Flirting with Autocracy in Indonesia: Jokowi's Majoritarianism and its Democratic Legacy

Abstract

After ruling Indonesia for a decade, Joko Widodo (or popularly called "Jokowi") left the presidency in 2024 amid a heated debate over his democratic record. While his high approval ratings indicated support in the broader population, pro-democracy activists were scathing. Indeed, under his presidency, many democratic achievements of previous periods eroded. Yet democracy, however damaged, survived Jokowi's rule. This article adds to scholarship on this outcome of a harmed but enduring Indonesian democracy. It looks at how Jokowi's majoritarian thinking led him to undermine democracy when he felt he had the majority's support for his actions. Believing that democracy is doing what the majority wants, approves, or tolerates, he used polls to identify segments of democracy he could attack. At the same time, his majoritarianism also set him limits: if a majority was opposed, he retreated. This left Indonesia with a declining democracy, but one that did not cross over into fully authoritarian territory.

When Joko Widodo, popularly called “Jokowi,” left the Indonesian presidency in October 2024, the debate about his democratic legacy divided scholars both in the country and outside of it. Leading the world's third-largest democracy for a decade, Jokowi was more than just the president of a developing middle power. Defending Indonesia's quest for development and using the Sino-American rivalry to attract the resources to fuel it, Jokowi represented the thinking and ambitions of many Global South powerholders. In the same vein, Jokowi's approach to democracy mirrored that of many of his peers in emerging economies. But what exactly this approach did to Indonesia's democratic substance is disputed. On the one hand, Slater (2024: 40, 42) contended that Jokowi left behind a “surprisingly high-quality democracy” that Indonesians were “mostly content with.” Others weren’t so kind. Jaffrey and Warburton (2024) noted the “lack of democratic opposition, the dominance of oligarchic power, vote buying, and worsening human rights conditions” to then focus on Jokowi's interventions in the 2024 elections. Their “scale and the brazenness,” they continued, were “unprecedented in Indonesia's brief democratic history [and] more reminiscent of elections under Suharto's [autocratic] rule.” Before them, Mujani and Liddle (2021) had already concluded that Jokowi was “doing a lot of damage” to Indonesian democracy, and that he had effectively “sidelined” it. Amid these contrasting assessments by leading Indonesian observers, it has become hard to ascertain whether Jokowi was democracy's protector or its undertaker.

This article posits that under Jokowi, Indonesian democracy sustained its minimalist foundations but lost an enormous amount of its qualitative substance. Neither should be taken for granted. Under Jokowi, Indonesia celebrated its 25^th anniversary as an electoral democracy, tripling the length of the country's only other democratic period in the 1950s. During Jokowi's rule, Myanmar returned to military dictatorship, Thailand's democracy was dismantled by a military-monarchic alliance, and the Philippines came to the brink of authoritarianism under Rodrigo Duterte. That Indonesian democracy survived Jokowi's presidency, then, is a positive chapter in the gloomy book of Southeast Asian democracy in the twenty-first century (Kasuya and Tan, 2024). At the same time, Jokowi tested the limits of democracy more aggressively than his postauthoritarian predecessors—and more than the benign language of his 2014 and 2019 election campaigns had indicated. Many of his actions undermined both written and unwritten democratic norms while leaving the formal framework of electoral democracy standing. He used his law enforcement agencies to control political elites and limit public dissent; he infiltrated and weakened independent state institutions; he sought to extend his rule beyond existing presidential term limits; and he heavily interfered in elections. Importantly, he did all this while enjoying approval ratings that were among the highest for any democratic leader in the world. But while Jokowi regularly flirted with autocracy, supported by most Indonesians, he also routinely pulled back from the last step into authoritarianism.

There are compelling structural explanations for the outcome of a diminished but surviving democracy under Jokowi. These have been examined elsewhere. For instance, while Jokowi was the most influential post-Suharto president, he had to share power with other influential sociopolitical actors (Slater, 2018). These players held powers that could have potentially threatened his rule, and so he included them in a broad government alliance. Although this was in line with general notions of coalitional presidentialism (Chaisty et al., 2017), the Indonesian manifestation of this model was particularly expansive. It did not only include parties but other veto powers as well: the military, the police, Muslim organizations, the bureaucracy, and oligarchs (Mietzner, 2023). Jokowi had not invented this approach (Slater, 2004), but he perfected it. While such power-sharing with elites allowed Jokowi to rule without major interruptions, it also put limits on his autocratic ambitions. For instance, Jokowi's coalition partners stopped his campaign for an extension of his term. The reason for this ability of other sociopolitical groups to limit the power of the president lies, in turn, in the power dispersal instituted in Indonesia during its messy democratic transition between 1998 and 2004. In that period, power was spread widely throughout the polity, benefiting many elite players (Mietzner, 2024). While these elite players had a collective interest in curbing the power of democracy to hold them to account, they had no interest in another Suharto-style autocrat blocking political competition and regeneration. As a result, the quality of democracy declined, but intraelite competition survived as the principle of organizing power.

