Key Findings

This book has found that within a decade, Indonesia moved from one extreme of the “stability of presidentialism spectrum” to the other. In the transitional period following Suharto’s fall in 1998, Indonesia seemed to conform to all the instability features Linz had ascribed to multi-party presidentialism. Parties in the MPR effectively ended Habibie’s presidency in 1999; put in place a president (Wahid) whose party had only won 12 percent of the vote; and impeached him in 2001 when he fell out with his coalition. Subsequently, key parties deserted Wahid’s successor, Megawati, in the 2004 direct presidential elections, contributing to her defeat and Indonesia recording five presidents in six years (McIntyre 2005). After 2004, however, the picture changed dramatically, and Indonesia experienced a level of formal stability in its presidential system that Mainwaring had predicted was possible and that Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power had declared a new trend. Yudhoyono and Widodo ruled without any impeachment proceedings; served two terms after winning re-election with significant margins; and oversaw periods of stable economic growth—only interrupted by the pandemic—and low levels of communal upheaval. And most Indonesians seem to approve not only of their presidents’ performance but also of the system overall. In August 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, 69 percent of Indonesians were satisfied with the way democracy was practiced (Ariyanti 2019), and while this level declined somewhat in the middle of the pandemic, consistently more than half of the citizenry remained satisfied.¹

When putting together and sustaining their coalitions, Indonesian presidents have used the five tools of coalitional presidentialism identified by Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power (2017), but they have also added other instruments and important nuances. Most significantly, they have directed these tools not only at parties in the legislature—as Chaisty and colleagues suggest—but also at a variety of other socio-political actors. We established that these actors are not veto powers in the traditional Tsebelian sense, but hold powers that presidents believe could be used against them. This book has demonstrated, for instance, how Indonesian presidents have used their co-legislative powers (the first tool of coalitional presidentialism listed by Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power) to entice political actors, party-based and otherwise, into their coalitions. While parties and parliaments are most directly concerned with legislation as the president’s co-legislative partners, the products of this process concern other actors as well. The military has been anxious about legislation that could take away more of its traditional authorities; the police would like to gain some of the latter; bureaucrats wish to prevent legislative reforms to their standing; local government heads have a fundamental interest in upholding existing decentralization legislation; the oligarchs want laws that meet their interests in achieving lower labor costs and obtaining licensing privileges; and Islamic groups rely on legislation to defend the role of Islam in politics and to receive financial support from the state. This web of interests gives presidents ample opportunities to use their legislative influence as coalition-sustaining leverage.

The second instrument in the traditional toolbox of coalitional presidentialism, namely that of partisan powers, is less prominent in the Indonesian context. This power normally describes a president’s authority over his or her own party, which is then used as an asset in political negotiations. In Indonesia, by contrast, presidents benefitted most when parties other than their own became close allies—and the latter often did so not because of the strength of the president’s partisan powers but because of their weakness. Yudhoyono, for example, exercised strong control over his party, but as it only had won 7 percent of the votes in 2004, this mattered little in terms of establishing a dominating position in the political system. His coalition only stabilized after Golkar, the largest party, entered the coalition via a friendly takeover by Yudhoyono’s vice president. Widodo, for his part, was a member of the largest party (that is, PDI-P) but had marginal influence over it. He, too, relied on other parties to bring stability to his alliance. Indeed, he used these parties to contain the influence of PDI-P, and he ultimately emerged as the controlling figure atop a pyramid of competing political parties, all vying for his attention. Keeping inter-party rivalry alive, then, was critical to Widodo’s dominance over the party-based side of coalitional presidentialism. As noted, he feared nothing more than a scenario in which all parties, including his own, united against him, as in the 2018 vice presidential nomination. Such cases remained scarce, with Widodo successfully fending off one party’s specific demands by pointing to contravening interests of others.

The president’s appointment powers are also crucial in the Indonesian case, but go well beyond the cabinet. Indonesia’s tradition of reserving around half of the cabinet seats for non-party figures, developed under authoritarianism and sustained after 1998, has given presidents room to make concessions to non-party members of their coalition. Military and police figures, bureaucrats, local government heads, oligarchs, and members of Islamic organizations have all been invited to join cabinet, tying their institutions to the presidential alliance. Below the cabinet level, presidents have used their authority over many other positions to reward loyalists and punish defectors. Presidents can appoint military and police leaders close to them and ask them to ensure the loyalty of their subordinates; presidents possess, and have gradually expanded, the right to intervene in bureaucratic appointment processes, allowing them to install loyal civil servants; presidents can appoint acting local government heads in specific situations, and pull others into cabinet; presidents can give big oligarchs ministries and smaller ones side jobs in the administration; and presidents have satisfied Islamic groups with cabinet posts and lower-level appointments alike. Presidents’ juggling of these positions, both as an inducement and as a threat to their partners, has been a major element in the dynamic negotiation between heads of state and their coalitional allies. As illustrated in the case of NU, the number and importance of positions are constantly re-calibrated—as is the definition of who counts as a representative of which political organization.

