“9. Muslim Organizations” in “The Coalitions Presidents Make”
9 MUSLIM ORGANIZATIONS
In the last half-century, the political role of religious organizations worldwide has taken divergent paths, depending on the polity they operate in. In the parliamentary systems of Western Europe and Oceania, as well as in some Latin American countries, the power of churches and other religious groups has declined, in line with what much of the modernization literature predicted (Molteni and Biolcati 2018; Somma, Bargsted, and Valenzuela 2017). But in the United States, Africa, and some Asian polities, the opposite trend has occurred. Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump relied heavily on evangelicals to win elections and maintain public support while in office, rewarding them with policy influence in return (Martí 2019). In Africa, many presidents have used and fueled conservative religious activism that gave them access to a fanatic support base (McClendon and Riedl 2019). In Asia, the record has been mixed. Buddhist actors have gained influence in Thailand and Myanmar (Walton and Hayward 2014), and conservative forms of Islam have increasingly shaped Malaysian politics. In the Philippines, by contrast, populist president Rodrigo Duterte took on the powerful Catholic church in his 2016 campaign (Abellanosa 2018). He was only able to do this, however, because of two supportive factors: first, he rallied the country’s minority religions (Islam and Protestantism) behind him; and second, in the Philippines’ electoral system, he did not have to win an absolute majority of the votes to become president. Thus, he could afford to alienate the nation’s most influential religious actor by courting others.
Indonesia fits into the group of countries that has seen an increasing role of religious groups in politics. Several factors have framed this trend. First, with 87 percent of the population being Muslim, appealing to the country’s overwhelming religious majority has been the most promising strategy in post-1998 democratic politics. Second, Indonesia’s electoral system—which, unlike in the Philippines, requires presidential candidates to gain an absolute majority in a possible run-off—further disincentivizes exclusive appeals to smaller constituencies and forces candidates to conform to majority understandings of piety. And third, private religiosity has intensified significantly in recent decades. Traditionally viewed as a country with a moderate version of Islam, religious conservatism has grown slowly but steadily since the 1970s (van Bruinessen 2013). By the mid-2010s, religious piety had become an important marker of societal acceptability for Muslims and hence for politicians, especially the president. Presidents—and presidential candidates—are under immense pressure to portray themselves as pious; even the slightest impression of secularism or disregard for Muslim practices and beliefs could prove electorally fatal (Bourchier 2019). This, in turn, drives presidents to enter into alliances with Muslim groups that can bestow the necessary religious legitimacy upon them. In exchange, as is the case with other actors of coalitional presidentialism, Muslim groups obtain cabinet representation, policy favors, and material benefits, both institutionally and for their leaders.
This chapter analyzes the importance of Muslim organizations for presidential coalitions in Indonesia by first sketching the growth of religious piety in society as the main power resource Islamic groups can leverage in political negotiations. Ironically or otherwise, this growth began at the height of the New Order’s rule, despite Suharto’s well-established preference for limiting the role of religion. By the 1980s, he had to respond to this societal trend, creating a more Islamic image for himself and inviting Muslim groups to play a bigger role in his regime. After 1998, conservative forms of Islam spread further, and faith became a key component of political competition. The second section highlights the powers that presidents can mobilize to win over Muslim groups and limit their ambitions. NU, for instance, is based primarily in poorer, rural areas and is thus dependent on government funds for its religious boarding schools and other educational institutions. The promise of such funds is consequently a main tool for presidents to integrate NU and other groups into their regimes. In the third section, we look at how the interaction between presidents and Muslim groups functions in the daily operations of coalitional presidentialism, with cabinet allocations at the center of the negotiations. Finally, the fourth section discusses the banning of two radical Islamic groups by Widodo, and how this inter-related with the vested interests of NU. An example of how presidents and Muslim groups mutually exploit each other, the incident highlights broader patterns of Indonesia’s coalitional presidentialism.
Muslim Groups and Their Powers
While the overall narrative of Islam’s influence on post-1998 politics has been one of gradual intensification, the details of its longer-term development have been far from linear and consistent. Indeed, its history has been full of contradictions. On the one hand, the largest Islamic organizations have dropped demands for the implementation of Islamic law. In the 1950s, the country’s two biggest Muslim groups, the traditionalist NU and the more modernist Muhammadiyah, had called for the obligation to observe Islamic law for all Muslims to be featured in the constitution (Nasution 1994). However, Suharto forced both groups to formally abandon any notions of an Islamic state and to endorse the country’s pluralist Pancasila ideology. Such endorsements also became the standard for the Muslim-based parties of the post-Suharto era, with only a few of them still pushing for Islamic law to be formalized in the constitution. But this trend of increasing religious moderation among mainstream Muslim groups and parties was, as we noted above, accompanied by counteracting patterns in society. From the 1970s, Muslims began to display increasing devoutness, with many women wearing a hijab and prayer groups mushrooming. Suharto recognized this development and performed an Islamic turn in the late 1980s: he went on the hajj pilgrimage for the first time and made more room for Islamic interests in his regime. By the time of his fall in 1998, therefore, Islamic groups of various orientations were well-positioned to play a stronger role in politics. In fact, their prospects were better than ever before as the controls Suharto had imposed on them were largely lifted.
As part of this trend, numerous smaller and more conservative Islamic groups were established outside the Muslim mass organizations and parties that some in the Islamic community viewed as too centrist. These smaller groups did not attract the massive following that their mainstream opponents did, but were well organized, connected, and vocal (Hasan 2006; Wilson 2008). They did not shy away from intimidation of other Muslims deemed not pious enough and were often openly hostile toward religious minorities. One such group was FPI, led by Rizieq Shihab. Recall that Rizieq led the Islamist mobilizations of 2016 and 2017, bringing him into conflict with the Widodo government. But even in the decade before that, Rizieq had been a prominent advocate of reopening the ideological debates of the 1950s; most importantly, he asked for Islamic interests to be more formally enshrined in Indonesia’s constitution and laws. Surveys showed that about 20 percent of Indonesian Muslims sympathized with FPI and its agenda (Mietzner and Muhtadi 2018). While sympathy for FPI often overlapped with concurrent support for NU and Muhammadiyah, Indonesian politicians felt that they could not ignore the conservative fringes of Islam. This constellation left presidents with two broad choices of how to manage the country’s religious right: they could try to accommodate some of its conservative ideas in the hope that this might convince the groups not to sabotage the government; or they could attempt to mobilize the large mainstream groups against their more radical rivals, opening the opportunity to repress the latter.