In this article, however, I explore how Jokowi's own thinking and actions contributed to, and intersected with, the democratic trajectory under his rule. I argue that his majoritarian understanding of democracy both led him to democracy-undermining actions and set limits to his autocratic operations. In Jokowi's understanding of majoritarianism, democracy was what a majority of the citizenry was willing to tolerate as acceptable political behavior. If polls showed that most Indonesians condoned something, Jokowi went ahead and did it; if, on the other hand, there was significant opposition—as expressed in surveys, not in street protests—he was likely to drop the initiative. The result was a mix of autocratic attacks and democracy-preserving withdrawals that, as observed, undermined the democratic polity but did not kill it. The article develops these arguments in four sections. The first discusses Jokowi's specific version of majoritarianism. Drawing from interviews with him, it shows that in addition to the developmentalist underpinnings of his thinking, he adhered to the belief that following majority wishes was at the heart of democratic governance. In the second section, I highlight Jokowi's breaches of democratic boundaries that tarnished his record. The third section demonstrates cases in which Jokowi decided to disown or abandon antidemocratic initiatives and preserve the status quo in the process. A fourth section investigates how Jokowi's majoritarianism not only overlapped with, but also differed from, his populist disposition and more conventional patterns of politicians following the dynamics of polls. The conclusion then weighs up Jokowi's overall influence on Indonesian democracy and places him in a comparative context.

Jokowi's Majoritarianism

In recent decades, political scientists have used the term “majoritarianism” in mostly pejorative terms (Girvin, 2020). Rather than referring to the practice of democratic elections in which the majority decides who will form representative government, majoritarianism is often deployed as a critique of how its executive leaders act. Abrams (2022): 74), for instance, has described “despotic majoritarianism” as a “form of democracy in which powerholders draw on majoritarian victories (such as in elections or referenda) to claim political legitimacy, while engaging in administrative despotism that constrains political expression and participation.” The result is a “system [in which} powerholders rely on procedural indicators of majoritarian support to transgress political boundaries (tyranny of the majority), while simultaneously curtailing the political space available to ordinary people.” In many cases, as the critics of majoritarianism suggest, it allows ethnic, religious, or class-based majorities to claim primacy over minorities and deny them the right of meaningful democratic participation. For their part, populism studies have focused on the claim of many populist leaders to give a voice to the “silent majority” or to “hand back the country to the people” as signs of the dangers inherent in purely majoritarian thinking (Goldschmidt, 2015). Prior to this, Lijphart (1999) had already highlighted the risks of majoritarian democracy in contrast to more consensus-oriented democracies. In other words, by the early 2000s, majoritarianism had lost its earlier appeal as a form of political legitimacy given by the people rather than by divine right or sheer force.

In Jokowi's notion of democracy, there were elements of both the “new,” despotic majoritarianism and the older ideas of popular emancipation. For him, democracy was “about figuring out what the people want.” ¹ This idea of following the people's wishes gave him, in his eyes, a mandate to carry out policies that met the expectations of the majority, regardless of concerns in minority groups. He felt emboldened in this approach by his conviction that he was uniquely placed to evaluate what the majority wanted. First, from his days as mayor of the Central Java town of Solo (2005–2012), he had carried out impromptu site inspections of projects and residential areas, talking to locals and asking them about their views (Tapsell, 2015). For this, he coined the term blusukan. Until the end of his presidency, he believed that these visits gave him insights other politicians did not have. Second, he was proud of winning all elections he ever participated in: two ballots in Solo, the 2012 Jakarta gubernatorial elections (two rounds), and two presidential elections, in 2014 and 2019. He often mentioned this fact not only to bolster his reputation as an electoral wizard but also to reiterate his right to represent the majority. Third, and most importantly for his rule as president, he was an almost fanatic consumer of opinion polls. More so than his predecessors, he developed an extensive web of poll advisers, with whom he spent many hours each week to assess how popular he was and what the majority thought about specific subjects. “I find out what the people want by reading the polls,” he said. ² In many ways, Jokowi's democracy was a polling democracy (Tomsa, 2020).

Substantively, Jokowi was in no doubt what his explorations of the majority will told him. The majority, he believed, prioritized economic well-being and development over other issues, such as civil liberties or the strict adherence to democratic procedure (Pangestu, 2020). In fact, Jokowi saw prosperity and democracy as inseparably intertwined, with the latter only of use it produces the former. “What is the point of democracy if it doesn’t lead to prosperity?,” he asked. ³ In this sense, Jokowi's developmentalism, as described by Warburton (2016), merged with his majoritarianism to create a strong belief that pursuing economic progress over democratic niceties was both necessary and reflective of the popular will. From Jokowi's perspective, this meant that he had the public's approval when pushing through projects or government regulations against the opposition of political minorities or the objections of bureaucrats concerned with doing things by the book. Over time, Jokowi developed a strong intuition for what the majority was willing to accept if it believed that the proposed or already executed action served a broader agenda of increasing people's welfare. Thus, the bar for Jokowi was not necessarily enthusiastic endorsement by the population—it was sufficient if a majority thought that a specific policy was tolerable. The overall indicator of the success of this assumption was Jokowi's general job approval rating. He watched it carefully and reacted if it dropped below 70%. Especially in his second term, he reached approval levels of 80%, which further consolidated his certainty that he represented the majority's wishes.

