3 THE LEGISLATURE

DPR Powers

We have noted earlier that the 2002 constitutional amendments established a system in which the president holds key powers but faces a strong legislature (Horowitz 2013). This balance encourages cooperation to avoid dysfunction and has thus developed into a cornerstone of Indonesia’s coalitional presidentialism. In the post-2002 constitutional landscape, the DPR possesses co-legislative powers together with the president; can overturn government regulations in lieu of law (Perpu); carries out oversight functions vis-à-vis ministries; is deeply engaged in the drafting and passing of the budget; and selects and confirms personnel for important state bodies. We had already touched on these powers in previous chapters, but to fully grasp the legislative dimension of coalitional presidentialism in the current polity, it is necessary to unpack the most important of them in some detail.

Among all its powers, the most consequential for Indonesia’s political economy—and the standing of legislators—is the DPR’s budgetary authority. It is also the one that presidents have most complained about. In his memoirs, Yudhoyono (2014, 34) lamented that “in the drafting and implementation of the state budget, the DPR has now the power to go as deep as the third level [with the first being the most general, and lower levels indicating a higher level of detail]. This means that [the legislature can influence] budget documents that regulate the allocation of funds per ministry/agency, sector, sub-sector, program, and activity. The DPR also has the right to withhold the disbursement of the budget, which is typically described as ‘the DPR giving the budget an asterisk.’ Unless this asterisk is lifted by the DPR, the budget—although it has previously been passed and turned into a law—can’t be disbursed.” Clearly annoyed, Yudhoyono added that “it was situations such as this that constantly disturbed the implementation of the budget as the main [driver of] economic growth and, at the same time, as a precondition for the functioning of the government.” His Finance Minister Chatib Basri (2013–2014) similarly lamented that his “rational policy” often collided with particularistic interests of legislators (interview, online, November 29, 2021). The DPR’s budget authority, then, does not only provide legislators with leverage against the president but also hands them ample opportunities to insert clauses into the budget that can benefit themselves or their electoral constituencies. As a result, during Indonesia’s post-1998 democratization, the center of patronage exchanges and corruption moved from Suharto’s executive-heavy administration to the forums of executive-legislative negotiations in the DPR.

Echoing Yudhoyono, Farhan (2018) described how the DPR can deploy its budget powers. In Indonesia, the budget process is divided into four stages: formulation, approval, execution, and monitoring. The first stage is the president’s responsibility, with the Ministry of Finance setting the macroeconomic assumptions and spending limits for the next fiscal year (Farhan 2018, 46). Parallel to this, the government’s National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) develops a Government Working Plan (RKP), drawing from longer-term development agendas and government priorities. Once the Finance Ministry and Bappenas have synchronized their budget planning, preliminary budget discussions with the legislature begin. This usually happens in May, based on the fiscal policy framework and the budget priorities submitted by the government to the DPR. This is also when the DPR’s powerful Budget Agency and its Commission XI, which oversees finance issues, become involved and represent the legislature in negotiations with the executive. From these discussions emerges a basic joint agreement, which is subsequently “used by ministries and government agencies to formulate a detailed annual budget and work plan” (Farhan 2018, 46). That work plan, in turn, is the basis for the 11 sectoral DPR commissions (each with at least one ministry as a cooperating partner) to negotiate with their respective ministries and agencies. As mentioned earlier, the overall budget ceiling remains mostly unchanged in these debates, but the budget line items can change dramatically—which is what Yudhoyono referred to as interference in the third level of budgeting. At this stage, legislators have the most opportunities to insert their patronage projects, and they do so until satisfied and their approval is secured.

