1 THE PRESIDENT

Historical Origins

In the first half of 1945, the Japanese military administration—which had occupied the archipelago since 1942—allowed selected Indonesian leaders to meet and discuss ideas as to how best prepare for independence (Anderson 1972). As the Japanese military position was dire, it was clear to everyone involved that decisions had to be made quickly. Thus, when the Investigating Committee for Preparatory Work on Indonesian Independence (BPUPKI) met for the first time in late May 1945, many issues of fundamental importance were only touched upon rather than deeply deliberated. However, there seemed to be broad agreement that Indonesia’s political system needed to be governed by a strong leader. In one of the first BPUPKI sessions, prominent legal expert and future minister of justice, Soepomo, explained that “a head of state has to be able to lead all people. The head of state has to stand above all groups and must have the attitude of [wanting to] unite the state and nation. Whether this head of state will be positioned as king [raja] or president or … as Führer is not directly relevant to the principle of government arrangements” (Sekretariat Negara 1995, 41–42). Some BPUPKI members justified this call for a strong leader with stipulations in Islamic scripture, while others viewed it as the logical consequence of the independence struggle and the need for unity. Hence, there was no lengthy discussion on weighing up the alternatives of parliamentarism, which the Dutch colonial power practiced, and presidentialism. During the discussions, the term “president” was adopted to replace the more general “head of state” used in earlier discussions. After the explosion of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima on August 7, 1945, the debates on the constitution were accelerated further, independence was declared on August 17, and the final version of the constitution was passed the following day.¹

Under this 1945 constitution, the president was to be elected by the MPR (Article 6-2). The MPR consisted of the legislature (DPR) and an unspecified number of representatives from regional and functional groups (Article 2-1). No stipulation existed on how the composition of the DPR was to be decided, or how regional and functional groups should be appointed. Theoretically, therefore, the DPR did not have to be democratically elected, and other MPR members could be non-elected delegates as well. These regulations appear to have been the result of the impracticality of holding elections in the near future (as it turned out, Indonesia would be waging war against the returning Dutch between 1945 and 1949). But the vagueness of constitutional rules surrounding the composition of the MPR and DPR stayed in place until the end of the Suharto era. One of the core elements of the original 1945 constitution even survived the post-1998 transition: that is, the positioning of the president and the legislature as co-lawmakers. Neither the president nor the DPR could make laws without the agreement of the other (Articles 5, 20, and 21), which forced both into a relationship of mutual dependence and established incentives for informal consensus building. Outside of lawmaking, however, the president enjoyed a high level of autonomy: the appointment of ministers did not require approval from the legislature (Article 17); the president was the commander in chief (Article 10); and he or she could declare a state of emergency (Article 12).

But opponents of Sukarno and the executive presidency enshrined in the constitution managed to effectively suspend the latter through a series of moves in October and November 1945. Many of these anti-presidential activists had been excluded from the BPUPKI, which was dominated by “senior civil servants and nationalist politicians who had worked for the Japanese military administration” (McIntyre 2005, 7). Consequently, after the declaration of independence, the non-BPUPKI elements forced a fresh and intensified parliamentarism versus presidentialism debate on Sukarno, emerging as temporary winners. Their campaign was assisted by the fact that Indonesia, now facing the challenge of having to gain international recognition from major powers such as the United States and the Soviet Union, needed leaders who had not collaborated with the defeated Japanese. Sutan Sjahrir was the leader of this faction, and he succeeded in extracting major concessions from Sukarno, one of the collaborators (Mrázek 1994). First, in mid-October the legislative powers of the MPR and DPR, which a provisional stipulation in the constitution had given to the president before these two bodies could be formed, were transferred to the new Indonesian Central National Committee (KNPI), making it a quasi-parliament. Second, in early November the government allowed the formation of political parties. Third, in mid-November Sukarno agreed that the KNPI could form a cabinet responsible to it rather than the president, and that Sjahrir could act as cabinet formateur. Sjahrir was ultimately installed as Indonesia’s first prime minister, marking the beginning of a parliamentary interregnum that would last, with some interruptions, until 1957.

After the war between the Dutch and the Indonesian republic ended in December 1949 with a negotiated settlement, two new constitutions were passed in quick succession (Soepomo 1964). The first was the 1949 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Indonesia (RIS), which came into force when the Dutch handed over full sovereignty to the RIS on December 27, 1949. In prior peace negotiations between the Dutch and the Indonesian republic, the former colonial power had insisted that the new Indonesia adopt a federal system. While the Indonesian side had grudgingly agreed, it did so in the knowledge that it would be able to subsequently overturn this concession. In the meantime, Indonesia adopted a RIS constitution that retained the roles of president and prime minister; gave the federal states power to select three cabinet formateurs; and established both a House of Representatives and a Senate. Under this arrangement, Sukarno’s vice president Mohammad Hatta was prime minister, as he had been during the war on several occasions when the KNIP was paralyzed. But by May 1950, Sukarno was already in negotiations with the federal states about the dissolution of the RIS and a new constitutional framework. In these discussions, it was agreed that once Indonesia returned to its status as a unitary republic, it would not restore the original 1945 constitution. Instead, a temporary constitution would be adopted in which Sukarno remained president; the parliamentary system remained in place; the president would not be allowed to establish a non-parliamentary cabinet (Feith 1962, 96); and a Constitutional Assembly would be set up to pass a new permanent constitution. In August 1950, the RIS was disbanded, and the new temporary constitution of 1950 (UUDS 1950) was enacted.