More systematic public openion research—which Jokowi was also aware of—mostly confirmed the president's instincts. One study (Aspinall et al., 2020: 514) found that Indonesian “citizens [view] democracy as a means of delivering social and economic benefits” rather than of democratic procedure and representation.” For instance, in one battery of questions respondents were asked to identify which of the following statements best represented their thinking on democracy's most essential characteristic: first, “government ensures law and order”; second, “media is free to criticize the things government does”; third, “government ensures job opportunities for all”; and fourth, “multiple parties compete fairly in the election.” The result was unambiguous: 45% of respondents saw the government offering full employment as coming closest to their understanding of democracy; 22% endorsed the law and order option; 10% found competitive multiparty elections to be most important in democracy; and 8% prioritized free media. Consequently, Indonesians’ support for democracy during Jokowi's rule fluctuated: it was lowest during parts of the COVID-19 pandemic when many citizens held gloomy views of economic conditions and the government's ability to protect them (Indikator, 2021: 14); and it was highest at times when most citizens felt good about the economy, and particularly when inflation was low and life therefore relatively affordable. In short, Jokowi's view of the linkages between democracy and prosperity was widely shared, giving him a compass for key political and economic decisions.

The most important political impact of Jokowi's majoritarianism was his exclusion of the liberal segment of Indonesian society from consideration in his decision-making. Again, this was based on polling data: surveys showed that the number of Indonesians who consistently adhered to liberal democratic values was small, standing at about 9% of the electorate (Aspinall et al. 2020: 517). This made them a voting bloc to cultivate in election times, but otherwise, a constituency that could be ignored without much negative repercussions when in government. And that's precisely what Jokowi did: in the 2014 and 2019 campaigns, he systematically appealed to liberal voters by warning them of the risk that his then-opponent, Prabowo Subianto, would pose to the health of democracy. He knew that the liberal community had nowhere else to go if it did not want Prabowo—who had been accused of past human rights abuses and raised the specter of strongman rule—to lead the country. Thus, his stump speeches of 2014 and 2019 routinely included a remark that he was “free of historical baggage,” implicitly offering himself as the more palatable option for liberals. But once the elections were over, he reverted to his majoritarian orientation. After the 2014 elections, he told me that the liberal voters were unimportant for his victory, saying that the reason he won was that most voters believed that he was “humble and worked hard, that's it.” ⁴ He probably knew that this was not entirely true, but he felt that he owed the liberals nothing. Once in office, therefore, he governed for the mainstream.

It is crucial to note that Jokowi's majoritarianism did not mean that he shunned Indonesia's religious minorities in favor of the Muslim majority. In his political calculus, the religious minorities—which make up about 12% of the population—were an integral part of a pluralist majority that wanted to defend the country's multireligious constitution against demands for its Islamization (Fossati, 2022). Representing this majority, non-Muslims and pragmatic Muslims formed an alliance that Jokowi used to defeat the Islamists aligned with Prabowo in the 2014 and 2019 elections. Once more, the polls confirmed Jokowi's calculations. Based on a series of responses in a 2016 survey, 58.5% of Indonesian Muslims could be described as pluralists, while 41.5% held Islamist-leaning opinions (Mietzner and Muhtadi, 2018: 482). With the non-Muslim minorities added to the mix, there was a significant majority against the country's political Islamization. Hence, his majoritarianism made Jokowi treat religious minorities in a different way compared to the liberal fringes of society. Conveniently for him, while liberals were likely to be religious pluralists at the same time, the majority of the latter were generally as socially conservative as the rest of the population. For instance, pluralists’ views on the primacy of development over civil liberties, or their rejection of progressive proposals to protect citizens with nonmainstream sexual orientations, were as strong as in other constituencies. In a 2018 survey, for instance, 88% of respondents across all religions and political colors viewed the LGBT community as a threat (Sani, 2018).

But while many of the ingredients of Jokowi's majoritarianism were illiberal in nature and nurtured his unique intuition for what a welfare-oriented majority was willing to tolerate, it also included ideas of democratic emancipation. Chief among them was the notion that the majority wanted, and deserved, a direct say in political affairs through elections. As a result, he rejected initiatives by other elites to abandon direct executive elections at the local or national levels and instead return to a system of indirect election by the various legislatures. Even before becoming president, he opposed a bill promoted by Prabowo's coalition in 2014 to abolish direct elections for governors, mayors, and district heads (Muhtadi, 2015). Of course, he did so partly out of self-interest: he possessed the popularity necessary to win such elections, while many other elite actors didn’t. “I came through the system of direct elections, so I will always defend it,” he claimed. ⁵ But he also knew that the majority of citizens strongly backed direct elections—the polls were unequivocal in this regard. Accordingly, as in the case of his prioritization of development over democratic process, his personal views aligned with that of the majority. As far as direct elections were concerned, however, Jokowi's alignment with the majority protected democratic achievements rather than challenging them. This diffusion between majoritarian ideas that undermined Indonesian democracy and those that preserved it helped producing Jokowi's curiously chequered democratic legacy. In the following, therefore, we will first look at the democratic boundaries that Jokowi's majoritarianism attacked, before discussing those that he respected, however grudgingly.

