The Economist - USA (2020-10-17)

34 Asia The EconomistOctober 17th 2020

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Banyan Suharto with a saw

O

nce upona time, a slight, upstand-

ing, mild-mannered person came to

inhabit the presidential palace in Jakarta,

carried there on the shoulders of mil-

lions of Indonesians who recognised in

the former furniture-maker a man of the

people. Today’s incumbent, by contrast,

remains remote and aloof, surrounded

by courtiers from the capital’s inter-

twined business and political elites. The

previous president used to talk of using

political capital to help ordinary folk. His

informal blusukan walkabouts forged his

famous connection with voters and

allowed him to learn first-hand about

their problems and how to fix them. The

current one has just pared back protec-

tions for workers and, this week, sent the

police out to crack the heads of those

who took to the streets in protest.

The two men are, of course, one:

President Joko Widodo, or Jokowi, who

came to power in 2014 and was re-elected

last year. On the face of things, the new

“omnibus” law, which takes a saw to

regulations around employment, among

other things, is a sensible effort to make

it easier to do business and thus promote

investment. The economy is indeed tied

up in red tape. Mandatory benefits for the

few workers lucky enough to be in formal

employment were definitely so lavish as

to discourage firms from creating jobs.

Yet to weaken them in the midst of the

pandemic, which has prompted the

steepest collapse in incomes in a gener-

ation, is tone-deaf, as a former senior

official puts it. What is the government

doing to help the unemployed to retrain,

or to keep tiny businesses afloat?

That is not the law’s only flaw. It

reduces the autonomy enjoyed by pro-

vincial, district and city governments

across the vast archipelago (which,

incidentally, enabled Jokowi’s own rise

from mayor of a middling city to presi-

dent). In the name of shredding paper-

work, it reduces the say of affected com-

munities in the issuing of environmental

permits. It benefits the coal-mining in-

terests close to Jokowi by doing away with

royalties in favour of a lower value-added

tax. And it makes it much easier for log-

ging firms to plunder virgin forests.

Perhaps the clearest indication of the

law’s deficiencies is the murky way in

which it was drawn up. The government

says unions were consulted; they deny it.

The final text, passed by parliament on

October 5th and now sitting on the presi-

dent’s desk for his signature, has yet to be

made public.

The saga caps a dispiriting year in

which Jokowi and his people have stripped

the anti-corruption commission of its

independence, neutered the constitution-

al court, used the police to hound critics,

expanded the army’s influence and pan-

dered to Islamists at the expense of wom-

en, minorities and civil liberties. Now the

central bank’s independence is at risk. The

former senior official calls the past year

“the biggest assault on independent

institutions” since the days of Suharto,

the strongman who ruled Indonesia

from 1967 to 1998.

The question is what brought this

turn in the presidency. One observer

argues that Jokowi changed as he sought

re-election. Needing money to cam-

paign, he pivoted from the people to the

oligarchs. The transformation was com-

plete when, after a nasty presidential

race, he co-opted his defeated opponent,

Prabowo Subianto, a tycoon, ex-general

and former son-in-law of Suharto who is

the epitome of the old guard. Mr Prabowo

is now defence minister. Jokowi’s co-

alition includes nearly three-quarters of

mps. With the opposition co-opted, the

job of government is to spread patron-

age—or lose the oligarchs’ support.

Jokowi was probably never the trans-

formational democrat his early fans

imagined. Like Suharto, development

was what mattered. Jokowi loves getting

stuff built—toll roads, a metro system,

power plants—and if a bit of corruption

helps the process, fine. Now, as Ben

Bland of the Lowy Institute in Sydney

argues in an excellent book, “Man of

Contradictions”, power has revealed his

limitations. Building things falls “far

short” of a “strategy to remake the econ-

omy”. Lurching from problem to pro-

blem, and with a low tolerance for bore-

dom, power has “revealed a man with

surprisingly little to say about the big

questions” of Indonesia’s modern his-

tory, including the tension between

democratisation and the elites’ concen-

trated power. As for Indonesia’s lurch

back into authoritarianism: if it carries

shades of Suharto, one man who

wouldn’t mind the comparison with the

old development-obsessed tyrant is the

former furniture-maker himself.

While cutting red tape, Indonesia’s president is also undercutting institutions

the public interest”.

The crackdown may also reflect divi-

sions within the ruling party. The raids on

casinos chiefly netted members of the

Awami Youth League. Omar Faruk, its

leader at the time, accused the police of hy-

pocrisy, claiming they had been complicit

in the thriving casino business for years.

The crackdown, he said, was a politically

motivated “plot”. He was removed from his

position, along with many others in the

Youth League. But the main reshuffle, says

one observer, was of Dhaka’s underworld:

the Youth League’s ousting allowed gang-

sters with connections to other bits of the

party to muscle in on the casino business.

In the Faridpur case, the accused named

a local Awami League politician, Khan-

daker Mohtesham Hossain, as their “pro-

tector”, alleging that he took a 2% cut of the

spoils (he denies it). His brother, Khan-

daker Mosharraf Hossain, the local mpand

a former minister, is the father-in-law of

Saima Wajed Hossain, Sheikh Hasina’s

daughter. Bangladeshis speculate that alle-

gations that such grandees were involved

reflect a power-struggle within the party.

Whatever the explanation for it, the

sudden anti-corruption drive, far from

burnishing the Awami League’s image,

seems to have horrified many Bangla-

deshis by revealing that the problem was

even bigger than they had realised. “I knew

there were casinos in Dhaka,” says Mr Za-

man, but the number—at least 60, accord-

ing to reports—was “surprising even to

me”. The suspected abuses in Faridpur, he

notes, began long before the current gov-

ernment took office. But their exposure has

reinforced the widespread suspicion that

many politicians see their jobs as “a licence

for self-enrichment”. 7