Between 1950 and 1957, Indonesia’s parliamentarism reached its peak, with the ceremonial president Sukarno watching from the sidelines as legislative cabinets exercised power (Legge 1972, 242). Importantly, however, Sukarno remained in the public’s eye as the nation’s symbol and charismatic figurehead. In extensive international travel, he represented the new nation abroad, and the 1955 Bandung Conference—which he organized, assembling many leaders from post-colonial states—positioned Indonesia as one of the key players in the African-Asian movement (Shimazu 2014). This image of Sukarno as the embodiment of the nation, at home and overseas, put him in a position in which he was likely to profit from any crisis of the parliamentary system. This crisis set in around 1956, only one year after the country’s first parliamentary elections. Regional rebellions began to cripple the central government; the Constitutional Assembly, elected in 1956, was hopelessly deadlocked; and incessant corruption scandals ate away at the legitimacy of the parties and legislature. To be sure, Sukarno fueled these anti-party sentiments, and in the background he negotiated with the military over terms to return to the 1945 constitution. In March 1957, martial law was declared, followed by Sukarno’s appointment of a presidential cabinet—despite the stipulations against such a move in the UUDS 1950 (Lev 1966, 22). After two more years of crisis, on July 5, 1959 Sukarno dissolved the Constitutional Assembly and declared Indonesia’s return to the 1945 constitution. It did not concern Sukarno that neither of these acts was allowable under the UUDS1950. Indonesia’s autocratic presidentialism had been born.

Sukarno’s regime, which he called Guided Democracy, revived the executive presidency that had been envisioned in the 1945 constitution but only practiced for a brief moment. Crucially, however, Sukarno went beyond the spirit of the constitution, exploiting its vagueness to cement his autocratic rule. For instance, he disbanded parliament in 1960, replacing it with an appointed legislature that accommodated parties and groups that had pledged loyalty to his rule, including representatives from the armed forces (Feith 1963). As discussed earlier, the 1945 constitution did not specify how the DPR was to be elected, opening the door to Sukarno’s operation. He also banned parties opposed to Guided Democracy—again, he profited from the absence of any mention of parties in the constitution. In 1963, the provisional MPR appointed Sukarno president for life, and while this exceeded the five-year terms set by Article 7 of the 1945 constitution, the supporters of his anointment could justify their motion with the MPR’s near-unlimited powers. But in political terms, Sukarno’s regime depended on the continued support of the military and the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and as the relationship between these two actors became increasingly tense, the foundations of Guided Democracy began to crumble by 1964 (Roosa 2006). Against the background of deteriorating economic conditions and political uncertainty, the military quelled what it claimed was a PKI-led coup attempt on September 30, 1965; gradually removed Sukarno from office between 1966 and 1968; and installed General Suharto fully in the presidency by 1968. Unsurprisingly, the new regime decided to stick with the 1945 constitution.

One of the reasons why Suharto’s military-backed government opted to retain the 1945 constitution despite its close affiliation with Sukarno was the fallen president’s careful autocratic re-interpretation of the initial document. For instance, Sukarno decided in 1959 to have Soepomo’s president-centric elucidations of the 1945 constitution declared an integral element of the constitution itself. In these elucidations, which were re-confirmed by the new government in a provisional MPR decree in 1966, Soepomo had laid out the principles of state organization in a clearer fashion than the constitution itself (Nurtjahyo 1997). Among others, Soepomo had declared that “all state power” rested with the MPR, but that the president was its sole “agent” [mandataris]. Further, he specified that the president was the highest government official, and he added—in rather awkward English—that the “concentration of power and responsibility [are with] the President.” Soepomo also clarified that the president did not report to the DPR—and neither did his or her ministers. Nevertheless, the president needed to get approval from the DPR for laws and the state budget. For Suharto, even more so than for Sukarno, this meant that control of the MPR was the key to further expanding the already extensive presidential powers enshrined in the 1945 constitution. Such control over the MPR, it appeared to him, was easy to accomplish as the constitution did not regulate the exact composition of the body, making it vulnerable to manipulation by whoever exercised real executive power. In post-coup Indonesia, power was firmly in the hands of Suharto and his military, and so they would determine how the MPR was assembled and what it would decide.

Suharto perfected his control of the MPR, and all other state organs, in a systematically and patiently pursued campaign between 1966 and 1973. In the late 1960s, he developed the military-backed Functional Group (Golkar) alliance as the regime’s electoral machine, which won heavily manipulated elections in 1971 (Suryadinata 1989). Two years later, he forced the nine non-Golkar parties that had participated in the 1971 polls to merge into one nationalist party—the Indonesian Democracy Party (PDI)—and one Islamic party, the Unity Development Party (PPP). Tightly controlled, they formed a pseudo-opposition to the most senior regime (Aspinall 2005). In subsequent elections, Suharto—as president, the most senior leader of Golkar, and supreme commander of the armed forces—had the right to screen all Golkar, PDI, and PPP candidates for the DPR for possible security concerns and disqualify anyone who raised red flags. Thus, all members of the DPR were pre-approved by Suharto, regardless of the outcome of the elections held every five years (the military, for its part, was given a quota of non-elected seats). Additionally, Suharto signed off on the regional and functional representatives that made up the rest of the MPR. In other words, every MPR member was directly or indirectly appointed or approved by Suharto. Based on this artfully crafted system of presidential control, the MPR would re-elect Suharto every five years, perpetuating him in office until 1998. In that year, the Asian Financial Crisis caused much economic damage to Suharto’s regime (Pepinsky 2009), triggering popular unrest and intra-regime splits that forced him to resign.