Breaching Democratic Borders

Most of Jokowi's majoritarian interventions into Indonesian democracy came in the form of executive aggrandizement. I understand executive aggrandizement here “as an attempt by a democratically elected executive leader to weaken both electoral (vertical) and horizontal accountability without altogether suspending democratic institutions” (Laebens, 2023: 1). Executive aggrandizement is particularly successful if the leader can be confident, and if surveys show, that a majority of the population either supports the attempt or does not care enough about it to oppose it. Jokowi was a master in figuring out when he could count on the majority's backing or indifference. After his reelection in 2019, for instance, he cooperated with legislative leaders to revise the law that underpinned the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK). Over the years, Jokowi had grown convinced that the agency's arrests of key decision-makers obstructed development and that it needed to be tamed. The revision triggered student demonstrations, but Jokowi's reading of the polls indicated to him that he could pull it off without alienating the majority: one poll suggested that 45% of Indonesians supported the revisions, with 39% opposed (Aco, 2019). Other polls painted a different picture but still assured the president that a majority did not care: in one survey, only 60% of respondents said that they followed news on the issue, and 71% of those agreed that the revisions weakened the KPK (Riana, 2019). Only 42% of the total population, then, were critical of the initiative. This was enough for Jokowi to wait for the demonstrations to fizzle out and move on with government business.

Jokowi's self-interested interventions into the judiciary did not worry the majority either. In May 2022, Jokowi presided over the wedding of his sister with the chief justice of the Constitutional Court, Anwar Usman. At the time, critics pointed to the damage this could do to the separation of powers, but most citizens shrugged their shoulders. Surely enough, in October 2023, the court cleared the path for Jokowi's son Gibran to run as vice-presidential candidate in the 2024 elections. Under Anwar's direction, the bench allowed Gibran to run although he was below the constitution's minimum age for the office. Without much fanfare, the president's brother-in-law had helped Jokowi with his dynastic succession plans and bent the constitution as well as internal rules to do so. But in a poll taken in the week after the decision—and reported to Jokowi—55% of respondents said they had not heard about the case (Indikator, 2023: 37). Of the 45% who had, 70% supported the verdict. In another poll, 76% of respondents stated that they did not know that Anwar was the president's in-law. Surveys also showed that the decision did not reduce the lead of Prabowo Subianto, Jokowi's chosen heir, over his competitors. Accordingly, Jokowi gave the green light to Gibran being paired with Prabowo. Having interfered with the judiciary to benefit one of his sons and finding no public resistance, Jokowi repeated the feat in June 2024. In that month, the Supreme Court created an exception for his youngest son Kaesang to run in the local executive elections scheduled for later in the year. Once again, the news was met with the majority's yawning disinterest. (In a later twist, the Constitutional Court surprisingly overturned this ruling by its sister court).

Jokowi also gave his government the power to disband sociopolitical organizations, and the majority agreed (Fealy, 2020). In July 2017, Jokowi issued an emergency decree that allowed the executive to ban a mass organization without prior approval by the courts—previously, judges had the final say in such matters. The president used the decree to outlaw Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI), one of the groups involved in Islamist antigovernment demonstrations in 2017. HTI was an easy target because it had few supporters even among Muslims. Indeed, Nahdlatul Ulama, the country's largest Islamic group, asked for its disbandment. Thus, Jokowi could rest assured that his move would be backed by the majority, despite reminders by liberal circles that giving the government the right to get rid of dissident groups set a dangerous precedent. Prior to the disbandment, Jokowi knew that 72% of Indonesians had never heard of HTI. Out of those who knew the group, only 11% liked it (Kumparan, 2017). With most Indonesians unaware of HTI or disliking it, 78% agreed with its ban. Three and a half years later, Jokowi moved to ban the Front of Defenders of Islam (FPI) after its leader, Rizieq Shihab, had returned from exile. As in the case of HTI, the majority of Indonesians either did not know the group or supported its ban. In a June 2021 poll, 71% of respondents said they knew FPI, 77% of those knew that it had been outlawed, and of those 59% agreed with the policy (Warta Ekonomi, 2021). With these numbers, the government was confident that its arrest of Shihab would not lead to a public backlash. Importantly, too, Jokowi chose the right timing: by 2020, FPI had lost some of its earlier popularity, after Rizieq had been away in exile for years and none of his lieutenants could match his charisma.

In some cases, Jokowi weakened democratic institutions in the knowledge that doing so wouldn’t even register with the population at large. One example was the disbandment of the Civil Service Commission (KASN). Created under his predecessor Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in 2014, the agency oversaw the implementation of civil service rules in national and local bureaucracies (Barus, 2022). It was an open secret that the sale of civil service positions served as a major source of patronage for local politicians (Kristiansen and Ramli, 2006). Consequently, the KASN was asked to follow up on complaints by civil servants who faced financial or other irregular demands from their superiors, or who were reshuffled against the rules. By all accounts, the agency did a good job, and as a result, local politicians who felt cut off from a key income stream complained to Jokowi. Initially, the president defended the institution. By his second term, however, he had concluded that the KASN—by ordering local government heads to refrain from reshuffles or to overturn them—unduly interfered with executive authority. Finally, in October 2023, he agreed with party leaders and key actors in parliament to disband the body. Unsurprisingly, the news did not make into the front pages of the major newspapers, and unlike in the case of the KPK, there were no demonstrations. Only a small circle of political elites and concerned nongovernmental organizations was aware of what had happened to the KASN and its crucial oversight function. In fact, the pollsters didn’t even bother to survey the population as to what it thought of its dismantling.