Once a general agreement is reached between government representatives and the DPR, the president delivers the annual budget speech to the House, normally—as noted—in August. Another round of negotiations ensues before the draft is put to the DPR plenary for endorsement. This typically occurs in September or October. In the post-2004 period, all budgets were passed unanimously, indicating that sufficient concessions were made behind the scenes to satisfy all legislators.¹ But the DPR’s budgetary authority does not stop with the approval of the budget. During the third and fourth stages (namely, execution and monitoring), legislators have additional opportunities for intervention. One such opportunity emerges during discussions on budget revisions and additions, which take place in the first half of each budget year. During the 2012 and 2013 revision debates, some caucuses rejected the government’s proposal to cut fuel subsidies. PKS—a member of Yudhoyono’s party coalition—took the same stance, which was the reason for the continued debates within the alliance over whether to expel the party for violating coalition discipline. However, such open expressions of dissent are rare, even from parties and legislators not formally part of the president’s coalition. It is much more common for potential dissenters to receive quiet incentives to approve the government’s proposals. This also applies to the final stage of the budget process; that is, the passing of the Law on the Responsibility for Budget Execution in the past budget year. The DPR’s approval of this bill absolves the government from any potential wrongdoing in past budgetary matters, both legally and politically.

The display of power of the DPR and individual legislators in the protracted, multi-layered budget deliberations is replicated in deliberating non-budget bills. In contrast to the executive-centered early formulation of the budget, the DPR can initiate its own bills that are deliberated once the president agrees to appoint representatives for this process. The Legislative Agency in the DPR—the non-budget equivalent of the Budget Agency—coordinates which bills are discussed, determines the schedule, and oversees the deliberations. In most cases, a bill is deliberated in the DPR committee covering a bill’s subject area; if a bill cuts across multiple policy arenas, a special working committee consisting of members from various committees is created. After the agreement is reached among the members and, collectively, with the government, the bill travels back through the Legislative Agency to the DPR plenary for endorsement. As in the case of the budget, approval is generally unanimous—only in rare cases is a vote taken and dissent recorded. As in the budget process, too, legislators have a lot of opportunities to make sure that their particularistic interests are accommodated in bills, explaining the low level of opposition to the final product. Many of these individual insertions to (or removals from) a bill become untraceable; in 2009, an article disadvantaging the tobacco industry disappeared from the Health Bill after it was passed, and in October 2020, a major Omnibus Law (which changed numerous laws in one step to launch a massive economic deregulation drive) was passed without anybody able to say how many pages and articles it had (Pebrianto 2020). It took days before the final version was published, but the mystery of who had inserted what and when remained unresolved.

In the arena of personnel selection for Indonesia’s key state institutions, the DPR has the power to confirm the appointment of the military and police chiefs as well as ambassadors; it picks from a list of nominees to appoint members of the Supreme Court, the Supreme Auditing Board, the Judicial Commission, the Human Rights Commission, and other major agencies; and it can directly name three out of the nine judges of the Constitutional Court. These appointment powers have shaped presidential behavior in the selection processes. For instance, to narrow down the DPR’s range of choices, presidents do not submit more than one candidate for the military and police chief—this leaves a potentially sceptical legislature only with the option of rejecting the president’s nominee. The DPR has thus far shied away from such a move, partly because of fears among legislators that rejection of powerful military or police leaders could make them targets for future acts of retaliation. Similarly, presidents usually submit a list of candidates for positions in other state agencies that only includes nominees acceptable to the executive but gives the DPR the final say in the selection. This creates patronage opportunities for individual legislators, who rarely follow party lines in selection processes and—in some cases—have been known to accept payments for their votes (Amelia 2013).

On the surface, viewing the DPR’s individualization and fragmentation as a weakness in its strategic positioning toward the presidency would be tempting. It could be argued that a united and coherent legislature (as well as strictly organized caucuses) could extract more concessions from the executive. But in Indonesia’s specific context, the DPR’s atomization situates its institution and members as independent actors rather than as subordinates of their parties. Were parties in stronger control over their caucuses and members, presidents could limit themselves to negotiating with party and caucus leaders—and indeed, much of the coalitional presidentialism focuses on these interactions. In Indonesia’s post-2004 polity, however, the difficulty of “herding” MPs and the DPR as an institution is the source of their power, and it necessitates presidents to integrate them into ruling coalitions with strategies that are different from those applied to political parties. Moreover, the self-confidence of legislators (both vis-à-vis their parties and the president) has continued to gradually increase in the post-2004 polity. One reason for this is the growing personalization of legislative elections following the introduction of an open party list system of proportional representation in 2009 (Aspinall and Berenschot 2019). Under this system, nominees compete with members of their own parties for seats, which means that individual candidates, not parties, run and finance their campaigns. Once they reach the DPR, therefore, members view themselves as nominally affiliated with—rather than subordinated to—their parties.