Initially, most post-authoritarian heirs of Sukarno’s and Suharto’s presidential system believed that they could continue operating within its framework while democratizing some of its key components. For instance, early post-Suharto leaders were confident that conducting democratic elections for the DPR would solve the main problem of the missing link between the MPR and popular accountability (Crouch 2010, 52–55). They also thought that a two-term limit on presidents, imposed through a 1999 constitutional amendment, was sufficient to prevent another Suharto-style autocratic presidency. Some politicians raised the possibility of a direct election of the president in the constitutional debates of 1999 (Yusuf and Basalim 2000, 160), but powerful actors argued against it. Among them was Megawati, Sukarno’s daughter and the most popular politician in that period, who wanted to maintain as much as possible of the system that her father had created (McIntyre, 2005). But the idea of reconciling the pressures of a new democratic era with a presidential system misused by two successive autocrats was doomed from the beginning. As mentioned earlier, it needed Wahid’s presidency, which came crashing down in his 2001 impeachment, to convince the elite that cosmetic changes to the constitution were inadequate. As a consequence, the fourth round of amendments in 2002 produced a new regime of presidentialism, based on direct elections and a re-arranged power balance between the president and other state organs. It was under this reformed system that coalitional presidentialism became fully practiced after 2004, replacing the transitional regime that had proved unsustainable.

Indonesia’s turbulent history of presidentialism produced important legacies that continued to echo in the post-2004 polity. Most importantly, the 1945 revolution had situated the president as the nucleus of national political life, and while that role was challenged in the immediate post-independence period, it was permanently entrenched by two autocratic presidencies after 1959. At the same time, the political contestation of the 1940s and 1950s highlighted that other forces outside of the presidency sought accommodation, and that incumbents had to deal with them either by co-optation or repression (or a combination of both). The fact that both autocratic presidents, who had prioritized repression, were ultimately overthrown suggested to their post-1998 successors that co-optation of potential veto actors might be the smarter option as Indonesia democratized, setting the scene for coalitional presidentialism. Finally, with Habibie effectively removed by the MPR, Wahid impeached, and Megawati losing her bid for re-election in 2004, the presidents operating in the post-amendment environment had much to ponder in terms of what they could do better than both their toppled autocratic predecessors and the short-lived transitional presidents ruling after Suharto’s fall. In many ways, then, coalitional presidentialism was a concept that amalgamized the experiences of all Indonesian presidents since the nation’s inception. It recognized both the president’s vulnerabilities and the strengths inherent in the office, combining them into a strategy that balanced the two in a stabilizing fashion.

Constitutional Powers

Studying presidential powers in any country is obviously dependent on the time period examined. For our context, investigating the powers of Indonesian presidents means discussing their post-2004 authority that can be leveraged to shape the contours of coalitional presidentialism and the alliances necessary to sustain it. Pre-2004 presidents either had no need to build formal coalitions because they were autocrats (Sukarno and Suharto), or they relied on elite guarantees given to them in the chaos of the post-Suharto transition that saw the constitution constantly changing under their feet (Habibie, Wahid, and Megawati). These presidents were precursors to, but not actors of coalitional presidentialism, and for these reasons, the detailed study of their powers in their respective periods is not essential. Rather, our focus is on those powers that presidents have had access to, and have deployed, since 2004. The individual chapters explain the powers presidents possess vis-à-vis each actor, but it is important to start our discussion with a general overview of the political assets handed to post-2004 presidents by the amended constitution.

To begin with, post-2004 Indonesian presidents enjoy high levels of popular legitimacy, which is a significant resource in their negotiations with other state and non-state actors (Fukuyama, Dressel, and Chang 2005). This legitimacy is bestowed on them through a direct popular vote, which replaced the previous mechanism of indirect election through the MPR. In 1999, Abdurrahman Wahid won the presidential elections in the MPR despite the weakness of his party, which had gained only 12 percent of the votes in the preceding legislative elections. The party of his opponent, Megawati, had obtained almost three times as many votes. Entering into several backroom deals with the military and other parties, Wahid prevailed (Mietzner 2000), but his lack of a clear popular mandate, and his misguided belief that the legislature and MPR could not disrupt his presidency, predisposed him to impeachment. By contrast, post-2004 presidents can point to their direct election to fend off challenges to their rule. This legitimacy is strengthened through the run-off mechanism, by which candidates who do not win an absolute majority in the first round of the elections will face the second-placed nominee in the final round. This sets Indonesia apart from the Philippines and the United States, for instance, where presidents can win office with a minority vote share. In Indonesia, an additional stipulation seeks to prevent candidates from concentrating their campaign on the most populous island of Java, where about half of the country’s citizens reside. Successful candidates must win at least 20 percent of the votes in at least half of the provinces. Both Yudhoyono and Widodo won compelling victories between 2004 and 2019, and polls showed that about 70 percent of the population accepted them (Octaviyani 2019).

Indonesian presidents can also rely on constitutional arrangements that make presidential impeachment unlikely (Santika 2019). Any impeachment process must start in the DPR, in which a relevant motion has to receive a two-thirds majority in a session attended by at least two-thirds of its members. Effectively, this means that the absence from the House of a little more than one-third of MPs supportive of the president can stop an impeachment proceeding early on. Should an impeachment motion get the necessary number of votes, the motion is then assessed by the nine judges of the Constitutional Court (a body created by the 2002 constitutional amendments). In their deliberations, the judges (three of whom are appointed by the president, three by the DPR, and three by the Supreme Court) must establish whether the president has committed a “legal offense in the form of treason, corruption, bribery, or other serious criminal code violations or reprehensible acts.” Only if the judges affirm this can the motion against the president be submitted to the MPR for a final vote that must be attended by at least three-fourths of its members. Again, the absence of one-fourth-plus-one members of the MPR—which since 2004 consists of the members of the DPR and the senate-style Region’s Representative Council (DPD)—can foil the impeachment. If more than three-fourths of MPR members attend the impeachment vote, two-thirds of them have to vote in the affirmative for the president to be removed. Between 2004 and 2021, not once was the first stage of this process initiated. As noted, this contrasts sharply with some Latin American and East Asian presidential systems that have a high incidence of impeachments.