Under the first scenario, conservative fringe groups gain an amount of influence on presidents that is disproportionate to their size. Yudhoyono tried this approach with some success—but also with damaging consequences for Indonesia’s minority protections (more about this later). In applying the second strategy, by contrast, the role of NU and Muhammadiyah becomes crucial, and it gives them much leverage over incumbent presidents. This was the option chosen by Widodo in his post-2016 dealings with Islamic politics. A look at the size of both groups indicates why this choice was appealing. In surveys, roughly 45 percent of Indonesian Muslims profess to be part of the broader “NU family” (Mietzner and Muhtadi 2020, 71). This means that they might not be card-holding members but that someone in their family is; that they married an NU supporter; or that they live near one of NU’s boarding schools (which, in turn, form NU’s organizational backbone). Thus, about 100 million Indonesians have some ties with NU, giving it—in theory at least—a great influence on society at large. Muhammadiyah, for its part, is much smaller—about 5 percent of Muslims say that they belong to its constituency (Mietzner and Muhtadi 2020, 71). But while NU’s community is mostly rural, Muhammadiyah is more urban-based and therefore has better educated, more affluent, and politically connected cadres. Consequently, both groups can grant presidents access to large yet socially diverse Muslim communities to counterbalance more militant religious activists’ actions and demands.
Their large followership also gives the two groups immense electoral power. While an electoral recommendation by the organizations’ leaderships typically does not produce united voting blocs among their members, presidents and presidential candidates would be ill-advised to antagonize the two movements. As noted, NU had pressured Widodo to pick one of its leaders as his 2019 running mate, and as he was under simultaneous pressure from his party coalition, Widodo obliged. In the election campaign that followed, NU warned its grassroots members that a vote for the president’s opponent, Prabowo, would strengthen Islamic hard-liners—that is, NU’s adversaries (Aspinall 2019). It is not surprising, then, that significant increases in the president’s vote shares in NU’s strongholds in Central and East Java secured his re-election (Shofiah and Pepinsky 2019). This pattern in presidential elections is often replicated at the grassroots, where legislative candidates and nominees for the position of governor, district head, or mayor lobby the main Muslim groups for support, especially in the areas in which they are particularly strong. Moreover, many of the groups’ cadres have run in elections themselves—mostly through their affiliated parties (PKB and PAN, respectively) but also as candidates of broader party coalitions or more nationalist parties, such as Golkar. The election of the senior NU cadre Khofifah Indar Parawansa in 2018 as governor of East Java was one such example, and her subsequent activism for Widodo’s re-election showed her victory’s national relevance.
Beyond direct vote mobilization, Islamic groups can provide something at least as valuable: that is, the bestowal of religious legitimacy on presidents and those who want the office. In terms of their faith, Indonesian presidents have predominantly been pragmatic Muslims rather than strict practitioners of Islam (there has never been a non-Muslim president or vice president). While the vast majority of Indonesians are Muslim, their views on what role Islam should play in state organization differ widely, placing candidates with moderate views on the issue in a better electoral spot than those with an exclusivist Islamist agenda. But there is much agreement that the president should be pious, which is seen as an indicator of moral cleanliness (Taufan 2019). Attacks on presidential candidates’ religious credentials have been customary in Indonesian elections. During the 1999 and 2004 elections, pictures of Megawati seemingly praying at a Balinese Hindu temple were used to depict her as lacking commitment to the Islamic faith (her father, Sukarno, was half-Balinese). In 2014 and 2019, Widodo had to fight smear campaigns that questioned his devoutness and even suggested that he was the son of a Christian Singaporean Chinese. Religious organizations can offer protection from such attacks (of course, in return for rewards); Megawati and Widodo adopted NU figures as their running mates, with the former failing in 2004 and the latter succeeding in 2019. After having done his job as Widodo’s protective shield in all matters of faith, the elderly Ma’ruf Amin was mostly sidelined in the president’s second-term government (Peterson 2020b).
Widodo’s struggle with the issue of his alleged religious deficiencies had a deep impact on him, and it drove him to lean closer to religious groups than he had intended. When the smear campaign began in the 2014 campaign, he felt the need to appear in the company of Islamic leaders and to display his devoutness publicly. Accompanying Widodo on a campaign trip to Lampung on Sumatra in March 2014, the author asked his staff for permission to photograph the candidate during a stop to pray at a mosque. The staff replied, “we not only give you permission, we want you to photograph him. The more pictures of him praying the better. That’s the whole point” (interview, Bandar Lampung, March 22, 2014). During another trip to a mosque in Bogor (a town in West Java seen as particularly devout), he mingled with local Islamic leaders, and promised that he would help them to develop their communities. In return, the clerics praised Widodo for his commitment to Islamic causes and certified that, in their view, he was a pious and moral man (notes by the author, Bogor, June 7, 2014). While he initially thought that his 2014 election had settled the issue, the anti-Purnama demonstrations of 2016 and 2017 implicitly re-litigated Widodo’s devoutness; once again he felt vulnerable on the religious front. In response, he moved ever closer to NU, culminating in his acceptance of Ma’ruf’s 2019 vice presidential nomination and a much more aggressive approach to opponents who attacked him on religious grounds.