The budgetary powers of the president are an essential element of Indonesia’s coalitional presidentialism practices as well. In a polity still embedded in patronage as a socio-political glue, Indonesian elites remain dependent on the financial benefits provided by the state. Although the president shares budgetary powers with the legislature, we found that there is much room for him or her to move funds to politically interested beneficiaries. Presidents have used this constellation to increase salaries for military and police personnel around election times; pump money into the bureaucracy, which feeds off state budgets to fund its patronage system; promise or withhold local transfers to local government heads in exchange for political support; allocate projects benefitting allied oligarchs; and shower NU with a range of lucrative initiatives before elections. The parties and the legislature get a particularly generous share as well, given that their consent is needed to design the budget. Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power have situated the exchange of favors as a fifth element of coalitional presidentialism; however, in the Indonesian context it is possible to think of this item as a practice in which the president draws from his or her co-legislative, appointment, and budgetary powers to hand out inducements to actual and potential partners. In some instances, the president may ask oligarchs in their coalition to dish out favors to other alliance partners, but the tycoons typically do so only if they are regular recipients of presidential patronage themselves.

In post-2004 Indonesia, these presidential tools have been applied so effectively to counterbalance the powers of the various coalition actors that none of the latter have seriously turned against the president. When dissatisfaction occurred, coalition deals between the president and key forces in the coalition were renegotiated—sometimes collectively but more often on an individual basis. An additional appointment here and more funds there have rectified disgruntlement among such actors. The stability of Indonesia’s political order after 2004 flows from this ability of coalitional presidentialism to dynamically accommodate actors that hold potential veto powers. It is not surprising, then, that the only case of significant instability in the two decades of the Yudhoyono and Widodo presidencies was the Islamist mass mobilization of 2016 and 2017. Recall that this oppositional movement arose from Widodo’s exclusion of the Islamist fringe from the parameters of coalitional presidentialism, into which Yudhoyono had invited them. Widodo opted, in this case, not to solve the problem by simply re-integrating the troublemaker into the presidential coalition. Instead, he used repression and asked another member of his coalition, NU, to do the groundwork for him in terms of delegitimizing the Islamist fringe and protecting the president from a backlash in the Muslim community. The gamble paid off, and stability was restored within about a year of the outbreak of the protest.

Widodo’s handling of Islamist protest points to an important additional presidential tool that Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power did not sufficiently consider: that is, the instrument of coercion. Such coercion is not the prerogative of autocrats; it is a standard practice of presidents in unconsolidated democracies (and, as the Trump presidency has shown, in some consolidated polities, too). Presidents in Indonesia have both enticed and coerced actors to join their coalitions. For example, Widodo exploited his power to determine the legality of party leadership boards to remove oppositional figures and install pro-government politicians—who then took their previously reluctant parties into the coalition. Widodo also allowed his law enforcers to flip an oppositional tycoon into a pro-government oligarch, who subsequently shifted the party under him into the presidential camp. Consequently, while it is true that most of Indonesia’s political forces and leaders have a natural interest in being involved in coalitional presidentialism and consuming its spoils, there have also been cases in which groups or individuals were unwilling to join the alliance but were forced to do so. In fact, this coercive element of coalitional presidentialism played a large role in further consolidating the system as it transitioned from Yudhoyono to Widodo. While Yudhoyono was reluctant to use coercion, Widodo seemed to enjoy it (Power 2020). His bans of HTI and FPI, and the arrest of opponents, caused him no moral conflicts, and their shock effect added to his reputation as a president determined to punish disloyalty.

But while the effectiveness of the president’s use of coalitional presidentialism tools goes a long way to explain the stability of Indonesia’s post-2004 regimes, it does not tell the full story. This is because even pre-2004 presidents used elements of coalitional presidentialism but evidently with much less success. Wahid built a large coalition only to watch it impeach him. Megawati presided over a broad alliance that included non-party actors such as the military, but she failed to mobilize these resources to stay in office. Hence, we need to dig deeper to understand why the post-2004 system produced more stability (but also more democratic calcification) than its predecessor polity between 1998 and 2004. But before we do that, we have to reflect further on Indonesia’s place in the comparative spectrum of coalitional presidentialism studies. This will assist us in making judgments about the applicability of the Indonesian case to other parts of the world and explore in a more systematic fashion the structural reasons why it evolved the way it did after 2004.

The Comparative Context

At the beginning of this book, we briefly assessed how Indonesia compared to other presidential systems in the world regarding key indicators such as stability and coalition size. Four main characteristics stood out. First, post-2004 Indonesia has been significantly more stable than other presidential systems, experiencing no impeachment attempts at all for two decades. This contrasts sharply with countries such as Peru, where presidential impeachments and resignations are routine affairs. Second, the president’s party is comparatively small, with neither Yudhoyono’s nor Widodo’s party holding more than one-fourth of the seats in the legislatures between 2004 and 2024. In countries such as Kenya, Chile, Bolivia, and South Korea, the size of the president’s party in parliament has traditionally been much larger. Third, the size of the presidential coalition has been significantly larger in Indonesia than in other presidential systems. In his second term, Widodo’s coalition controlled 82 percent of parliamentary seats, and the size of Yudhoyono’s coalitions was not much smaller. Except for the Philippines, all other cases we analyzed in the introduction had smaller coalitions. And fourth, while Indonesian presidents give more than half of their cabinet seats to non-party actors, and this allocation is a crucial element of the coalitional presidentialism architecture, other presidential systems have exhibited similar patterns. This is a surprising finding, given that non-party cabinet representation has been given marginal attention at best by conventional coalitional presidentialism studies.