The introduction of direct elections and high impeachment thresholds reflected a broader pattern of post-2004 presidents benefitting from a substantial disempowerment of the MPR (Sorik and Aulia 2020). No longer the body that elects presidents, other powers were taken away from the MPR as well. Most crucial among them has been the MPR’s previous authority to issue Broad Outlines of State Policy (GBHN). These GBHN bound elected presidents to a set of policy principles that they subsequently had to implement during their five-year term. The GBHN were abolished after 2004, giving presidents greater authority to set policies and change them quickly should circumstances demand. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, conservative politicians, including Megawati, raised the idea of re-instating the GBHN (later repackaged as Fundamentals of State Policy [PPHN]), in an effort to restore some of the powers party leaders had lost through the 2002 amendments. Initially, President Widodo spoke out strongly against this initiative, arguing that the restitution of the GBHN would unduly constrain presidents and make it impossible for them to respond to sudden policy crises (Syahrul 2019). He later softened his stance, however. At the time of writing, the constitution has not been amended again, leaving presidents free of the obligation to follow guidelines set by the MPR. Similarly, MPR decrees—which in the past were issued on matters of great importance and were legally superior to laws—have no longer been issued in the post-2004 period. While some old MPR decrees remain in place and retain their legal validity (Wicaksono 2013), new ones have not been added, giving presidents more leverage in designing laws and implementing policies.

In the post-2004 polity, Indonesian presidents have maintained their co-legislative powers, a major instrument in their interactions with parties, legislators, and other actors. Unlike in other presidential systems where the executive’s co-legislative authority is regulated through a complicated mechanism of vetoes and counter-vetoes (Hoff 1991; Alemán and Schwartz 2006), Indonesian presidents must give their approval in joint deliberations with the DPR for a law to be passed. Indeed, formal legislative deliberations cannot begin if the president refuses to appoint an executive representative (most frequently, a minister) for these discussions. In a final DPR session, legislators vote on a bill, and the president’s representative simultaneously expresses approval. Subsequently, the president has to sign the new law within thirty days, but it comes into force even without such a signature. In some cases, presidents used this staged process to blame the legislature for the passing of controversial bills—when, in fact, their governments had approved them. In 2014, Yudhoyono’s home minister endorsed—in the president’s name—a bill abolishing direct elections for local government heads. Yudhoyono expressed his opposition to the bill but struggled to explain why his government had formally supported it in the relevant DPR session, and he finally was forced by a public outcry to issue an emergency decree in lieu of law to overturn it. Five years later, Widodo did not sign an unpopular revision to the anti-corruption law that his government had agreed to in joint talks with the DPR. Unlike Yudhoyono, however, he did not overturn it, indicating that his refusal to sign the law was primarily designed to shift responsibility for the initiative from the executive to the legislature.

The instrument of an emergency decree that Yudhoyono used in 2014 to overturn a law is one of many weapons in the president’s regulatory arsenal. Formally called a Government Regulation in Lieu of Law (Perpu), this emergency decree becomes law from the time the president issues it until the DPR has a chance to vote on it in its next session. DPR rejections of a Perpu are rare; for example, in 2008 the DPR refused to endorse a decree on financial regulation but also did not formally reject it. Instead, the DPR asked the president to submit a new bill, leaving the Perpu in place (Harsono 2010). Below the Perpu, presidents can also issue Government Regulations (PP). These regulate details of governance typically not spelled out in laws. Given the significant frequency with which laws stipulate that further detail will be specified by government regulations, the authority over the latter gives presidents leeway to partially rule by executive orders. Further below government regulations, there are Presidential Regulations (Perpres), Presidential Decisions (Kepres), and presidential Instructions (Inpres). These are used for different purposes (Husen 2019), with Perpres often laying out political and development strategies, ratifying international agreements, and detailing the inner workings of ministries; Kepres formalizing the appointment of teams and their officials; and Inpres giving instructions to the executive on how to coordinate policies. While these regulatory instruments give Indonesian presidents a strong position, they do not allow them to fully rule by decree. Decrees can be challenged in court, and the DPR can demand changes to laws that would subsequently override the contents of government and presidential regulations.

The Indonesian president also has extensive budgetary powers. The president prepares the budget proposal, formally presents it to parliament through a speech (typically a few days before Independence Day on August 17), and subsequently passes it with the DPR in the form of a law. While the DPR has the authority to request changes and often does so, its “scrutiny tends to focus more on detailed line items than overall budget policy and strategic priorities” (Blöndal, Hawkesworth, and Choi 2009, 24). This is largely due to the primary interests of legislators in gaining access to patronage resources for themselves and their constituencies (Farhan 2018). This tendency, combined with the president’s constitutional budgetary powers, leaves the executive much room for shaping the general size and direction of the budget while entering into compromises with individual legislators and parties over its details. As a result, although there have been occasional threats by the DPR to withhold endorsement of the budget—which, according to the constitution, would allow the president to apply last year’s budget—post-2004 presidents have seen their budgets approved without major incidents. Any conflicts related to the budget are normally resolved behind closed doors by the give-and-take practices of coalitional presidentialism before it reaches the floor. Afterward, “it is almost impossible to track the history of a particular budget item or to understand why its allocation has decreased or increased” (Farhan 2018, 52), pointing to the often-discreet nature of coalitional presidentialism operations and the predatory behavior they enable.

As Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Powers (2017) indicate, presidential appointment powers are particularly important for heads of state to exert influence and attract coalition partners. This is no different in the Indonesian case. Presidents directly appoint ministers, executives of state-owned enterprises, some judges, the chiefs of staff of the army, navy, and air force, and the heads of state agencies; nominate the commanders of the military and police as well as ambassadors; have influence over civil service appointments; and can—in special circumstances—appoint replacements for governors, district heads, and mayors. Later chapters discuss in more detail the exact appointment authority and other powers Indonesian presidents hold over each coalition actor. But the brief sketch presented above already gives us some glimpses into the strong politico-constitutional position of post-2004 presidents. They are better protected from impeachment than many of their global counterparts, and the unique form of their co-legislative powers makes it impossible for the legislature to promulgate laws without presidential consent. Similarly, extensive budgetary and appointment rights give the presidency unrivaled political influence. Conversely, presidents have many incentives to engage a broad range of actors into their coalitions, given that they need the legislature’s consent for their own bills and budgets, and that other actors—such as the military, the police, local administrations, or the bureaucracy—have either retained or gained significant powers in the post-2004 environment. Before analyzing in subsequent chapters how Indonesian presidents have managed such actors as part of their coalitions, the next section looks briefly at how the presidential office is organized to deal with this challenge.