Remarkably, even when a majority recognized that its democratic rights were curbed under Jokowi, it did not object. In the field of freedom of expression, for example, Jokowi tightened the limitations on legitimate dissent. One main instrument in this regard was the 2008 Law on Information and Electronic Transactions, which criminalized “slander” on social and other online media. In Yudhoyono's second term (2009–2014), the law was only used in 74 cases (Hamid, 2019). In Widodo's first period (2014–2019), this number shot up to 233 cases, with 82 of them related to alleged insult of the president. In addition, new police teams were set up during the COVID-19 pandemic to detect government critics. In combination, these measures stifled the willingness of citizens to openly express their view of state authorities. In a September 2020 survey, 70% of respondents agreed that Indonesians were “increasingly” afraid of stating their opinion (Nurita, 2020). But while they clearly felt the restrictions imposed on them, the majority of citizens still did not think that Jokowi's government was being undemocratic. At the very same time that they observed increasing fear among the population, 69% of survey respondents professed to be satisfied with the way democracy worked in the country (Santika, 2024). In an earlier poll, in 2017, respondents gave Jokowi a score of 4.5 on a scale that reached from 1 (authoritarian) to 5 (democratic) (Antony, 2017). Jokowi, it appeared, had hit the sweetest of majoritarian spots: he was able to curtail civic freedoms without a majority finding this objectionable. On the contrary: the applause continued.

We need to acknowledge, of course, that majoritarian leaders not only react to majority opinions and adjust their strategies accordingly. They also put a lot of effort into manufacturing such majorities. This is done by deploying various instruments to shape public opinion in their favor. We already noted above that freedom of opinion, including on social media, was more tightly controlled under Jokowi than under his post-Suharto predecessors. This, in turn, reduced the flow of negative information on Jokowi's presidency that could have threatened his majority support. In the same vein, Jokowi had ways of influencing the narrative of specific events or issues. Importantly, most of the country's media conglomerates were close to Jokowi's regime (Tapsell, 2020). For example, Surya Paloh, Hary Tanoesoedibjo, and Aburizal Bakrie owned media companies while also leading parties in Jokowi's cabinet. Erick Thohir, another media entrepreneur, was Jokowi's campaign manager in 2019 and subsequently a minister. Therefore, Jokowi enjoyed generally favorable coverage in the country's television stations and newspapers, with critical reporting moving into a few niche outlets. This allowed him to dominate the public discourse on key subjects—such as the ban on the two Islamist organizations. In other words, just as much as Jokowi was interested in learning what the majority thought, he was also very keen to influence it. Often, this influence helped him to consolidate longer-term attitudes in society that benefitted him. In other cases, it enabled him to put his case to the public through the privileged carpet coverage by his media allies.

But as much as Jokowi could count on the majority's acceptance of his breaches of democratic boundaries, there were limits to its concurrence. As noted in this section, the majority nodded in approval when their president weakened or even abolished oversight bodies, banned organizations he considered a nuisance to his rule, or engineered court verdicts tailored to his family's political interests. However, the following section turns to cases in which Jokowi, however hard he tried, could not find a majority for his plans and felt forced to drop them. Majoritarianism, then, not only handed him a tool to identify the democratic limits he could cross—but it also told him which ones to respect.

Jokowi's Uncrossed Democratic Borders

Among the cases in which a majority successfully rejected Jokowi's autocratic ambitions were some of the most important to Jokowi's political agenda. Indeed, no other topic was more crucial for him in his second term than the plan to somehow extend his stay in office. Learning from the experience of Suharto's seven-term presidency between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, Indonesia in 1999 introduced a limit of two terms for holders of the office. Thus, as Jokowi was inaugurated for his second term in 2019, he was technically in his last 5-year period. But he soon contemplated reasons for why he deserved more time, and he allowed his aides to develop strategies of how to achieve an extension. In this, he was not alone: many of his peers around the world regularly do the same. One study that traced term limit evasion manoeuvers in a sample of 234 incumbents in 106 countries since 2000 found that “no fewer than one-third of the incumbents who reached the end of their prescribed term pursued some strategy to remain in office” (Versteeg et al., 2020: 173). Out of the sixty cases of such attempts analyzed, two-thirds were successful. In the instances when democratic presidents managed to obtain an extension, such steps often marked the transition into autocracy. Some of these autocratic transitions occurred during Jokowi's rule. For instance, the flamboyant president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, had loyalist judges scrap the ban on him running for a second term in 2024, consolidating his self-description as the “world's coolest dictator” (Meléndez-Sánchez, 2024).