Let us revisit each of these patterns and their significance for Indonesia’s place in coalitional presidentialism studies. In many ways, post-2004 Indonesia is the ultimate example of successfully practiced coalitional presidentialism, given its stability. Like no other presidential regime, post-2004 Indonesia provides evidence, disproving Linz, that presidents can navigate the perils of minority status in parliament to establish stable governance and avoid impeachment if they use the tools offered by coalitional presidentialism effectively. But while this makes Indonesia exceptional—given the incidence of impeachments in other countries practicing coalitional presidentialism, such as South Korea, Brazil, or the Philippines—it does not remove it from comparability with other cases. This is because the stability of Indonesia’s presidential system is not a quasi-cultural long-term product but the result of institutional design and the post-2004 agency of leaders. Indeed, Indonesia’s pre-2004 instability offers important insights into the conditions under which coalitional presidentialism, albeit attempted, can be ineffective and break down. As Slater (2004) showed, the Wahid and Megawati cabinets were intended to operate as coalitional presidentialism vehicles, but they failed because of the institutional framework in which they were placed and because of miscalculations by their leaders. Their successors learned from these mistakes. In this context, studying Indonesia delivers lessons not only in how coalitional presidentialism is practiced but in how it is created.

With regard to the size of presidential parties, Indonesia is at the low end of the spectrum but generally follows a global trend, too. Many party systems worldwide have splintered, with voters moving from large catch-all parties to narrower constituency or issue-based parties (Lupu 2015). This pattern has been particularly pronounced in Latin America, the heartland of presidentialism (Mainwaring 2018). In Southeast and East Asia, traditionally weak parties have faced further challenges from social modernization and populists (Kenny 2018). In some areas, there have even been tendencies toward “hyperfragmentation” (Zucco and Power 2021)—Brazil being one such example. This trend toward shrinking and more parties has also affected the size of the president’s party. In Indonesia’s 2014 election, for the first time in the country’s history no party reached more than 20 percent of the votes, and that result was replicated five years later. In the 2019 elections, only three parties achieved more than 10 percent of the votes, with the president’s party emerging as the largest, but still a far cry away from holding majority status. However, contrary to Linz’s warnings, this multi-partyism—even in its more extreme forms—has not undermined the stability of presidentialism. If anything, as the increasing examples of solid coalitional presidentialism arrangements have demonstrated, party proliferation has strengthened presidential control. The reason for this has been illustrated in this book: the existence of smaller and more parties can increase the presidents’ leverage through clever divide et impera strategies, allowing them to avoid being domesticated by their own parties.

While Indonesia is part of the global party system fragmentation story, it also fits into the trend of party outsiders emerging as the most popular presidential candidates. This may take the form of marginal party figures becoming more popular than their party leaders or of independent politicians establishing parties purely for the functional purpose of their candidacy. In the Philippines, popular figures often co-opt a fringe party or parties as a base for their candidacy. Brazil’s Bolsonaro used a similar strategy by joining the Social Liberal Party in 2018, and Kenyatta established the Jubilee Party in Kenya to facilitate his presidential ambitions. In Indonesia, as shown, Widodo became the candidate of PDI-P only because its leaders saw no alternative to the popular politician, and both Yudhoyono and Prabowo Subianto founded personalist parties. At first glance, this trend might lead us to conclude that presidents who are not the central figures of their parties or only preside over their own but poorly rooted groups might face difficulties ruling. Linz openly decried this risk, and even Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power implied that such a constellation was disadvantageous to incumbents. But as this book highlighted, presidents who do not control their parties or only dominate their shell parties can still establish stable rule as long as they possess something that the parties desperately lack: electoral popularity. This popularity has emerged as the core political asset of presidents with which to control parties, regardless of their formal position within the latter. In demonstrating this pattern, post-2004 Indonesia joined the ranks of many other countries with outsider presidencies.

If the size of the presidential party in Indonesia is small by comparison, its coalitions tend to be bigger than in other countries. This correlation is not coincidental—a similar relationship exists in the Philippines (Bongbong Marcos’s party alliance UniTeam won only 22 percent of the House seats in 2022 elections, but quickly built an 85 percent majority after taking office). While there are Indonesia-specific reasons why Widodo and Yudhoyono opted for large coalitions to overcompensate for their relatively small presidential parties, there appear to be generalizable patterns that relate to the inner logic of coalitional presidentialism. First, being able to rely only on a small home base in parliament seems to create more anxieties in a president than is the case in those heads of state who can draw from the support of a larger partisan caucus. These anxieties, in turn, drive the push to build oversized coalitions. Second, presidents with smaller support bases in parliament are more likely to explore the benefits of divide et impera strategies. Widodo has been particularly skilled in playing a variety of party and non-party actors against each other, increasing his political leverage enormously. Presidents whose parties are larger do not have the same incentive structure to engage in such effective (but also risky) experiments in balancing, and are therefore less likely to reap their benefits. In fact, the need to observe the vested interests of all actors involved in large coalitions (identified in this book as both a guarantor of stability and a hindrance to reform) might turn off incumbents with ambitious political agendas.