The Palace

The way presidents operate within administrative structures is often an indication of their ability (or the lack thereof) to set their political and strategic agendas (Patterson and Pfiffner 2001). As is the case with other bureaucratic institutions, presidential organizations consist of a complex and entrenched network of pre-existing structures that can constrain and even dominate incoming presidents. Long institutional traditions and their defenders frequently aim to transform a presidential newcomer into an executor of the status quo, and more often than not, they are successful in that endeavor. However, some presidents come to office with a determination to shape the institutional infrastructure around them instead of being shaped by it. In most cases, a mixture between the new and the old emerges, with few presidents managing to completely reform the institutions administering the presidency but most leaving their individual mark on the set-up of their office. In Indonesia, for instance, President Widodo established the Office of the Staff of the President (KSP) at the beginning of his first term in 2014, addressing long-standing calls for a more efficient presidential administration. Yet he was unable, or unwilling, to realize more wide-ranging plans developed by some of his supporters for a complete restructuring of the presidential institutions left over from Suharto’s three-decade rule. As we will see below, the fact that Widodo only managed to institute half-hearted reforms had to do partly with the strength of the existing structures, but also with interventions by coalition partners, his own uncertainty about what exactly he wanted, and his self-imposed physical isolation from the offices designed to assist him.

Since Widodo’s post-2014 limited reform, the presidential administration consists of three main institutions, all located within the complex of the president’s palace in the capital Jakarta. They are the State Secretariat, led by a minister; the Office of the Cabinet Secretary; and the abovementioned Office of the Staff of the President (see table 1.1). The State Secretariat has traditionally been the most powerful of these offices, and it remains so today (Pangaribuan 1995). The State Secretariat assists the president with carrying out all of his or her functions as head of state and as head of government. That means preparing and scrutinizing bills, formalizing decrees to be signed by the president, managing media relations, overseeing the relationship with other state bodies, and a whole range of protocol tasks. The State Secretariat is the largest of the three presidential offices, and it has the Presidential Secretariat, the Vice Presidential Secretariat, the Ministry Secretariat, and the Military Secretariat under its coordination.² The minister leading the State Secretariat is usually a close confidant of the president, giving him or her not only formal but also immense informal influence. During Yudhoyono’s second term, the position was held by Sudi Silalahi, who had known the president since 1971, when they began serving in the military together. Widodo, for his part, chose Pratikno, a fellow graduate from Yogyakarta’s Gadjah Mada University. Thus, presidents recruit State Secretariat ministers mostly from non-party figures, whose main assets are discretion, loyalty, and competence rather than independent political clout. In the dynamics of coalitional presidentialism, they often deal with the non-party actors in the presidential alliance.

Sudi and Pratikno have given similar accounts of their role and the qualifications needed for it. According to Silalahi, “the less visible you are, the better. You must be seen as loyal but without own political interests. Then the president believes in you, and his partners also trust that you deliver messages without manipulating them in any way” (interview, Jakarta, September 8, 2014). As a former military general, he felt he had better access to the non-party side of the presidential coalition: “parties are not really my domain, I mostly leave that to others.” Pratikno, who succeeded Silalahi when Widodo ascended to the presidency in 2014, similarly highlighted that in addition to the formal business of the presidency, the minister heading the State Secretariat “needs to handle a lot of the actors who seek access to the president and have particular requests; in order to do that, these actors must view me as a loyal aide to the president, and nothing else. And I think [Widodo] chose me partly because he knows that I don’t have political ambitions or other masters. I’m just an academic” (interview, Jakarta, September 13, 2016). Like Silalahi, Pratikno initially did not view the interactions with the political parties as his main priority: “that’s not my world. Pram [Cabinet Secretary Pramono Anung] is mostly in charge of that.” In later years, however, Pratikno increasingly dealt with parties as well. One insider, describing the situation in 2023, observed that “whenever the president wants to tell party leaders that he can’t meet a particular demand they made, he sends Pratikno to convey the bad news. When Pratikno comes, party leaders know it’s official (confidential interview, Semarang, February 15, 2023).

Within the State Secretariat, the Military Secretariat has a special role in the president’s efforts to build close relations with the security forces. In functional terms, the military secretary assists the president in carrying out his or her function as the supreme commander of the armed forces, especially when it comes to the appointment of the military chief and the chiefs of staff of the army, air force, and navy. The secretary also coordinates with the military in regard to the president’s security arrangements. But more importantly, the office is a political link between the president and the military, and its holder has a good chance of subsequently being promoted to higher positions. For instance, Hadi Tjahjanto, who was the secretary from 2015 to 2016, became military chief in 2017. In that post, Tjahjanto was crucial in ensuring continued military support for Widodo, including in his re-election year of 2019. Under the coordination of the military secretary are the presidential adjutants, recruited from both the military (usually colonels) and the police (typically at the chief-commissioner level).³ These adjutants carry out mundane assistance jobs, but just like the military secretary, they possess enhanced career prospects. For instance, Widi Prasetijono, Widodo’s adjutant from 2015 to 2016, was promoted to the chief of staff position in the military’s Central Java command in 2020 and as its commander in 2022. Another presidential adjutant, police officer Jhonny Edizzon Isir (2017), became deputy police chief of North Sulawesi in 2021. The Military Secretariat’s personnel, then, solidify the president’s ties with the military and (to a lesser extent) the police and are groomed by the president for future leadership roles.