There is no question that a revision of the presidential term limit regulations would have been a major threat to Indonesian democracy. The introduction of the term limit in 1999 had laid the foundations of post-Suharto democracy. It demonstrated that presidential power was temporary, and that all political actors had the chance to compete for the country's top executive position without having to wait for decades to do so. For a long time, the term limit was one of the few holy cows of Indonesian democracy: none of the post-1998 presidents prior to Jokowi had tried to question it. That Jokowi dared to do it showed his brazenness in challenging existing democratic norms. In public, he denied that he was seeking an extension, but it was clear that he had internally given the go-ahead to some of his key aides to work on making it happen (Mietzner and Honna, 2023). The initial focus was on amending the constitution. This required the approval of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), which consisted of the members of parliament and those of the Regional Representative Council (DPD). The head of the MPR, Bambang Soesatyo, was on board for an amendment, and several scenarios were developed for how it could be done. One of these scenarios proposed that Jokowi leave the country for a minor pilgrimage, during which time the MPR would convene and quickly pass the amendment. Beyond the institutional adventurism, however, there was also the unspoken subtext of any amendment just being the stepping stone for future ones. As one MPR member asked, “do you think that Jokowi would have stopped at a third term? I doubt it.” ⁶

But much to his dismay, a majority of Indonesians opposed changing the existing term limit stipulations. In Jokowi's majoritarian thinking, this was a significant disruption to his plans. In most of his previous operations, he had relied on his instincts to assess and mobilize the majority's position. Typically, his pollsters would confirm that his intuition was right, and he moved ahead knowing that the majority supported his actions or acquiesced. This time, however, was different. In one poll in September 2021 (SMRC, 2021, 21–23), 84% of respondents said that existing term limits should be maintained. Jokowi could take some comfort from the fact that the answers were somewhat different when another question in the same poll brought his name into play. Asked whether Jokowi should be allowed to be a candidate in 2024, 30% of respondents agreed while 48% were opposed. Thus, even though voters were less opposed to Jokowi running for a third term than to a general lifting of term limits, a majority of citizens still wanted him to leave office in 2024. The president and his aides hoped that the numbers would change over time, but they didn’t. Some of Jokowi's assistants tried to intervene in the public discourse, claiming that the “real” numbers were different and that support for a third term was larger than thought. In March 2022, Jokowi's senior minister Luhut Pandjaitan stated that his “big data,” derived from systematic analyses of online activity, showed that 110 million Indonesians backed more time for the president. He was widely mocked for this claim, and Jokowi did not buy it either. He relied on his trusted conventional pollsters, and they told him that the numbers weren’t changing.

Facing stiff public rejection, Jokowi dropped the idea of a third term. To be sure, many political leaders had refused to cooperate, too. Accordingly, his inner circle developed alternative, softer plans. In the middle of 2022, the discussions shifted toward an election delay of 2 or 3 years. This was in line with Jokowi's initial justification of the idea of a term extension: in internal conversations, he had complained to his aides that the COVID-19 pandemic had kept him from completing his agenda. Hence, in his mind, the new suggestion of an election delay simply compensated him for time lost managing COVID-19. But in a March 2022 poll, roughly 80% of respondents opposed an election delay, and they did so consistently when presented with different justifications for a postponement (Alfons, 2022). Ultimately, Jokowi accepted the verdict and intensified his search for a suitable successor. Obviously, the fact that he settled on Prabowo Subianto and his son as the ticket to support carried its own risks for democracy, and it drove him into the judicial interventions mentioned earlier. But he did not join the ranks of leaders who pushed through term extensions and turned their democratic polity into an autocracy as a result. He also did not follow through with an election delay when some of his peers did. In Senegal, for instance, President Macky Sall tried to circumvent his term limit by delaying the 2024 elections (Ndiaye, 2024). He initially succeeded, but the Constitutional Council later ordered the ballot to be scheduled. Jokowi, to his credit, did not go so far, and withdrew once the majority made its wishes clear. Of course, his majoritarian instincts remained central to his political actions afterward as well: he used them to build a political dynasty and guide his son into what he hoped would be a future presidential career.

Jokowi also rejected numerous autocratic proposals made by his aides because he believed that the majority did not support them. For instance, his interior minister, Tito Karnavian, suggested that direct elections for local government heads should be abolished in areas in which voters were poor and uneducated, and Luhut wanted to get rid of them altogether. But Jokowi told them off: “I said to them, ‘haven’t you seen the polls?’. The people want direct elections. It would be crazy to touch this.” ⁷ Hence, throughout his rule, he defended existing electoral mechanisms—unlike Yudhoyono, who at the end of his presidency cooperated with Prabowo to end direct local elections (Muhtadi, 2015). It was only after a massive public backlash that Yudhoyono changed his mind and overturned the decision through a decree. Jokowi also threw cold water on other ideas that would have fundamentally undermined democracy. In a particularly astonishing case, Luhut proposed to the president issuing a decree that would have allowed him to appoint the head of the Supreme Court. While Jokowi was clearly not a stickler for democratic procedure, he understood instinctively that this would not fly with the public and thus impossible to do. ⁸ In short, the boundaries of Jokowi's democratic world were demarcated by majority opinion, not by a set of values or commitment to an established constitutional codex. This majoritarianism worked against Indonesia's democratic status quo on many occasions, but in others, it led Jokowi to give up on his own autocratic initiatives or reject those of others. Overall, it left democracy standing, but in diminished form.