Finally, the tendency in Indonesia toward appointing non-party ministers echoes, despite its apparent country-related context, the situation in many other presidential systems. As our initial assessment in the introduction showed, presidents allocate significant proportions of cabinet seats to non-party actors. Despite that fact, the appointment of such actors remains understudied, including in the work of Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power. One exception has been the study by Lee (2018, 345) on South Korea, which discovered that “the posts wherein ministers can influence the government’s overall reputation typically go to nonpartisan professionals ideologically aligned with presidents, while the posts wherein ministers can exert legislators’ influence generally go to senior copartisans.” Such findings suggest that comparative presidentialism studies need to reconsider their traditional over-concentration on the parliamentary arena as the most decisive factor in determining the character of presidential rule. The data from South Korea also indicate that the nature of, and the motivations for, the allocation of cabinet seats to non-party actors are diverse. In the Indonesian case, non-party appointees are not only “professionals ideologically aligned with presidents” (Lee 2018, 345). They are representatives of important groups whose exclusion from cabinet would expose presidents to the risk of being politically and socially sabotaged by them. Thus, this book’s focus on Indonesia not only deepened comparative studies of coalitional presidentialism but also broadened their perspective by paying more attention to non-party politics.

Where, then, does Indonesia sit exactly in the comparative spectrum of coalitional presidentialism? It ranks highest in overall regime stability, suggesting that Indonesian presidents have been more successful than others in using the instruments of the coalitional presidentialism toolbox. Furthermore, Indonesia has smaller presidential parties and bigger coalitions than many of its counterparts, making it an ideal case to study the interrelationship between these two factors. This relationship, in which the presidents’ sense of exposure to risks of instability breeds initiatives to include all relevant actors in their coalitions, also led Indonesia into a specific format of non-party participation in political alliances. Such non-party engagement appears to be more institutionalized in Indonesia than in South Korea, for example, but points to modifications in the traditionally party-centered behavior of presidents around the world. In other words, the investigation of Indonesia in this book has firmly anchored the country in the study of coalitional presidentialism, and where Indonesia has slightly diverted from comparative norms, this has not underlined its exceptionalism but the need to expand the concept’s initial boundaries.

Drivers of Stability

Thus far, we noted how Indonesian presidents have effectively used traditional tools of coalitional presidentialism, plus other ones, to stabilize their rule. Moreover, our comparative analysis has pointed to their weak position in the party system (that is, as heads of small parties or marginal figures in larger ones) as a possible motivation for their behavior. But we need to ask more systematically why Indonesian presidents have acted the way they did, and—by the same token—why party and non-party actors alike have refrained from even trying to remove them from office when such attempts are common in other presidential systems. This means that we have to reflect more deeply on the specific circumstances under which presidents and their allies operated after 2004, as well as on broader social structures that may have contributed to their actions. In this section, therefore, we look at four dimensions: first, the institutional set-up of the post-2004 polity that strengthened both the president and other actors, making the search for a compromise more desirable than conflict; second, the individual experience of Yudhoyono with Wahid’s fall, which informed both his presidency and Widodo’s; third, deeply rooted images of the power of leading actors, whether the president’s or that of their allies, that convinced both sides that challenging the other would be disadvantageous; and fourth, strong ideational traditions of cooperation in Indonesian political culture that incentivized the inclusion of a maximum amount of actors into presidential coalitions.

To begin with, the sharp break between the instability of the political order in place between 1998 and 2004, on the one hand, and the solidity of the post-2004 polity, on the other, suggests that the constitutional amendments of 2002 had a major role in causing the shift of political practices (Horowitz 2013). Indeed, the amendments had an important impact on both the president and his or her institutional counterparts as, rather unusually, both were strengthened by the new arrangements. Presidents were protected more effectively from impeachment—so much so that removal of the president through the DPR and MPR became almost impossible. This circumstance created a compelling incentive for political actors to work with presidents rather than attempting to launch impeachment procedures with little chance of success. Other actors, however, also saw their powers expanded: parliament, for instance, gained additional appointment authorities, forcing the president to accommodate legislators even if he or she had reasons to feel secure from the threat of impeachment. Similarly, the shift to direct presidential elections increased the powers of non-state actors, such as oligarchs and religious organizations. The former paid the bills for the increased campaign efforts, while the latter mobilized voters and offered religious legitimacy to candidates. Hence, the post-2004 order left the president and other actors dependent on each other, with presidents fearing the effects of alienation from potential veto forces and these forces becoming more inclined to benefit from presidential patronage than to forego it through opposition.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this institutionalist approach to explaining coalitional presidentialism behavior and its stability in the post-2004 regime. To put it simply, the experience of Yudhoyono and Widodo—that is, sailing through their presidencies with no serious attempt to remove them from office—would not have been thinkable under the pre-2004 arrangements. On the day Wahid was elected president by the MPR in October 1999, the author asked a Golkar politician why he had voted in a figure with such a long record of unreliability and erratic behavior. “That’s easy to answer,” the politician said, “he serves our interests now, and if he stops doing that, we’ll just impeach him” (interview with Achmad Arnold Baramuli, Jakarta, October 20, 1999). And so they did. No such easy avenue is available to post-2004 politicians, who have to accept that a just-elected president is likely going to be around for at least one term (more likely two), and that therefore making deals with him or her promises more benefits than trying to score points through self-exclusion from presidential favors. Similarly, Wahid’s false notion that a president can do whatever he or she likes (recall that he issued decrees to freeze parliament and ban Golkar) was put to rest by the 2002 constitutional amendments, disciplining presidents and driving home the point that more was to be gained by cooperation than hostile acts against mainstream opponents.