The Cabinet Secretariat, as the name implies, deals more specifically with the management of the cabinet. This includes preparing cabinet meetings, holding briefings on particular policies and, in cooperation with the State Secretariat, analyzing and synchronizing bills. In the political and administrative hierarchy, the cabinet secretary sits below the minister heading the State Secretariat but holds considerable power because of his or her closeness to the president. Presidents have filled the position in different ways. Yudhoyono put loyal non-party administrators in the post (before becoming State Secretariat minister, Silalahi was cabinet secretary), while Widodo first appointed Andi Widjajanto, the son of a politician of his party (PDI-P), to reward him for running much of his 2014 election campaign. However, Widjajanto had a tense relationship with Megawati, the PDI-P leader, and she ultimately demanded his dismissal. Thus, Widodo replaced him in August 2015 after less than a year in office. In his stead, he selected Pramono Anung, a former PDI-P secretary-general, who was a smooth operator and known to be close to both Megawati and Widodo. After his appointment, the relationship between Megawati and the president improved significantly, pointing to Anung’s politically shrewd use of the Cabinet Secretariat as an operational bridge between Widodo and his party. On many occasions, Anung was able to resolve tensions between the president and PDI-P on policy or personnel issues before they erupted into the open (interview, Denpasar, August 8, 2019). As a party politician, he was well suited to interact on the president’s behalf with “my friends, the other party leaders in the coalition” as well.

The Cabinet Secretariat also coordinates the special staff of the president. Special staff are hired to advise the president on specific matters, such as policy on the troubled provinces of Papua, or carry out certain tasks, such as preparing speeches or media summaries. The number of special advisers varies, but in 2019, twelve were appointed. The coordinator of the team was Ari Dwipayana, an academic close to State Secretariat minister Pratikno and a member of a team that had prepared Widodo’s candidacy and advised him during the 2014 campaign. Another member of that campaign team, Sukardi Rinakit, also became a special staff of the president. The inclusion of presidential confidants into the structure of the palace bureaucracy helps presidents to establish a routine not dominated by the existing civil servants but by what the president wants. This process of entrenching presidential staff in an environment shaped by previous presidents and their bureaucracies often takes a long time. According to Rinakit, “it was difficult at the beginning. Most staff we had to deal with were from the Yudhoyono period, and because of bureaucratic rules, we could not easily shift them. In that context, having staff that the president already knows is very helpful. But even then, this process of adaptation is very slow—much of the first year [of the Widodo presidency] was spent on finding our feet” (interview, Jakarta, April 20, 2016). In short, the facility of special staff gives presidents a way to reward political assistants but also to circumvent the established civil service apparatus.

The Office of the Staff of the President (KSP) operates outside of the State and Cabinet Secretariats, and was only established in 2014 (Suyadi 2018). It grew out of an earlier office created by Yudhoyono in 2009, the so-called Presidential Working Unit for Development Monitoring and Control (UKP4). The latter had the task of supervising the government’s priority programs and submitting evaluations to the president, including on the performance of ministers. The head of UKP4, the tough-talking bureaucrat Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, had assembled a team of young, energetic experts, and by most accounts, delivered critical reports. The problem was, as Kuntoro admitted, that, “sometimes we would have liked the president to pay more attention to them” (interview, Jakarta, December 5, 2013). As a consequence, when Widodo took office in 2014, he dissolved UKP4 and set up the KSP. As the first chief of staff, whose position was designed to resemble the White House chief of staff in the United States, Widodo picked Luhut Pandjaitan, a retired general, entrepreneur, and former Wahid minister. Widodo and Luhut had owned a joint furniture business since 2007, and Luhut was instrumental in organizing and funding his 2014 campaign. Luhut initially used his private resources to get the office running, pointing out that “I even brought staff and some furniture from my old business office” (interview, April 29, 2015). He moved into an enormously sized office in the Bina Graha Building that had been used by Suharto but was subsequently shunned by all post-1998 presidents. Luhut recruited five deputies with different responsibilities, setting KSP up as the kind of executive office that previous presidents lacked.

But the KSP did not develop into such an office. Over time, it evolved into a body that fulfilled think tank and trouble-shooting functions but did not act as the president’s main institution for political strategy. Judging from his personnel decisions, Widodo himself seemed unsure about the role he wanted KSP to play. After Luhut had shaped KSP in its early stages, Widodo replaced him as chief of staff in September 2015, moving him to a key ministry (Vice President Jusuf Kalla, among others, had complained about Luhut’s increasing power). As his replacement, Widodo appointed Teten Masduki, an anti-corruption activist whose persona was the opposite of Luhut’s—he had few private resources and political connections. Under him, KSP managed important crises spots; in 2018, for instance, the office’s special staff Ifdhal Kasim helped resolve a sensitive land conflict in Ambon, where thousands had died in religious violence in the late 1990s and early 2000s (interview, Ambon, February 2, 2018). But senior staff criticized Masduki for not developing the KSP’s full power potential. One of the five deputies at the time lamented that “we are not the office that we could and should be—we’re mostly a think tank. We are not what the president and Luhut wanted us to be” (confidential interview, Canberra, September 17, 2016). Apparently taking the concerns seriously, Widodo removed Masduki in January 2018 and again put a Luhut-style figure into the chief of staff position—the former armed forces chief Moeldoko, an ambitious and resourceful general. During Moeldoko’s tenure, KSP regained some of the clout it had under Luhut, but it did not emerge as the kind of presidential office that some Latin American presidents possess.