Populism and Poll Politics

Jokowi's majoritarianism overlapped in significant dimensions with populism but also showed features distinct from it. Some have strongly rejected using the populism label for Jokowi at all (Hatherell and Welsh, 2019). But there is much evidence to suggest that Jokowi viewed himself, and his place in Indonesia's politics, in populist terms. Mudde (2004: 543) defined populism as a “thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” There is little doubt that Jokowi thought that he expressed the volonté générale of the people as he understood it from his systematic reading of polls: that is, as a longing for economic prosperity and social stability in their daily lives. Similarly, from his early days as mayor and governor, and even more so later as president, Jokowi viewed himself as fundamentally distinct from Indonesia's corrupt party politics. Looking back at his mayorship, Jokowi said that “actually, in 2010, I didn’t want to run again. The world of politics wasn’t for me. Too dirty. That's not me.” ⁹ He did stand again and won in a landslide—precisely because he profiled himself as a nonpolitician. Thus, he also fit into Levitsky and Loxton's definition (2013: 110) of populists as those who “mobilise mass support via anti-establishment appeals, […} and profess to establish a direct ‘linkage’ to ‘the people’.” Overall, he felt that he stood up for the ordinary people and their views against a predatory political class largely interested in self-enrichment. In this sense, his majoritarian instincts echoed Jokowi's populist self-positioning in Indonesian politics.

But Jokowi's populism was moderated by his pragmatism and his specific conceptualization of majoritarianism. As indicated, Jokowi viewed his majority constituency as comprising a broad, multireligious coalition of voters who prioritized economic development and eschewed both ideological radicalism and liberalism. Thus, his rhetoric and strategies were not as polarizing as in the case of many of his populist peers (Roberts, 2022). Instead, he exhibited an inclusive language that he knew would appeal to a largely apolitical mainstream. Some authors have coined such moderate populism as “popularism” (McKean, 2020). This moderation was also seen in Jokowi's public portrayal of his foes. Politically, Jokowi treated the radical fringes of Islamism with coercion and ignored or intimidated liberal critics, but in his speeches, he typically stayed away from sharp attacks on them. In the same vein, while he presented himself to the electorate as being distinct from the country's rich elites, and as presenting the will of ordinary citizens rather than that of the ruling class, he formed alliances with those very elites and refrained from antagonizing them in public. He explained this seemingly contradictory constellation with the need to get his agenda through in the interest of the people he fought for. According to Jokowi, “presidents need to make compromises in order to protect their agenda. My agenda is to improve people's welfare. The art is simply not to give [the elites] too much, because they will always ask for more.” ¹⁰ Jokowi's populism, then, was pragmatic and developmentalist in nature and sought to broaden his mostly apolitical base rather than mobilizing a specific political group against others. His particular view of majoritarianism guided him in developing this version of populism light.

Just as Jokowi's majoritarianism overlapped with notions of populism, so did it intersect with core principles of traditional electoral democracies. And as in the case of populism, too, this intersecting brought commonalties and differences into focus. To begin with, politicians tend to be transfixed on polling results even in long-established democracies of the West (Schumacher and Öhberg, 2020). It may be argued, therefore, that Jokowi's obsession with opinion surveys is not necessarily an indication of majoritarian thinking and practice. Indeed, the fact that Jokowi's attitude toward polls had similarities with that of politicians operating in more solidly democratic contexts points to the pro-democratic ingredients of his majoritarian model that we referred to earlier. In many cases, Jokowi identified policies popular with the masses based on polls, and he increased his consumption of surveys in elections times, as one would expect from politicians in other democracies. We also noted that polls informed him of the barriers he could not cross, and therefore his consultation of surveys contributed to the outcome we observed throughout this article: that is, Indonesian democracy declined substantially in quality under Jokowi's rule, but remained formally operational. From this perspective, Jokowi's use of polling data was not only compatible with, but supportive of, standards of democratic politics. Of course, this is also the way he saw it: polling reports helped him to understand what the people wanted and thus were crucial to the conduct of democracy.

But Jokowi's deployment of polls went beyond that typically observed in more conventional democratic arenas. In fact, he often used them in a way that underscored the democracy-damaging impacts of his majoritarianism. Far from just analyzing polls to help him design policies or win elections, he turned to them to find out which of his acts of executive aggrandizement voters would find tolerable. In other words, polls were a barometer for him for how far he could push his ambition for more power concentration and dynasty building. As noted, in some cases he recognized that he had hit a limit and then retreated. But more often than not, his pollsters told him that particular plans to undermine accountability mechanisms were not important enough to the electorate for it to be concerned, or that it was even supportive. Accordingly, Jokowi utilized polls as a tool to achieve outcomes that might have secured majority indifference or acquiescence, but must be classified as undemocratic by more substantive conceptualizations of democracy. This is where Jokowi's majoritarian thinking was most harmful to Indonesia's polity: by reducing democracy to the political will of the majority, Jokowi marginalized its other, equally important elements. Rule of law, separation of powers, civil rights, freedom of expression, and other key pillars of democracy mattered much less to Jokowi than his belief that he executed the majority's mandate. In this context, Jokowi's strategic use of polls to identify areas of democratic politics that he could weaken without a public backlash stands outside of their ordinary role as guides for politicians to decide on policies or to draft election-winning agendas.