Yet the institutionalist explanation only goes so far. For instance, it does not capture the continued fear of Indonesian presidents of impeachment despite its bar being set so high by the 2002 amendments. This incessant anxiety is also not fully explicable by pointing to the minority status of Yudhoyono’s and Widodo’s parties in parliament and the weak control of the latter over PDI-P. Rather, we must take seriously what Indonesian presidents have told us about why they chose broad coalitional presidentialism over narrow simple-majority rule. As mentioned, Yudhoyono was explicit about his fears. Despite the 2002 amendments, he continued to call Indonesia’s system “semi-presidential” or “semi-parliamentary,” implying that removal by parliament was an ever-present threat. In addition, he thought that unhappy political actors would create instability in society, and that their integration into government served a wider purpose of protecting socio-political harmony. For Yudhoyono, the trauma of being a senior minister during the days of Wahid’s impeachment was undeletable (Kurdi and Wahid 2003). What he saw at that time shaped his views of what could happen to a president who aggressively confronted his foes. As Yudhoyono recalled much later, “for five months I was able to convince [Wahid] not to [disband parliament] because it is against the constitution, I was saying that, but I lost, I left (or he threw me out), and then he fell” (interview, Cikeas, December 2, 2014). For Yudhoyono, presidents fall if they make enemies instead of allies, and Wahid was toppled because he ignored that advice. Coalitional presidentialism in Indonesia cannot be understood without this historical context shaping the views of presidents, beyond the institutional framework that operated after 2004.

Widodo, for his part, adopted Yudhoyono’s approach despite having actively campaigned against it in 2014. Initially, he viewed Yudhoyono’s inclusion of so many actors in his coalition as akin to the president being taken hostage by his allies. But his determination to pursue a different path crumbled within weeks of his inauguration, and he became convinced of the political convenience and benefits of inclusive coalition-building. He quickly dropped the rhetoric of opposing broad coalitions and started building his own, now explaining that Indonesian democracy differed from its Western counterparts. He began to use the term demokrasi gotong royong—that is, a democracy in which all actors help each other (BBC Indonesia 2020). According to one of his assistants, Widodo would not acknowledge copying Yudhoyono’s approach, given the rivalry between the two. “But every president learns from his or her predecessor, and it is clear that at the beginning we were a bit naïve about the challenges ahead of us,” the aide said. “And yes, it has become more understandable to us why Yudhoyono had done things the way he did. It is a lot easier to have many actors supporting us inside the presidential tent than facing their sabotaging actions launched from outside” (confidential interview, Jakarta, February 8, 2017).

The presidents’ fear of impeachment by the MPR highlights broader historical threat assessments that presidents make vis-à-vis a range of actors. It is worth pointing out that in 2014 Yudhoyono was the first president or prime minister—after sixty-none years of post-independence history—to leave office without being dismissed by the DPR or MPR, overthrown by the military, or removed by voters at the ballot box. Thus, the trauma of Wahid’s impeachment was embedded in a larger history of presidential downfalls and the actors who caused them. In the 1950s, prime ministers were typically replaced in the DPR as a result of shifting party loyalties; Sukarno was removed by the military; Suharto fell because of a popular uprising and because most elites deserted him; Habibie lost a decisive confidence vote in the MPR; the same body impeached Wahid; and Megawati lost the 2004 elections, which she mostly blamed on Yudhoyono who had challenged her despite serving in her cabinet. In short, Indonesia’s coalitional presidentialism was born out of a desire to end a long streak of presidential misfortunes that the various incumbents believed resulted from allies not offering sufficient support. At the same time, history had shown that coercion alone was not enough to keep presidents in office. Both Sukarno and Suharto went down despite (or even because of) their repressive rules, and Wahid’s last-minute attempt to govern as an autocrat was also unsuccessful. For incumbents, therefore, the need to accommodate potentially disloyal partners seemed to be the most compelling lesson from fallen ex-presidents.