Finally, the physical architecture of presidential institutions also shapes the way presidents operate. Close proximity to the president is crucial for officials to ensure an effective administration of presidential tasks, but it can also make presidents feel controlled by bureaucrats. In Indonesia, none of the three presidential institutions managing the presidency are located in the presidential palace itself—officials of all bodies have to take walks of varying distances through the presidential complex to get to the president. Moreover, they mostly do so only when called. This means that even leading officials often have little knowledge of what the president does at any given time, as he or she works in the palace with only the closest advisers. This sense of distance has been intensified by the fact that neither Yudhoyono nor Widodo lived in the palace, and that the latter only irregularly conducted business there. Yudhoyono lived in his private residence in Cikeas on the outskirts of Jakarta, while Widodo opted for the secondary presidential palace in Bogor, about sixty kilometers to the south of the capital.⁴ Over time, Widodo shifted much of his presidential operations there (Firmansyah 2015). As indicated above, this physical isolation has had advantages and drawbacks: on the one hand, presidents could escape attempts by the palace bureaucracy to appropriate him or her; on the other hand, the presidential administration often worked without direct leadership from the president. Politically, this physical set-up increased the importance of informal networks outside of the official presidential administration that Indonesian presidents can use to communicate with actors involved in their coalitions. These informal networks are specific to each actor and will be analyzed in later chapters.

The historical, constitutional, and institutional scene described in this chapter so far has equipped Indonesian presidents with a strong sense of their power but also with an acute awareness of its limitations. As we have seen in the last segment, presidents have under them an apparatus that they nominally control but are also suspicious of, forcing them to rely heavily on pre-presidency confidants to bend the presidential institution and its bureaucrats to their will. With this, the organizational portrait of the presidency is a mirror of its politico-constitutional evolution, showcasing both its resourcefulness and constraints. Flowing from this simultaneous sense of power and vulnerability is the determination of post-2004 presidents to secure their position through coalition-building. Against this background, we can now turn to the broad outlines that guide the building of such coalitions. As the later chapters deal with this alliance formation and maintenance in detail, the following section can limit itself to a brief sketch of post-2004 coalitions that will help to put this detail into a broader context.

Coalition-Building

The strong commitment of post-2004 presidents to the logic and practices of coalitional presidentialism is simultaneously predictable and surprising. It is predictable because this is what the coalitional presidentialism literature tells us they would do, and Indonesia’s history and constitutional settings provide enough examples of presidential vulnerabilities for incumbents to be justifiably worried about their status. Both Yudhoyono and Widodo were minority presidents facing a fragmented legislature, and Widodo was not even in charge of his own party (indeed, he was not included in its leadership structure at all). Building a coalition to gain a majority in the legislature made sense to get bills passed and budgets approved. But it is also surprising in terms of the obsession they both displayed over the possibility of impeachment, and in terms of the size of the coalitions they assembled. Not only did Yudhoyono and Widodo build coalitions that held vast majorities—in fact, supermajorities—in parliament, but they also opted to integrate a wide range of non-party actors into their coalitions. Thus, they designed coalitions that were larger, and broader, than conventional coalitional presidentialism studies would deem necessary.

Yudhoyono and Widodo took very different pathways to arrive at their conclusion that large presidential coalitions were compulsory. Yudhoyono had been a senior minister under Wahid and was tasked with fending off the latter’s impeachment. This experience had a profound impact on his views on his own presidency. “Almost every night,” he recalled, “I told [Wahid] that we really didn’t have the strength to confront the legislature. He would say, ‘no, no, we’re strong.’ I told him that sometimes we have to give and take” (interview, Cikeas, December 2, 2014). Although impeachment regulations were subsequently changed, Yudhoyono retained his conviction that Indonesia’s democracy was not only “multiparty but semi-presidential and semi-parliamentary.” In this context, “it was my interest to ensure the continuation of government, so that it doesn’t fall mid-term [di tengah jalan]. That allowed me to do many things, including economic development.” In his analysis, presidents cannot rely on the popular mandate that the electorate has given them—“in my case, I was elected with 61 percent, but these voters turn into passive cells after the election. The battle then moves into parliament” and other arenas of society that also need to be prevented from creating “chaos” [kegaduhan]. At the beginning of his presidency, Yudhoyono faced exactly the kind of “chaos” he was so fearful of. Opposition parties held a majority in parliament, and they briefly blocked all of his initiatives. The situation was only overcome when his vice president took over the Golkar Party (then the largest in the DPR) two months into his term (Tomsa 2006). This gave Yudhoyono and Kalla a legislative majority, which Yudhoyono later enlarged further by integrating more party and non-party actors, securing the government’s stability.

In contrast to Yudhoyono, Widodo initially believed that he would be able to rule effectively as a minority president. Indeed, his 2014 campaign was based on the premise that Yudhoyono had given too many concessions to his coalition partners, and that he—Widodo—would not repeat this mistake (Muhtadi 2015). Interviewed briefly before his inauguration, Widodo insisted that he did not need a majority. “If the DPR opposes me, I’ll let the people know,” he said, indicating that he might mobilize his voters against elite initiatives to obstruct his presidency (interview, Jakarta, September 15, 2014). Asked what he would do if the DPR rejected his budget, he smiled and said that “I would just use last year’s budget, no problem at all.” Brushing aside all doubts about the viability of this approach, he told the interviewer to “just watch me.” But Widodo changed his mind very quickly. One experience was particularly important in triggering this change. When he put together his first cabinet, he included Maruarar Sirait, a PDI-P politician who had been one of the first in the party to call for Widodo’s nomination. Megawati had felt slighted by Sirait’s rapid support for Widodo, and she thus refused to endorse him for a cabinet seat. If Sirait was still included, she threatened, PDI-P would withdraw its support from the president (confidential interview with a Widodo adviser, Jakarta, April 28, 2015). In shock, Widodo canceled Sirait’s planned appointment at the last minute. The event was a watershed in his presidency; from then on, Widodo took steps to enlarge his coalition, and within two years, he turned a 37 percent minority into a 69 percent majority in the legislature. As Yudhoyono, he was now convinced that he needed a large coalition to be safe from impeachment and—in his case—to increase his independence from his own party.