Thus, Jokowi combined features of illiberal populism and more conventional democratic politics into a belief system that pushed him into autocratic experiments but also kept him away from crossing the authoritarian Rubicon. The substantive intersection between his populist instincts and his democratic leanings was majoritarianism. In Jokowi's majoritarianism, we find both his willingness to ignore or repress minorities irrelevant for his broad electoral constituency and his insistence that the will of the people must be assessed and heard. Standing in majoritarian territory meant that Jokowi had one foot in the illiberal landscape of populism, and another in the traditional belief of majoritarian thinkers that the desires of the masses need to take precedence over those of small elite circles. This made him a complex figure and explains the vastly different assessments of him by his intellectual critics on the one hand and ordinary voters on the other. For the former, Jokowi was an antidemocratic ruler who reduced the quality of democracy during his decade in power, weakening institutions while laying the ground for a dynastic future. For a large majority of the population, by contrast, he was a strong leader who cared for the wishes of the lower classes and ran a democracy they felt comfortable with. Assessing Jokowi in a balanced fashion means recognizing that he wasn’t one or the other—he was both at the same time. This makes situating him in a historical Indonesian context or on a comparative spectrum more difficult but also more analytically illuminating.

Conclusion

International democracy indexes have painted a complex picture of Indonesia's democratic journey under Jokowi. They detected a gradual and moderate decline of democratic quality under his rule but also the overall survival of electoral democracy (Mietzner, 2024). This article has argued that this outcome reflected the president's majoritarian predisposition. Jokowi exploited generally conservative and partially apolitical views in society to expand his executive powers up to the limit that he knew a majority would tolerate. Once he was about to cross this boundary, however, the majority made it clear that it was unwilling to cooperate, and Jokowi typically retreated. This meant that he constantly pushed out the parameters of what was still acceptable in democratic terms, but stopped at the bridges that would have led him into full authoritarianism. This flirtation with autocracy, partly consumed and partly abandoned, damaged Indonesian democracy but did not end it. The majority of Indonesian citizens, while subscribing to developmentalist notions of democracy, still wanted elites to compete over their support. This attitude, in turn, rebelled against long-term autocratic agendas—even if pursued by someone as popular as Jokowi. Jokowi, for his part, respected majority opinions not only as the source of his power but also as the ultimate limit to it. Of course, as indicated in the introduction, Jokowi's majoritarianism wasn’t the only dimension that set boundaries to his ambitions: Jokowi, like other presidents before him, also had to accommodate Indonesia's elite players in a complicated arrangement of coalitional presidentialism (Mietzner, 2023; Slater, 2004, 2018). But while the latter has been explored in some detail before, this article focused on Jokowi's personal predisposition and its political repercussions.

Democracy indexes are set to further reduce Indonesia's ratings due to Jokowi's meddling in the 2024 elections. But even in these interventions, which added up to constitute the most intensive electoral engineering by a president since Suharto's regime, Jokowi followed his majoritarian instincts. As noted, his steering of the Constitutional Court left the majority uninterested or supportive. The same was true for most of his other actions. In fact, in October 2023 poll, taken after the court's decision, 75% of respondents stated that Jokowi had the right to support a candidate who he thought would protect his legacy (Indikator, 2023: 46). Only 21% believed that as president, he should be neutral in the race. Jokowi rightly read this as evidence that the majority would not object to him mobilizing state resources to promote his candidate. At the heart of his indirect campaign for Prabowo and Gibran was a tour of battleground provinces in which he distributed social aid to voters. When the other candidates called this a form of vote buying and proposed that the distribution of aid be suspended during the campaign, the public turned against them, not the president. The distribution continued and heavily favored Jokowi's preferred pair. After the elections, which the latter won in a landslide, 76% of Indonesians were satisfied with how the ballot was held. It is also worth recalling that when Jokowi decided to throw his weight behind Prabowo, the defence minister was already ahead in the polls. Pushing for Prabowo's victory was therefore not just a personal preference for Jokowi but also a result of his tendency to bet on the majority's favorite. Helping the leader in the polls, in his mind, was good strategy.

Where does all this put Jokowi's Indonesia on the spectrum of comparative democracy studies? To begin with it, it is important to recognize the cases which Jokowi did not emulate. Jokowi was no Vladimir Putin, and he was no Recep Tayyip Erdoğan either. Unlike them, he lacked the determination to remodel the political status quo in his image. In fact, Jokowi's institutional legacy remained weak—he undermined existing democratic agencies but did not create new ones that could have built the foundations for a more personalized regime. Unlike them, too, he observed limits to his ambitions: while he was ruthless enough to use the state's coercive apparatus to domesticate elites and activist minorities, he shied away from challenging the majority if it refused to support his plans. This made Jokowi an unfinished autocrat and a defective democrat at the same time. It also made him more similar to Narendra Modi of India, whose record of democratic decline was—according to V-Dem—of roughly the same magnitude as Jokowi's (Verma, 2023). Both men shared a crude majoritarian understanding of democratic politics—Modi in an ethnoreligious sense, Jokowi in a more attitudinal and developmentalist way. But both ruled in a manner that protected them from the kind of international condemnation directed at Putin, Erdogan, or other autocrats. Despite their illiberal actions, both Jokowi and Modi continued to be courted as members of the world's democratic community. In that, it appears, lies Jokowi's greatest success: to have curtailed democracy to his benefit without the mainstream pundits at home and abroad even noticing.