For sitting presidents, Islamic groups also hold crucial importance as providers of mass education. NU alone has 16,000 schools and 32,000 madrasah (religious schools, often affiliated with a mosque), in which 900,000 teachers instruct about 11 million students (Rohmat and Fahtoni 2017). Similarly, Muhammadiyah runs 4,623 preschools, 2,604 elementary schools, 1,772 junior high schools, 1,143 high schools, and 172 universities (Marnati 2015). With these vast educational networks, the two largest Muslim groups are key pillars of the national education machinery. In organizing national education plans, budgets, and delivery, any government needs to accommodate the expectations of NU and Muhammadiyah. Even slight mistakes by ministers of education in their relationship with the two groups can lead to major political upheaval. In April 2021, Minister of Education Nadiem Makarim was forced to apologize to NU because a historical dictionary edited by his department had not mentioned the founder of NU, Hasyim Asy’ari (Chaterine 2021). Similarly, Muhammadiyah protested in March of the same year that the term “religion” had disappeared from one of the ministry’s education planning documents. The background to these attacks was that the young tycoon Nadiem had, unlike many of his predecessors, no ties with NU or Muhammadiyah, and thus attracted regular attacks on his policies from the two groups. As we will discuss in detail below, granting or denying the education ministry to one of the large Islamic groups has been a main instrument for the president to manage them as members of government coalitions.
Consequently, Islamic groups—whether small and radical or large and mainstream—can exercise an immense influence on Indonesian presidents. Fringe groups can develop an amount of power disproportionate to their size by vocally taking center stage in political activism, forcing presidents to respond. They run the risk, however, that presidents may decide to repress or otherwise sideline them by forming alliances with larger organizations that view their smaller rivals as a nuisance. In the longer term, therefore, the two large Muslim mass groups have had a stronger and more durable influence over presidents than their marginal counterparts. Big actors, not the fringe groups, have found themselves regularly represented in cabinet and showered with other material and policy favors. But in order to limit their expectations and impose discipline on them as parts of their alliances, presidents can bring their own powers into the equation, and they usually have done so effectively.
Presidential Power over Muslim Groups
As powerful as Islamic groups are through their societal entrenchment and ability to bestow religious legitimacy, they are attracted to, and feel dependent on, the office of the president as a distributor of resources and policy favors. As mass organizations and educational institutions, NU, Muhammadiyah, and other groups require significant funds to keep their operations running, pay compensation to their staff, and provide economic development opportunities to their members. Thus, the mainstream groups are keen to place their cadres in critical positions of the state, which they can then use to access resources, hire lower-ranking members to fill staff positions and protect their group’s policy interests. This tradition began long before Indonesia developed full presidentialism. In the 1950s, under Indonesia’s parliamentary democracy, NU (which formed its own political party in 1952) was known in political circles as being primarily interested in the Ministry of Religion as its main reward for participating in government (Fealy 1997). As Wasisto Raharjo Jati formulated, “this [perception] has cult status in a cultural sense—that NU as the largest Muslim organization has the right to occupy the office of minister of religion in a majority Muslim country” (Utomo 2019). Indeed, NU split from a larger Islamic party, Masyumi, in 1952 because in that year, a Muhammadiyah cadre had been appointed minister of religion, outraging the NU community. The post returned to NU a year later. After the end of parliamentary democracy, the authority to appoint ministers of religion shifted from the prime minister to the president, giving the latter a crucial patronage instrument.
But NU has learned to respect (and fear) Indonesian presidents not only as the key to acquiring the Ministry of Religion but also as more general dispensers of rewards and punishment. Under his autocracy, Sukarno gave seats to NU in cabinet and the appointed parliament in return for its recognition of his unconstitutional power grab in 1959 (Fealy 1997). Suharto, for his part, offered a deal to the group in 1984 by which NU would endorse Pancasila as its only organizational foundation, with the state in exchange promising to lift previous restrictions on NU members entering the civil service and on the disbursement of development funds to its boarding schools (Bresnan 1993, 240). This experience had a long-term impact on Wahid, who was NU chairman at the time and the one who arranged the Pancasila deal with Suharto. Reflecting on why he sought the presidency in 1999, Wahid told the author, “the reality is that if you want to shape things, and if you want to do good for NU, you must control the presidency. Those who say otherwise tell you non-sense. Yes, we could just go for the Ministry of Religion as we have done for decades, but what has that brought us? Most NU members are still poor, many are even illiterate. No, to protect NU from what Suharto has done to us (remember all the threats!), and to control where development funds go, we must gain the presidency for ourselves” (interview, Jakarta, August 25, 1999). As noted, Wahid’s presidency ended in utter chaos, and his goals for NU remained unfulfilled. But the idea that NU needed to be at least close to the sitting president, and benefit from his or her powers of resource distribution, survived the Wahid presidency.
What the Ministry of Religion has been to NU, the Ministry of Education has been to Muhammadiyah. While far from claiming a monopoly on the post to the same extent as NU has done for the Ministry of Religion, Muhammadiyah has taken great interest in the education portfolio. It first obtained the position in 1948, but post-Suharto presidents in particular have frequently handed the ministry to Muhammadiyah to gain the group’s support. With Muhammadiyah’s wide network of schools and universities, holding the Ministry of Education allows it to set policies for its institutions and direct funds to them. How important the post is to Muhammadiyah in contemporary Indonesia showed on the rare occasions when it was denied to the group. This was the case in 2019, when Nadiem was appointed minister of education (replacing a Muhammadiyah cadre), and again in 2020, when Widodo offered the post of vice minister to Muhammadiyah’s secretary-general, Abdul Mu’ti. Within Muhammadiyah, this offer was seen as an insult and thus declined (Detik 2020). The affront was considered especially hurtful because in the same 2020 cabinet reshuffle, the Ministry of Religion returned to NU after a brief hiatus. Muhammadiyah’s disappointment was only slightly moderated by the fact that its previous minister of education, Muhajir Effendi, was made coordinating minister of human development and culture in 2019. While the coordinating ministry technically oversees the Ministry of Education, in reality, the power to move budgets and personnel lies in the core ministry. Hence, as for NU, the power of the president to give or withhold a key ministry is of existential importance to Muhammadiyah.