This sense of Indonesia’s presidential history has led heads of state to adopt often-exaggerated threat assessments of specific actors. As noted, the various members of presidential coalitions have significant powers, which encouraged presidents to tie them into their regimes. But it is unclear whether any of these groups would have the strength to remove a sitting president, especially if acting on their own. In many cases, it is the imagined potential of an actor to cause trouble, rather than the certainty that it can successfully challenge the president, that has persuaded incumbents to pre-emptively accommodate a particular player. In the case of the military, for instance, it is questionable whether it would have the power to launch a coup if the political and economic conditions are otherwise stable. Nevertheless, Indonesian presidents and large segments of the public remain married to the idea that the military constitutes the indispensable power behind the throne. (In a December 2021 poll, 92 percent of Indonesians trusted the military, leaving the president in second place at 82 percent) (LSI 2022, 43). Similarly, the oligarchs are immensely powerful but other than withholding funds and sponsoring opponents, their options for successfully removing a president are limited. Presidents, for their part, have chosen not to try to find out what would happen if they aggressively took on the oligarchs or any other major actor. Avoidance of conflict, rather than experimental challenges to see how far they can go, has been the premise of Indonesian presidents since 2004.

A maverick bound to challenge the foundations of coalitional presidentialism has yet to emerge. Widodo campaigned as such a maverick in 2014, but once in office, perpetuated the system he found. Even Prabowo, the most aggressive self-styled populist in modern Indonesia, was unlikely to follow through with his “burn the system” rhetoric if elected. At a campaign event in June 2014, Prabowo addressed a stadium full of supporters in Jakarta by delivering one of his standard speeches on the corruption of the existing system and why only he could dismantle it. Meanwhile, the representatives of that system had lined up at the stage behind him: among them were Bakrie, one of the most blatantly self-interested political oligarchs; Amien Rais, representing politicized religious groups; and Suryadharma Ali, the PPP chair and minister of religion who had just been declared a corruption suspect. Recognizing the tension between his anti-system speech and his pro-system supporters, Prabowo briefly turned to them and said, “by the way, when I attack the corrupt system, I don’t mean them. They are very fine people” (notes by the author, Jakarta, June 22, 2014). Later, of course, Prabowo joined the system as well by becoming a minister. Partly, the absence of committed political mavericks is due to the presidential nomination monopoly held by political parties; however, it is also due to the obvious expediency of aligning with powerful actors rather than trying to destroy them and getting burnt in the process.

While Indonesian presidents have sought cooperation over conflict by pre-empting real and imagined threats, their coalition partners have adopted the same approach. In doing so, they have been motivated by an image of the Indonesian presidency that reflects not only its current powers but is an amalgamation of past experiences. The memories of Sukarno’s and Suharto’s autocracies are still fresh, with most of today’s politicians having been socialized during the latter. Suharto’s presidency appeared all-powerful and long-lasting to them, instilling a sense that cooperation with sitting presidents is more promising than waiting for a more favorable one. The quick succession of short-term presidents Habibie, Wahid, and Megawati, as well as the reduction of presidential powers compared to the New Order, did little to change the long-term impression that the presidency remains the center of power and needs to be both respected and exploited. To be sure, the post-Suharto changes increased the self-confidence of actors to position themselves vis-à-vis the presidency, giving them a clear awareness of which rewards they could demand in exchange for their cooperation. Nonetheless, in the background still looms the fear of exclusion and punishment—a fear that Widodo revived by applying some of the coercive strategies that Suharto had used.

Finally, however easily dismissed as pure rhetoric, there is an ideational element to the preference for broad coalition-building in democratic Indonesia. We already noted Widodo’s mentioning of gotong royong democracy, which referenced Sukarno’s concept of mutual assistance. Megawati, for her part, has often voiced her surprise at the practice of deciding policy issues by majority vote, given that Indonesia traditionally celebrates the principle of musyawarah mufakat, or discussion until a consensus is reached (the term is reflected in the name of the MPR). In 2015, she told a PDI-P congress that “actually we can use musyawarah mufakat, not voting [to decide any issue]. Voting is not our culture, it’s the culture of Western people imported to us” (notes by the author, Sanur, April 8, 2015). Implicit in this concept of musyawarah mufakat, a household term in Indonesia, is the idea of accommodating everyone, regardless of their strength, electorally or otherwise. Yudhoyono, too, expressed his belief in the principle: “I love check and balances, but if it leads to a president being overthrown mid-term, I don’t agree. [Musyawarah mufakat] can soften our politics, and that makes me happy” (interview, Cikeas, December 2, 2014). Hence, whether the notion of musyawarah mufakat breeds inclusivist coalition-building behavior, or whether it just cloaks pragmatic interests in a cultural vocabulary, Indonesian politicians use it to explain their approach. Ultimately, it combines with other historical experiences to form a lens through which presidents view power-sharing as the most effective path to power maintenance.

