The Personalization of New Parties and the Rise of Populism in Indonesia

This paper analyses the transformation of the Indonesian party system after 1998, specifically the personalization of political parties and the ascendancy of different forms of populism. It starts with a short description of developments and major characteristics of this system until the fall of Suharto in 1998, and then traces the profound transformation since 1998. It is argued that the pattern of socio-political streams (aliran) that shaped party politics in the 1950s in combination with the authoritarian restructuring under the New Order (1966-98) has produced a party system still impacted to an extent by specific social milieus. Yet, the huge influence of oligarchic interests on party politics as well as the introduction of a much more candidate-centered electoral system (that is the introduction of direct presidential and local elections and of open candidate lists) has led to lower levels of party identification, the emergence of a range of parties being mere vehicles of presidential candidates, and a personalization of political competition. Today, the party system consists of highly personalized vehicle parties as well as older, socially better rooted parties. Campaigning is now more candidate-centered, more professionalized and expensive, and has led to populist forms of voter mobilization at the national and regional levels since 2014. These illiberal, anti-elitist populists construct an essentialist antagonism between an allegedly morally pure, authentic people on the one hand and corrupt elites that need to be replaced on the other. The best examples are the 2014 presidential election when a populist candidate used his own highly personalized party as vehicle for his nomination and campaign and the 2017 gubernatorial election in Jakarta when the incumbent who was only tenuously linked to a political party lost because of a populist, Islamist mobilization by civil society groups loosely connected to some of the candidates.