Outside the ministries of religion and education, NU and Muhammadiyah hope for additional appointments from the president. This may relate to other cabinet posts and senior bureaucratic appointments or lucrative positions in state-owned enterprises. As Nusron Wahid, an NU and Golkar cadre appointed in 2014 by Widodo as chief of the National Agency for the Placement and Protection of Indonesian Migrant Workers (BNP2TKI) explained, “many keep staring at the cabinet posts, but real governance is often happening at the level below them. This is where NU should play” (interview, Canberra, September 19, 2017). Such positions keep leading NU and Muhammadiyah cadres salaried and allow them to address constituency-specific issues. BNP2TKI, for instance, oversees the mechanisms through which mostly lowly educated migrant workers are sent abroad. Many of these workers are women from the rural areas of Central and East Java, NU’s strongholds, who take up positions as domestic helpers in the Middle East, Singapore, Hong Kong, or Taiwan (Chan 2018). From Nusron’s perspective, the BNP2TKI office (which he held until 2019, when he returned to the DPR) gave him an instrument to protect a major NU constituency and establish himself as a patronage distributor in his community. Unlike his NU colleagues in cabinet, he attracted little public controversy, highlighting below-cabinet-level positions as both important and convenient for Islamic groups interested in exerting quiet influence.
The co-legislative powers of presidents are also highly attractive to Islamic organizations. As the constitution-makers decided in 1945 not to privilege Islam over other religions, and after that decision was confirmed during amendment initiatives in the late 1950s and early 2000s, Islamic groups have to focus on laws and regulations to achieve policy advantages for the Muslim community. There have been many such stipulations, especially since the 1970s. Specific regulations for Muslims exist in marriage and inheritance rules, and laws governing the education sector have increasingly been written with an eye to the interests of Islamic groups. At the end of Widodo’s first term, the government and parliament debated a law that would regulate religious education. To uphold religious pluralism, the draft initially aimed to regulate all religions and their educational activities. But Christian churches rejected the draft as an attempt of government intervention into their internal affairs, fearing that their autonomy would be watered down through a law primarily pushed by Islamic groups. Ultimately, the law—passed in September 2019—only regulated Islamic boarding schools, most of which belong to NU. Coming just a few months after Widodo’s re-election, the law was widely interpreted as a reward to NU. To be sure, some NU leaders feared, like the churches, that the government might use it to justify increased government intervention in religion. But as the law also promised more government funding for the boarding schools, excitement prevailed in NU (Nurcahyadi 2021).
As in their relations with parties and oligarchs, presidents can leverage their electoral standing in negotiations with Muslim organizations. We noted that most Indonesian presidents have been Muslim pragmatists who can appeal to all religious constituencies. In other words, while Muslim organizations are instrumental in organizing votes for presidents, in Indonesia’s post-2004 system of direct elections, they would find it hard to win the presidency for themselves. This is because the Muslim community is politically divided, and because the voting bloc of religious minorities (which makes up 13 percent of the electorate) is a crucial swing vote that can decide the outcome of tight races. Widodo’s 2019 campaign, for instance, not only attracted the support of NU followers but also secured almost the entire religious minority vote. By contrast, NU’s Wahid was only able to win the presidency in 1999 through backroom machinations in the MPR; he would not have been competitive in a direct election as he was deeply unpopular in non-NU segments of the Muslim community. Similarly, former Muhammadiyah chair Amien Rais, who was detested in NU, finished fourth in the 2004 elections. As a result of these vulnerabilities, Islamic groups have since settled on associating with the candidate they think is most likely to win—and on joining the latter’s coalition once in office. In the post-2004 polity, then, the lack of personal electoral popularity is the greatest weakness of Islamic leaders, and its abundance is the biggest strength of pragmatists who can bridge constituency divides. Both Yudhoyono and Widodo exploited this constellation masterfully.
Smaller, more radical Islamic groups are even more dependent on presidents to give them access to state resources and positions than their mainstream rivals. Groups such as the FPI successfully made their voices heard in societal discourses; however, they found it difficult to penetrate political institutions monopolized by the established elite. We discussed the various thresholds that make it hard for non-mainstream groups to establish parties, enter parliament, or nominate one of theirs for the presidency. As a result, for all the attention Rizieq Shihab received for his advocacy of a greater role for Islam in state affairs, and as much as he flirted with the idea of his presidential candidacy (Damarjati 2018), he and his group are highly unlikely to ever make it into the palace. Other groups, such as HTI, even declined to turn themselves into political parties or to participate in presidential elections (Ward 2009)—largely for ideological reasons but also in recognition of their marginal chances. For them, attaching themselves to a mainstream candidate in exchange for policy concessions is the only way of having an impact in a political system favoring the catch-all establishment. Hence, the vast majority of hard-line Islamic groups associated with Prabowo in the 2014 and 2019 elections, hoping his victory would open the door to state privileges. While Prabowo came close to winning twice, eventually his affiliation with FPI and other radical Muslim groups scared away mainstream voters and sealed his defeat on both ballots. Without protection from the president they opposed, and having triggered his hostility, both FPI and HTI found themselves banned after Widodo’s re-election.
In sum, presidents can use their appointment powers, legislative and budgetary authority, and electoral popularity to induce (or coerce) mainstream Islamic groups into their coalitions. The debacle of the Wahid presidency, in which an NU leader briefly held the presidency, further consolidated the view within large Muslim groups that forming an alliance with a cross-constituency president is the best way for them to exert influence. As Cholil Bisri, a senior NU and PKB leader, expressed in despair after Wahid’s fall, “[Wahid] was a disappointment as president, for NU and Indonesia; we should have voted for Megawati [in 1999]” (interview, Jakarta, August 11, 2002). The selection of Ma’ruf Amin as Widodo’s running mate in 2019 reflected this approach, giving NU access to state powers without exposing it to the political upheaval that presidents have to manage. In the case of radical groups, presidents can bring similar powers to bear, but tensions between the two sides can have even more existential consequences for small actors than for big groups. In addition to threatening radical groups with exclusion from state power, presidents can use their repressive authority to disband them, as HTI and FPI experienced. With Muslim groups (of both moderate or radical orientations) and presidents possessing significant powers vis-à-vis each other, the management of this relationship becomes essential. Its integration into the architecture of coalitional presidentialism has been the logical result of this necessity.