In sum, the process through which Indonesia’s coalitional presidentialism developed and stabilized involved several domestic drivers: institutional changes coming into effect in 2004 that gave both presidents and other actors more power; Yudhoyono’s experience with Wahid that motivated him to pursue an accommodative path (one then continued by Widodo); historically grounded but often exaggerated perceptions both on the part of presidents and their partners of what the other side could do to them in case of non-cooperation; and a cultural affinity toward ideas of cooperation. These factors created an equilibrium in which both sides accepted each other’s red lines of vested interests, and in which stability became the political premise for most actors involved. This stability, while setting Indonesia apart from many other presidential systems around the world, has come at a high cost, however. In the last section, we assess this price Indonesia paid for stability in more detail: effectively, coalitional presidentialism—as practiced in its post-2004 form in Indonesia—produced democratic erosion.

Democratic Decline

In the introduction to this book, we noted that the concurrence of stabilizing presidentialism and democratic backsliding that presented itself in the post-Suharto polity does not seem to be unique to Indonesia—democratic quality in Indonesia has declined in concert with that in Latin America, the world’s stronghold of post-authoritarian presidentialism. The various chapters of this book highlighted that this interrelationship is indeed not coincidental, but a logical linkage in which the stabilization of presidential rule has been fed by the absorption of, and thus a reduction in, democratic substance. In each chapter, we investigated the damaging effects of a president purchasing the accommodation or acquiescence of an actor by making concessions to their vested interests. In combination, these acts of accommodation guaranteed the endurance of the post-Suharto order and its colonization by patronage-driven players. Indonesia’s stability and democratic decline, then, are two sides of the same coin (Aspinall 2010).

These dynamics, already visible in pre-2004 governments, were institutionalized during the Yudhoyono and Widodo presidencies. Yudhoyono’s inclusion of the radical Islamist fringe into his broader coalitional presidentialism parameters set the tone for systematic compromises on democratic quality in the name of political stability. The same approach was used for other actors, with ever-increasing straightforwardness. With the protection of each coalition partner’s red lines emerging as the core organizing principle of coalitional presidentialism, areas of critical importance to democratic quality became taboo zones. Subsequently, these zones turned into arenas of democratic decline as actors clawed back privileges lost in earlier periods of democratization. Whether the military reclaimed civilian roles; the oligarchs overturned the soft labor laws of the early 2000s; bureaucrats fended off attempts to dry up their patronage resources; or parties paralyzed the anti-corruption commission that had arrested many of their leaders—coalitional presidentialism offered the framework in which actors could exploit the president’s real or exaggerated sense of vulnerability to restore old privileges or demand new ones. Presidents, believing that they guaranteed stability by giving in to these demands, were satisfied as long as they could defend and expand their own powers. Coalitional presidentialism in Indonesia, therefore, works so well for presidents and the accommodated elites because it is a win-win proposition—both sides gain, but at democracy’s expense.

The specific mechanism through which presidents and their allies feed on democracy’s substance also explains the pace and extent of democratic decline in Indonesia. While this decline has been serious, it has been slow and gradual—and stopped short of overturning democracy per se. This is because democracy is both an obstacle and an enabling necessity for presidents, elites, and their power-sharing under coalitional presidentialism. Although democracy can expose the predatory behavior of leaders and their machines, it also equips them with all-important legitimacy. In this regard, the elite’s wish to diminish the effects of democratic transparency is balanced by their interest in maintaining democracy as the system that justifies their rule. Post-1998 democracy, for all the upheaval and changes it has brought for socio-economic elites, has served most of the country’s leaders well, and its replacement by a new autocratic system might offer more uncertainties than benefits for them. Accordingly, the characteristics of Indonesia’s democratic decline under coalitional presidentialism—slow-paced and regime-preserving—is not an accident but in line with the elite’s strategic priorities.

One of the most consequential impacts of this gradual democratic decline under coalitional presidentialism has been the undermining of the principle of checks and balances. In his analytical description of Indonesian party coalitions in Indonesia as cartels, Slater (2004, 2018) found that Indonesia is caught in an “accountability trap”; that is, neither do the various actors hold each other to account, nor can voters fulfill that task due to everyone being in government. While the cartel model overlooks crucial aspects of coalitional presidentialism—for instance, it underestimates the level of competition in the coalition and dismisses the role of the president as negligible—it accurately captures the illiberal pitfalls linked to coalitions that try to accommodate too many actors. Although the intense inter-actor rivalry in the coalition sustains a degree of competitiveness that has allowed Indonesia to remain an electoral democracy, it is no substitute for effective mechanisms of control and accountability in which oppositions scrutinize governments through the legislature and societal oversight. Building up the latter is near-impossible if the government coalition controls four-fifths of parliamentary seats; most media outlets are in the hands of presidential allies; and other non-party actors with the potential to counterbalance the ruling alliance have joined it. The bigger these coalitions grow, the more the media becomes a soft companion of government rather than its controller—and the more non-party institutions trade their accountability powers for benefits, the more democratic quality erodes.