The broad outlines of the DPR’s powers suggest that Indonesian presidents have to manage the demands of the institution and its members if they want to secure the stability of their rule. We will see below how exactly they do this, but the fact that there have been so few instances of DPR dissent, and no serious threat of impeachment since 2004, indicates that presidents have successfully integrated the DPR and its MPs into their coalitional presidentialism arrangements. Key to this success has been the fact that presidents have significant powers that they can bring to bear. In the next section, we turn to the assets Indonesian presidents possess in interacting with the DPR, before then discussing the system of brokerage through which they ensure the legislators’ support.

Presidents’ Legislative Leverage

Indonesian presidents’ first noteworthy asset vis-à-vis the legislature is the near-impossibility of impeachment. We already noted that presidential impeachments in Indonesia involve a cumbersome process that must pass through the DPR, the Constitutional Court, and the MPR, and that presidents can prevent its initiation by commanding a one-third-plus-one minority in the DPR. This constellation creates a different relationship between the president and the legislature than, for instance, in Brazil or Peru (Rattinger 2017). There, presidential impeachments are regular occurrences, and legislators include them in their repertoire of potential actions against the president. In Indonesia, legislators must assume that presidents serve their five-year terms and, if a first-term incumbent is popular, the likelihood of a second term is high. This fact encourages cooperation rather than fundamental opposition and prefigures a broadly inclusivist model of coalitional presidentialism. As conceded by Jazuli Juwaini, the chairman of the PKS caucus in the DPR, “although we are in opposition, we know that the position of the president is very strong. He is deliberately protected by the constitution, and we respect that. That means we are engaging with him constructively, and we try to reach a win-win solution: the best for the president but also the best for our constituents. We’re in this together for at least five years” (interview, Kyoto, February 6, 2020). Thus, while presidents need to manage the DPR’s strengths, they also know that they can only be removed by it in extreme circumstances.

As much as the DPR’s budgetary powers aggrieved Yudhoyono, legislators depend on the president to realize their budget ambitions. The president establishes the initial budget framework through the minister of finance, and it is this framework within which legislators have to create opportunities for themselves, their constituencies, and their sponsors. In the more detailed budget discussions, legislators must secure the president’s approval (however tacit) for their projects to make it into the final budget law. According to a political adviser who had helped Widodo and his running mate, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, to win the 2012 gubernatorial elections in Jakarta, Widodo became—as governor—a master of the bargaining processes necessary to have his budgets approved by the capital’s legislature. “How do you think Widodo got all of his budgets through so easily in Jakarta? He accepted that about 10 percent of the total budget is set aside for special interests of legislators, and he never questioned that practice,” the adviser said, adding that Purnama felt more appalled by such patronage exchanges than Widodo did (confidential interview, Jakarta, April 17, 2014). While not confirming that he was engaging in material deals with legislators during his time as governor between 2012 and 2014, Widodo emphasized briefly before his presidential inauguration that he anticipated smooth relations with the DPR once sworn in: “I know what my role is, and I know what their role is. I have faced oppositional legislatures before, as in Jakarta, and I did well” (interview, Jakarta, September 15, 2014). Given that all of his presidential budgets passed without incident, he was proven right.