Presidents and Muslim Groups
Holding ministries of crucial importance to them is arguably the primary lens through which NU and Muhammadiyah view their relationship with presidents. For presidents, therefore, offering or denying ministries is a key instrument in managing the involvement of these Muslim groups in their coalitions. In this regard, calculating how many ministers in cabinet belong to which group is a matter of constant contestation. The president tends to use a broad definition of who is a member of a specific Muslim group to signal that its representation in cabinet is high. Conversely, the organization in question likes to apply a narrow understanding of membership to downplay its representation and ask for more. Several factors complicate this calculation. In addition to how to define “membership” (presidents normally consider family backgrounds, while organizations not only insist on formal card-holding membership but also on an endorsement by the group to represent it in cabinet), there is also the overlap between NU and Muhammadiyah, on the one side, and their respective parties, on the other. As noted, NU has a close relationship with PKB, and the latter’s cadres are typically members of the former. Similarly, Muhammadiyah played a leading role in creating PAN, and this historic connection remains strong today. Accordingly, at the center of Islamic groups’ role in coalitional presidentialism in Indonesia is the question of how many, and who specifically, among their leaders get invited to share power with the president in cabinet.
Some of these debates over cabinet representation are held behind closed doors, but they are occasionally displayed publicly. This is because both sides want to communicate their interpretation of the current coalition arrangement to voters and, in the case of Islamic groups, their followers. In June 2016, Widodo claimed at a public event that at least six cabinet members represented NU. “I want to clarify the issue of NU ministers,” Widodo said, addressing indications of NU dissatisfaction with its level of cabinet representation. “A few moments ago, I quietly counted, there are six. So there is [a lot of] NU (Toriq 2016a).” But speaking to the media, NU deputy chair Marsudi Syuhud offered a vastly different calculation. He insisted that four PKB ministers not be counted as NU representatives, and he described the then-minister of social affairs, Khofifah Indar Parawansa, as a member of Widodo’s 2014 campaign team, not of NU. This was despite the fact that Khofifah headed NU’s women’s organization Muslimat. “There is nobody from NU headquarters,” Syuhud concluded, using the narrowest definition to claim low NU representation in cabinet. In the same event, Widodo stated, “since the Muhammadiyah chair didn’t ask, I didn’t count” (Toriq 2016b). In a later public commentary, Muhammadiyah turned this remark into an advantage: unlike the greedy NU, it implied, Muhammadiyah left the appointment of ministries to the president. While not entirely accurate (Muhammadiyah has clear expectations toward its representation, too), Muhammadiyah’s reaction pointed to cabinet representation not only as an issue of contestation between the two large Muslim groups, on the one hand, and the president, on the other, but also between the organizations.
Presidents often opt to adjust the cabinet representation of Islamic groups to their changing strategic challenges. In Widodo’s case, for instance, his dependence on the two Islamic groups increased significantly following the anti-Purnama mobilization in late 2016. After the first big protest, he immediately visited NU and Muhamadiyah to seek protection but was told in both cases that he had neglected them. According to palace assistants, Widodo was particularly taken aback by NU chair Said Aqil Siraj’s remark that the president had failed to deliver “barokah” to NU—which broadly means “blessings,” but is often understood to have a material meaning (confidential interview, Jakarta, November 24, 2016). The president’s aides conceded, however, that during his first two years in office, Widodo had viewed courting the two groups in non-election times as not essential, believing that his task was to focus on day-to-day governance. “We dropped the ball on this, to be honest. And now we have to make up for that,” they promised (confidential interview, Jakarta, February 8, 2017). This constellation eventually led to Widodo accepting an NU leader as his 2019 running mate. We already noted that his first choice was Mahfud MD, who had been nominated as presidential candidate of the NU-affiliated PKB in 2014. Widodo told polling advisers that Mahfud, in his view, had it all: “he’s popular, decent, a professor and part of the NU crowd” (confidential interview, online, August 7, 2018). But he failed to coordinate this selection with NU headquarters, which then forced Ma’ruf Amin on him, with the help of anti-Mahfud parties in Widodo’s coalition. Despite these irritations, the appointment of NU’s spiritual head to the ticket formalized Widodo’s alliance with NU, and the latter fought for him accordingly.
But just as presidents use the offer of important cabinet posts to purchase the support of Muslim groups, chief executives also weaponize the withholding of such posts to enforce discipline. After Widodo’s re-election in 2019, which was partly due to NU’s involvement in the campaign, there were expectations in the organization that the next cabinet would reflect NU’s contribution to the president’s victory. At an NU event in East Java in June 2019, one senior NU figure shouted into the crowd: “There is no political support that comes free of charge!,” while another openly asked for “strategic cabinet posts” (Andriansyah 2019). In the same vein, one NU group explicitly demanded the Ministry of Religion, once again reminding the president how much he owed NU (Muhyiddin 2019). But faced with this pressure, Widodo feared that if he gave in to all demands, he would give NU a disproportionate amount of power and thus see his own authority reduced. No doubt, he was also still angered by NU’s manipulative intimidation of him over Ma’ruf’s nomination in 2018. In consequence, to remind NU of who was in charge, he broke with post-2004 tradition and gave the post of minister of religion to a retired military officer, Fachrul Razi. In a classic example of how presidents balance the various groups to sustain the architecture of coalitional presidentialism, Widodo had decided to show NU its limits and fill the slot with a representative of another group instead. NU’s reaction was swift. One senior leader said that Widodo could be “cursed” for not picking an NU cadre as minister of religion, as that position was “non-negotiable” for the group (Indana 2019). After one year, Widodo returned the position to NU, and thus both sides had made their point: the president reconfirmed his authority, and NU the influence of its pressure.