In their composition, therefore, the Yudhoyono and Widodo cabinets look strikingly similar. Table 1.2 shows the actors that were given seats in each of the cabinets built by Yudhoyono and Widodo between 2004 and 2019. The first thing one recognizes is a large number of non-party cabinet members—more than half were typically not affiliated with parties. Much of the presidentialism literature suggests that a high number of non-party ministers is a sign of the president’s strength and his or her ability to prevent agency loss through the appointment of persons more loyal to the chief executive than to their various parties (Gallardo and Schleiter 2015). This book proposes an alternative interpretation. While the Indonesian case also features technocratic appointments that fit into Gallardo and Schleiter’s explanation (in table 1.1, these are captured in the category “others”), it is clear that presidents also appoint non-party ministers to broaden their coalitions beyond the legislative arena. As becomes evident in the table, certain groups are integrated into presidential coalitions with great consistency—that is, retired military officers, police, the bureaucracy, oligarchs, and Muslim groups. In regard to the latter, the number of its representatives is even higher than the formal figures suggest. This is because two parties are closely tied to the country’s two largest Muslim groups: the National Awakening Party (PKB) is the political wing of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), and the National Mandate Party (PAN) is affiliated with Muhammadiyah. Hence, many representatives of Muslim groups in the cabinet are hidden in the table’s party category. As for local government leaders, whom this book posits as members of presidential coalitions but who do not seem to record significant cabinet representation, our later discussion will show that their link to the presidential coalition is built via their interest groups and through party links as well.

The overview presented in table 1.2 allows us to trace nuanced but important changes in presidential coalition-building over time. For instance, the data confirm the narrative on the trajectory of Yudhoyono’s and Widodo’s thinking on coalitional presidentialism mentioned above. The low number of party appointees in Widodo’s first cabinet reflects his then still existent—but already weakening—belief that he could rule without a large legislative coalition. In his second term, he had let go of this conviction, returning to the level of party representation in the Yudhoyono cabinets in 2004 and 2009. Yudhoyono, therefore, was more stable in his appointments; he recognized the need for large party coalitions from the beginning. Indeed, he even named Golkar ministers in his first cabinet announcement although the party only came under the control of his vice president two months later. In the overview, we also see changes that emphasize momentous shifts in the power held by non-party groups: the police and oligarchs, in particular, have gained political influence since the mid-2000s, and that is reflected in their increased cabinet representation. It is essential to recall, however, that cabinet representation is only one dimension of how coalitional presidentialism is put into practice—albeit a very important dimension. As the rest of this book will demonstrate, Indonesian presidents have used many other formal and informal avenues to integrate the country’s key socio-political actors into their coalitions.

Post-2004 presidents have been embedded in the country’s history, constitution and institutional structures in ways that have shaped their understanding and practice of coalitional presidentialism. Historically, the country’s founders put the president into the center of politics, drawing from notions of strong leadership in times of anti-colonial struggle and the idea that someone needed to serve as a symbol for the unity of the nation. Sukarno, the informal leader of the independence movement, was the natural choice for that position. At the same time, the suspension of executive presidential rule between late 1945 and 1959 gave the nation a sense of the importance of non-presidential actors. While parliamentarism ultimately collapsed in 1959, it subsequently served as a source of inspiration, and aspiration, for marginalized pro-democracy groups living under four decades of presidential authoritarianism between the late 1950s and late 1990s (Bourchier and Legge 1994). The democratic presidentialism emerging after 1998, and especially after 2004, combined ideas of strong presidential leadership and the desire for powerful legislative institutions into a new, post-authoritarian concept of modern presidentialism. In this concept, presidents and the legislature have to find, and constantly maintain, an equilibrium that allows the government to work effectively but concurrently prevents the emergence of another autocracy.

But the legacies of Indonesia’s long periods of presidential autocracy remain powerful today, and they even neutralize some of the new constitutional arrangements put in place in the early 2000s. Sukarno’s approach of integrating the military into legislative and executive positions—and Suharto’s massive upgrading of that practice—is echoed by the consistent allocation of cabinet seats to retired military officers more than two and a half decades after democratization began (Aminuddin 2017). Similarly, Sukarno recognized the centrality of Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization, NU, and made it the centerpiece of his appointed parliament in 1960 (Fealy 1998). To this day, every Indonesian president has to include a number of NU representatives in the cabinet, both party and non-party, in order to sustain the support of this group. Indeed, Widodo made the spiritual leader of NU his running mate in the 2019 elections. Thus, Indonesian experiences with autocracy delivered a number of unwritten rules to post-1998, and especially post-2004, presidents that appear nowhere in the constitutional regulations governing its reformed presidentialism. These rules lead presidents to include actors that may not have a great impact on their position in the DPR but can stabilize government outside of it.

This historical context has produced a constellation in which even the tight, post-2004 impeachment rules have not strengthened presidents’ self-confidence in their position. Despite the fact that one-third-plus-one of DPR members would be sufficient to stop any impeachment process, presidents have aimed at securing at least two-thirds majorities in the legislature. Having secured that, they did not stop: they enlarged their broad coalitions by adding non-party actors. These broad coalitions are managed by a presidential administration apparatus that is only partially equipped for this task. As we have seen, the president can use the Military Secretariat at the palace to build bridges with the armed forces and fill the military’s ranks with loyalists. In Widodo’s case, he also utilized the Cabinet Secretariat to maintain good relations between himself and his party. But outside of that, presidents lack a proper support network; in fact, presidents tend to isolate themselves from the existing civil service force in the palace, in fear of being controlled by it. This requires the president to resort to many informal mechanisms to balance and sustain his or her coalitions. The following chapters will analyze these informal mechanisms, as well as the formal ones, to highlight how presidents manage each actor in their coalition. In combination, these chapters will demonstrate how Indonesian heads of state try to stay on top of the coalitional presidentialism game by playing groups off against each other without risking the coalition’s breakdown.