But the risk that coalitional presidentialism can pose to democratic substance is not related only to its inclusion of too many actors. Equally important is its exclusion of actors deemed too hostile or not influential enough to be invited into the coalition. At best, this exclusion leads to the denial of access to democratic processes and the distribution of societal resources. At worst, it takes the shape of outright repression. Under Indonesia’s coalitional presidentialism regime, both trends have been witnessed, with the first slowly but steadily combining with the second. Early in presidential terms, reformist civil society groups, labor unions, social and political minorities, and other marginal actors often enjoy the president’s attention as they can bestow democratic credibility. In his first term, Yudhoyono liked to move in such circles, and Widodo integrated them into his 2014 campaign platform. But as they began to demand more than just rhetorical praise, and as they asked for reforms that threatened the interests of important actors in the coalition, presidents moved away from such marginal groups. In later phases of Widodo’s rule, human rights and environmental activists who supported him in 2014 became increasingly criminalized and otherwise repressed (Jong 2018). We also noted what occurs to actors who once were important enough to be invited into the outer rings of presidential coalitions but then thrown out from them: the Islamist fringe, courted by Yudhoyono but excluded by Widodo, became the target of systematic and arguably disproportionate government repression after 2017.

The development of coalitional presidentialism in Indonesia, and the country’s concurrent democratic decline, thus point to important sequential dynamics in both. It is crucial to acknowledge that coalitional presidentialism is not per se disadvantageous for democracy. Indeed, it can help to avoid a democratic breakdown in some cases and provide the necessary stability for democracy to consolidate in others. Democracy indexes identified much of Yudhoyono’s first term as Indonesia’s democratic peak—that is, in a period in which coalitional presidentialism was still experimented with, and most actors (including the president) were unsure about the limits of their powers. But as the system gradually expanded to include more actors, its players became more brazen in demanding what they perceived to be their rightful privileges. Newcomers to the coalition oriented themselves at what others had received and requested the same. In hindsight, the tipping point of coalitional presidentialism turning from being an asset for democracy into a liability was Yudhoyono’s re-election in 2009. With an ever-growing coalition, and a bigger winning margin in a shrinking field of candidates, Yudhoyono had demonstrated the concept’s success and, therefore, its desirability. His second term, consequently, was described as one of stagnation, in which he simply administered the coalition and gave up on any attempts at broader reform (Aspinall, Mietzner, and Tomsa 2015). Widodo, who only briefly flirted with abandoning coalitional presidentialism, quickly reversed course, broadened the coalition, and further narrowed Indonesia’s democratic space.

The transformation of Indonesia’s coalitional presidentialism from a potentially democracy-stabilizing into a democracy-damaging force was particularly visible in the kind of actors who saw their influence in the coalition increasing. As noted, the two actors who recorded the biggest increase in their cabinet representation over time were the police and the oligarchs. This increase fittingly reflected the growing reliance of the Widodo government on security agencies and on the wealthy to survive challenges to its stability and fundraising needs. That democracy suffered under such a visible shift in power distribution and priorities is obvious.

Hence, post-2009 coalitional presidentialism in Indonesia lost the balance between the rival concerns of stability and democratic contestation. The way coalitional presidentialism has been practiced solved the problem of instability that haunted Indonesia between 1998 and 2004 but created a new, opposite deficiency: that is, excessive stability equivalent to stagnation. In this “irony of success” (Aspinall 2010), the stabilizing effects achieved by appeasing Indonesia’s veto powers have caused its failure to further advance the quality of democracy. A web of red lines drawn up by vested interests became the foundation of coalitional presidentialism, while the red lines set by democracy were increasingly made subject to negotiation. As coalitional presidentialism was entrenched beyond its point of healthy saturation, democracy receded. Given that Indonesia’s adoption of coalitional presidentialism and its concurrent democratic recession are both parts of a global pattern, its experience can tell us much about other cases around the world. As recognized earlier, the level of stability in coalitional presidentialism regimes has varied but one thing is clear: the problem described by Linz, namely that presidential systems are inherently unstable, is no longer the main issue confronting them. Neither is it the main challenge to explain why presidential systems can orderly co-exist with multi-party systems. Indonesia has impressively shown that it can, with a frightening level of political orderliness. The more pressing challenge is to explore how coalitional presidentialism can work without sucking the oxygen out of democratic societies—and without stability becoming a source of political calcification.

Finally, it is worth noting how little the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the political architecture of coalitional presidentialism regimes in Indonesia or elsewhere. While the pandemic was a period of socio-economic upheaval, it left almost no dent in the political order through which power is distributed. In Indonesia, Widodo’s coalition not only persisted but consolidated during the crisis. Oligarchic interests pushed through legislation that they had pursued unsuccessfully before 2020, and Widodo relied on the police—a member of his coalition—to stifle dissent that could have destabilized his rule. The crisis did not create cracks in Indonesia’s elite coalition, but instead nurtured a sense that it needed to hold together even more firmly to survive. Similar trends were apparent in the Philippines, where President Duterte rode out the COVID-19 crisis on the back of his oversized coalition. He subsequently handed over power to an even larger alliance of elite forces under Marcos. In Brazil, the pandemic led to a rotation of power that brought a previous coalition back into government, but it did not transplant the system of coalitional presidentialism itself. Democratic quality continued to decline during the pandemic in all of these countries, as it did in Indonesia. But for better or worse, the system of power-sharing institutionalized in coalitional presidentialism survived the storm—and is set to continue its existence as the dominant form of presidential rule in the younger democracies of the twenty-first century.