Presidents have also exploited their budgetary and co-legislative powers at politically opportune times to attract or reward Islamic groups as partners in their coalition. Before the 2019 elections, the Widodo government launched financial initiatives benefitting NU. Aziz Anwar Fachrudin (2019) listed these projects with great precision. First, funds from the National Zakat Agency (Baznas) were directed between 2017 and 2019 to forty-one Institutes for Syariah Micro-Finance (LKMS) attached to NU boarding schools. Second, Widodo told the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration to create Vocational Training Centres (BLK) in Islamic boarding schools; there were 500 such centers as of March 2019. With the elections approaching, Widodo promised to build 1,000 more in 2019. Third, NU’s central board was made a partner in a corn production program run by the Ministry for Agriculture. Fourth, NU received Rupiah 1.5 trillion (US$107 million) in credit from the Ministry of Finance for various micro-credit programs. Finally, in 2018, the Ministry of Finance’s Agency for Education Fund Management (LPDP) launched the “Santri Scholarship” scheme, providing scholarships for students affiliated with NU and other Islamic groups.1 After the elections, as noted, the law on Islamic boarding schools was passed. It included a stipulation on an eternal endowment, which is why NU had been attracted to the law in the first place. When Widodo signed the relevant implementing regulation in September 2021, NU welcomed the decree but complained that it did not include a concrete number (Syakir 2021). NU wanted this number to be 20 percent of the government’s total education fund, or about Rp 14 trillion (US$1 billion).
While presidents manage the coalition membership of large Islamic groups through appointments, budgetary favors, and legislative benefits, they find the handling of smaller and more radical organizations to be more complex and fluctuating. At various points of his presidency, Yudhoyono believed that such groups needed to be accommodated to prevent “chaos.” To the author, he explained his approach by citing how he dealt with the demand by radical Islamic groups to disband Ahmadiyah, a small Muslim sect that views its India-born founder Mirza Ghulām Ahmad as a prophet who appeared as the promised Messiah. In the late 2000s, FPI and affiliated groups attacked several Ahmadiyah mosques, putting pressure on the government to respond. Yudhoyono said that “if you have one mosque with 5,000 followers, and then next to it an Ahmadiyah mosque with 100 followers, and the first says Muhammad is the [Prophet] but the other one says he’s not, then it’s almost certain that there will be a clash” (interview, Cikeas, December 2, 2014). Although Indonesia’s constitution guarantees freedom of religion, for Yudhoyono the need to avoid “chaos” is supreme. Thus, he suggested, if the radical Islamist groups want a ban on Ahmadiyah and “human rights groups” demand that it be allowed to operate freely, the president’s task is to find a middle way. In 2008, therefore, Yudhoyono’s government issued a decree that effectively forced Ahmadiyah to cease open operations without banning it. Most radical groups were pleased with this result, cementing their belief that Yudhoyono was not an ideal but acceptable president for them.
Widodo, by contrast, took first a passive and then primarily repressive approach to radical Islamic groups—while absorbing some of their conservatism to bolster his religious credentials. In the 2014 campaign, radical Islamic groups had decried Widodo as a “troublemaker and bringer of disasters” (Dunia Muallaf 2014)—because, for them, he embodied advocacy for secularism and liberalism (the latter being a particularly wrong perception). When Widodo took office, he initially ignored his adversaries; he did not try to accommodate them as Yudhoyono had done but did not see the need to actively repress them either. This all changed with the anti-Purnama mobilization of 2016 and 2017. To take a harder line vis-à-vis radical Islamists, he sought a closer alliance with NU and Muhammadiyah, knowing that repressing FPI and others would lead to more accusations of him being anti-Islamic. In other words, he strengthened the Muslim mainstream flank of his presidential coalition to move against radical groups that had previously operated within the parameters of coalitional presidentialism but that now, in Widodo’s view, needed to be excluded. The bans of HTI in 2017 and of FPI in 2020 constituted the climax of this exclusionary and repressive strategy, but many other actions also fed into what Fealy (2020) called Widodo’s “repressive pluralism.” Universities and the civil service were asked to remove staff deemed to be close to conservative Islamic groups, and even the KPK sacked investigators who failed a nationalism test in 2021. At the same time, Widodo pointed to his conservative but still mainstream vice president Ma’ruf Amin as evidence of his continued piety.
Hence, the day-to-day management of Islamic groups as presidential coalition partners depends on their importance to the head of state at specific political junctures. When presidents feel that Islamic organizations can increase their electoral chances or consolidate their political legitimacy, funds and positions are promised or directly delivered to secure their loyalty. If, by contrast, presidents sense a greater level of stability in their position and want to warn Islamic groups not to become overly ambitious, these funds and positions are reduced, temporarily withheld, or adjusted. With this, the presidents’ approach to Islamic groups is similar to that used to keep other coalition partners in line, but the political sensitivity of Islam in Indonesia gives this relationship a distinct flavor. The fact that Widodo integrated the large Muslim groups into his coalition but repressed the radical fringe that Yudhoyono still courted is an additional feature making the management of Islamic actors more multi-layered than other groups. In order to analyze in more detail how presidents and Muslim actors negotiate their vested interests within the context of coalitional presidentialism, the next section focuses on the abovementioned bans of HTI and FPI. Of particular interest here are the mechanisms through which both the president and NU pursued their various agendas, and exploited each other in the process.
Widodo, NU, and the Fight against Islamism
Recall that at the beginning of the anti-Purnama demonstrations in late 2016, NU was dissatisfied with the extent of its participation in Widodo’s coalition. It felt that it did not have enough cabinet seats (which Widodo denied); it complained about not receiving sufficient material benefits (which Widodo acknowledged); and it sensed that its role as Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization was overlooked. But the president’s acute awareness of his vulnerability as a result of the anti-Purnama movement (at one point, an Islamist mob threatened to storm the palace) led to a significant recalibration of the relationship between NU and the head of state (Faturokhman (2016). Widodo recognized that he needed to engage NU to address the impression that he was ignorant of the ambitions of Muslim activists. He knew that asking NU for assistance would benefit him and come at a high cost. NU, for its part, viewed the new constellation as an opportunity to not only demand more positions and funds for its constituency from the president but also to settle bills with some of its old rivals in the struggle for hegemony over Indonesia’s fragmented Muslim community. It was clear to NU leaders that Widodo now owed them for their support, and that he shared their interest in moving against groups at the fringe of the Islamic spectrum that NU had long perceived as a disturbance. In short, the post-2016 political landscape aligned in a way that increased NU’s strategic value to the president and produced an overlap in the interests of both actors.
