know of Prabowo's plans suggests not continued stable presidential coalition-making but dark times ahead for the polity, the economy and society.