On the top of NU’s list of organizational adversaries in the Muslim community was the Indonesian branch of Hizbut Tahrir (HTI). HTI believed that Islamic scripture demanded the establishment of a caliphate, and that participating in secular political arrangements such as democracy was in violation of God’s will (Ward 2009). Thus, HTI possessed a truly revolutionary agenda, but at the same time, it did not condone violence to achieve its goals. Instead, it asked its cadres to infiltrate universities, mosques, state institutions, and other societal structures to trigger a religious movement both from below and the top. NU felt especially vulnerable to HTI’s infiltration attempts. This was partly because NU, too, had long struggled to conceptually reconcile the pluralist Indonesian polity with the idealist idea of an Islamic state. It was only able to do so by referring to those parts of the scripture that allow for pragmatism benefitting the Muslim community. In this context, some NU cadres on the more conservative end of the Islamic spectrum were attracted to HTI’s message, which appeared to them purer and less calculating than NU’s centrism developed through decades of nationalist activism. NU leaders also suspected that HTI targeted NU for its recruitment because of the mass organization’s influence in the state and society, which offered HTI an entry point for rapid expansion (Mustaqim 2019).
Consequently, even before the anti-Purnama mobilization began, segments in NU had aggressively moved against HTI and asked the state to ban it. In April 2016, local NU leaders disbanded an HTI event promoting the caliphate in Tangerang, a city close to Jakarta. The spiritual leader of Tangerang’s NU branch gave a fierce speech during NU’s protest, requesting that the state withdraw HTI’s operating license: “we ask the state to take action on this. The local office for political affairs and the police must be pro-active in this regard. We are loyal to the state, and therefore we are giving our blood and soul to the state. Organizations such as HTI should not be given a license of any kind, as it has clearly offended the dignity of the nation and the state. They have already insulted the founding fathers of this nation, and that is the same as insulting us, the NU community” (Arrahmah News 2016). Another NU speaker called the HTI ideology “treason” [makar], an accusation that in Indonesia would attract heavy-handed penalties and cause the organization involved to be dissolved. The orator, a deputy chair in one of NU’s educational institutions, promised to protect “mosques from being infiltrated by treasonous ideology.” Similar demands for HTI’s ban were made in Jombang, East Java, in May 2016 (NU Online 2016). Accordingly, well before Widodo thought about banning any Islamic organization (knowing that this would add to accusations that he was anti-Islamic), the discourse of banning HTI was already underway in NU and its affiliates.
As the anti-Purnama demonstrations unfolded (they stretched from November 2016 to mid-2017), the issue of HTI’s ban became part of the negotiations between the palace and NU over their recalibrated relationship. While Widodo’s assistants developed a package of new material concessions to NU—which was rolled out between 2017 and the elections of 2019—NU leaders kept proposing that the president take firm action against HTI. Initially skeptical, Widodo warmed up to the idea. As the president could be certain of NU’s strong support, disbanding HTI would not carry a large risk of damaging his Islamic credentials. Furthermore, although HTI was vocal, it was less popular than FPI, for instance. In a 2017 opinion poll (LSI 2017), only 32 percent of Muslim respondents declared that they had heard of HTI, and of those, a mere 14 percent supported its agenda. Overall, only 4 percent of Indonesian Muslims sympathized with HTI. In FPI’s case, 69 percent of Muslim respondents stated that they had heard of it, and 39 percent of those held sympathies for it—meaning that 27 percent of Muslims had a positive view of FPI. Against this background, banning HTI promised to a) send a signal of the president’s political toughness to the Islamist fringe, b) satisfy NU’s demands and thus tie it even closer to the government, and c) not pose a serious risk to Widodo personally as HTI had few friends among its fellow Muslim groups or in society at large.
From April 2017, then, it was evident that “NU leaders collaborated with the palace to create conditions that enabled the government to act against HTI” (Fealy 2018). From NU’s side, its youth organization staged more events of the kind already seen in 2016: it appeared at HTI events, protested, and asked the police to disband them. The police, in most cases, happily obliged. Meanwhile, Widodo asked his chief security minister, Wiranto, to prepare the mechanism to ban HTI. Eventually, it was decided to issue a government regulation in lieu of law (Perpu) that would allow the government to ban any societal organization without a court order—which previously had been required by a relevant 2013 law on mass organizations. Teten Masduki, Widodo’s then-chief of staff, insisted that this was done because “we just can’t trust the courts. You’ve seen how corrupt they are. We needed to do this quickly” (interview, Jakarta, July 20, 2017). In May, Wiranto announced that the Perpu would be used to disband HTI because its teachings violated the constitution and Pancasila, and because its activities provoked public unrest. As expected, NU immediately came out in support of the government’s ban, with its chairman Said Aqil Siradj saying that HTI could create disunity, conflict, and even civil war in Indonesia (Gual 2017). At last, NU’s long-standing campaign against HTI had succeeded, and while in the past it had feared that HTI might recruit its members, it now openly invited former HTI members to join NU (Kumparan 2018).
Three and a half years later, Widodo again moved to ban a radical fringe group, the FPI. This time, however, it appeared that the president and his aides, rather than NU, drove the initiative to outlaw FPI. To be sure, NU had suggested banning FPI several times, but there had been signs of reconciliation with its chairman Rizieq after the 2019 elections (Detik 2019a). Widodo, by contrast, continued to view Rizieq as a substantial threat to his presidency. Rizieq had led the anti-Purnama demonstrations, and even from exile, he had mobilized conservative Islamic voters for Prabowo in 2019. Indeed, Prabowo’s biggest campaign event in Jakarta was largely organized by FPI networks and featured a video appearance by Rizieq himself (Aspinall 2019). Hence, when Rizieq returned to Jakarta to an enthusiastic airport welcome by his supporters in November 2020 (after rejecting government conditions that he refrain from politics), Widodo was alarmed. We already noted that the police began to systematically pursue Rizieq for violations of social mobility restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gradually increasing the repression, the police killed six of Rizieq’s bodyguards in December before arresting him and banning FPI later in the month. The government accused FPI of violating the principles of Pancasila but also, controversially, of being involved in terrorism (the evidence for this was sketchy at best). With Rizieq’s later imprisonment on pandemic-related charges and FPI outlawed, Widodo’s most prominent opponent—after Prabowo’s entry into government—was removed from the political scene.2 The president was visibly relieved.
NU dutifully supported FPI’s ban, but unlike in the case of HTI, it did not seem as if it was included in its planning. As a result, its expressions of loyalty sounded less powerful than in 2017. One NU spokesman said that the government could not be accused of Islamophobia because “more than eighty” other Muslim organizations were still allowed to exist (Kurniawan 2021). He also suggested that FPI only had to submit more paperwork to the government to have its legal status re-instated (Yusuf 2020)—a massive misreading of Widodo’s determination to permanently paralyze the organization. Nevertheless, NU’s backing of the ban helped Widodo to make it palatable to society. Surveys showed that about 60 percent of citizens who were aware of FPI’s ban approved of it, and that FPI’s favorability ratings were dropping considerably (Fealy and White 2021). In brief, while the president had helped NU get rid of HTI as part of his initiative to integrate NU more firmly into his coalition, NU leaders returned the favor in 2020 when Widodo was keen to neutralize his strongest adversary. The two incidents highlighted how coalitional presidentialism allows presidents and their allies to exploit each other to protect their respective realms of power. As long as both parties view this constellation as beneficial to them, the presidential coalition is preserved. In the Indonesian case, dissatisfaction on either side typically does not lead to the dissolution of the alliance but rather to its recalibration. Unhappy with its coalition privileges in 2016, NU was given a better deal but had to offer stronger support in return. With both sides satisfied, Indonesia’s regime of coalitional presidentialism marched on.
As the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, it is not surprising that Indonesia has seen high levels of involvement by Islamic actors in politics. Unlike in many countries of Europe or Latin America, the role of religion in politics in Indonesia has not decreased but increased, partly due to rising piety in public life. This constellation has pressured Indonesian presidents to accommodate Islamic interests in their coalitions to win elections and sustain their post-election alliances. Some of this accommodation has occurred through the channels suggested by the traditional coalitional presidentialism school: that is, through political parties. PKB, PAN, and, to a lesser extent, PPP have played a key role in facilitating the coalition arrangements between presidents on the one side and NU and Muhammadiyah on the other. But as the 2016 dispute over the level of NU representation in cabinet showed, such party avenues are insufficient to satisfy the expectations of the large Islamic organizations. Their relationship with their respective parties has fluctuated over time—under the NU chairmanship of Hasyim Muzadi (1999–2010), for instance, NU and PKB were estranged. As a result, the Muslim groups want their own cabinet representation, funds, and benefits. Put differently, they wish to be treated as coalition partners outside of the party arena. Demonstrably, this is exactly what post-2004 presidents have done, and Widodo’s strong relationship with NU after 2016 embodied the kind of coalition arrangement sought by Islamic actors. As NU was showered with material favors, and its spiritual leader became vice president in 2019, NU felt sufficiently appreciated to support the president’s causes.
We have also ascertained that the expanded framework of coalitional presidentialism gives presidents strong tools to keep Islamic groups in check and to punish them for disloyalty or excessive expectations. Just when NU thought after the 2019 elections that Widodo had become dependent on its protection, the president took away its most prized possession: the Ministry of Religion. At the same time, he removed the Ministry of Education from Muhammadiyah’s control. With these moves, the president reaffirmed his status as the primary actor in the coalition, demonstrating that Islamic groups were only one among many coalition partners. Tellingly, the Ministry of Religion went to the military and the Ministry of Education to an oligarch. Subsequent events then showed how the contractual details underpinning coalitional presidentialism are constantly renegotiated: the Ministry of Religion returned to NU after a year, and Muhammadiyah rejected the offer to occupy the position of vice minister of education. With rotations and offers such as this, presidents fuel the inter-actor rivalry that is so important to maintain the architecture of coalitional presidentialism. There is little that a president fears more than a situation in which all coalition partners unite against him or her. Such occurrences are rare, but Widodo got a taste of this when all political parties in the coalition, plus NU and some oligarchs, rebelled against his initial choice of vice president in 2018. As in many other political arenas, divide et impera is a core principle of coalitional presidentialism, keeping presidential allies on their toes and the president in the center of power.
The fragmented nature of Indonesian Islam has given presidents ample opportunities to use intra-Islamic and inter-religious rivalries to their advantage. Faced with a challenge by small but influential hard-line Islamic groups, Widodo turned to the larger organizations (and, in elections, to non-Muslim groups) for help. With this move, Widodo overturned Yudhoyono’s long-standing approach of trying to have everyone, from Islamic radicals to mainstream Muslims and non-Muslims, in his presidential tent. This difference in approaches explains why Widodo never reached the 60 percent vote share that Yudhoyono won in 2004 and 2009 (Widodo won 53 percent in 2014 and 55 percent in 2019), and why his margins of victory were significantly smaller. It also explains why radical groups, excluded from presidential favors after Yudhoyono, rose against Widodo in 2016, and why they were subsequently repressed. Hence, while Widodo and Yudhoyono used similar patterns of coalitional presidentialism, their specific balancing of the various groups differed, and nowhere more so than in the management of Islamist fringe groups. Coalitional presidentialism, therefore, is not a static concept in which every actor is assured of his or her privileges. On the contrary, it is a dynamic system of distributing power in which all sides must continually reassess their position and lobby for adjustments if necessary. In Indonesia, the absence of impeachment proceedings or incumbency losses since 2004 suggests that this system has worked well for sitting presidents and most of their allies. Whether it has worked for the quality of Indonesian democracy, however, is an entirely different matter.
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