Within the broader budgetary powers of the president, the DPR has to seek approval from the head of the executive for its own budget. This budget includes important benefits for the institution and individual legislators, such as international travel, per diem payments for domestic trips, salaries for staff, and renovations for existing facilities. The negotiations surrounding this budget are controversial as the public tends to pay much attention to it—much more than to the significantly larger project budgets debated below the media’s radar screen. This is because items in the DPR budget are easier to expose for the media as evidence of the extravagance of politicians than the secretly inserted vested interest items in the rest of the overall budget. In 2012, for instance, there was extended media coverage of the planned Rp 1.4 billion (US$100,000) renovation of toilets in the DPR corridors, which were indeed in a sad state (Tempo 2012). Presidents are aware of the sensitive nature of the DPR budget and tend to be restrictive in the allocations. The DPR’s budget increased from Rp 2.4 trillion (US$171 million) in 2010 to Rp 3.9 trillion (US$279 million) in 2015 and Rp 5.1 trillion (US$364 million) in 2020, but these increases were below the growth rates of the total state budget. Similarly, both Yudhoyono and Widodo consistently rejected DPR requests to introduce discretionary funds for MPs, which are common in other presidential systems (such as the Philippines). Although presidents routinely agree to budget requests submitted by individual legislators, they do not wish to formalize this arrangement, which would reduce their leverage in negotiations and attract bad publicity.²

Another significant power of Indonesian presidents vis-à-vis the legislature is derived from the former’s co-legislative authority. Based on this authority, presidents not only have the power to introduce bills but also have several options to obstruct bills initiated by the DPR. One such option is to not appoint a government representative for deliberations of the bill in question, which means that the bill cannot proceed. Under post-2004 conditions of coalitional presidentialism, this has rarely occurred, as presidents are aware that the DPR would view such defiance as a hostile act. During her presidency in the early 2000s, Megawati refused to name a representative to start deliberations on a controversial anti-pornography bill, much to the frustration of its DPR initiators (Sherlock 2009). But her successor Yudhoyono did appoint deliberation representatives, and the bill was passed into law in 2008, leading to the imprisonment of dozens of people for “transgressions” since then. While post-2004 presidents have been reluctant to use their power of legislative obstruction, they have repeatedly threatened to do so. Before the 2019 revisions to the KPK law, Widodo stated that he had yet to decide whether to agree to the deliberations, and if he were to do so, he would make his own proposals (Putratama 2019). Ultimately, he agreed to the talks, and the bill was passed quickly. Some of his proposals were accommodated—a fact he disclosed in a media conference to fend off criticism that he had given in to the DPR. Hence, although rarely used, presidential powers to prevent legislation make the DPR dependent on the president’s goodwill, shaping the pace and outcome of deliberations.

DPR legislators are also attracted to the president’s executive appointment powers. While becoming a member of the legislature and its leadership bodies is highly lucrative for politicians, cabinet positions remain the most coveted jobs in the Indonesian political system outside of the presidency. As a result, legislators use their relationship with the president—often built up over years of executive-legislative negotiations—to recommend themselves for a ministry. There have been eleven former DPR legislators and one former provincial legislator in Widodo’s second cabinet, with previous presidential ministries showing similar patterns. Extended lobbying efforts by legislators for a cabinet post often involve adopting a softer stance toward the government in DPR forums than otherwise would be the case, delivering clear benefits for the president and his or her representatives. In the same vein, older legislators looking to retire often seek and receive ambassadorial appointments. For instance, after a seventeen-year career in the legislature, Golkar politician Hajriyanto Y. Thohari became ambassador to Lebanon in 2019. “As a member of Golkar, I am part of the coalition supporting Widodo, and I feel that I have done that job well. Now it’s time to serve the president in a different capacity,” Thohari explained (interview, Jakarta, January 8, 2019). As they are well paid, ambassadorships are highly competitive, with the president’s allies submitting nominations and lobbying for the candidates’ endorsement. The fact that the final list of presidential nominations returns to the DPR for confirmation is an additional encouragement for many legislators to seek an appointment, which then becomes part of broader presidential-legislative deal-making.

Finally, the president has broader powers of sanction that can be utilized to discipline legislators. Recall that Indonesian presidents can recognize or annul the legal standing of party leaderships and that Widodo used this authority to turn two parties (Golkar and PPP) from oppositional into pro-government parties. Given the autonomy of individual MPs, this did not mean that every legislator suddenly became a loyal supporter of executive policy, but it formally transformed Widodo’s minority position in the DPR into a supermajority and made governance easier. Importantly, however, the politico-psychological impact of Widodo’s intervention in internal party (and, indirectly, DPR) affairs went well beyond the Golkar and PPP cases. Other parties feared that they would experience the same fate, and some thus instructed their legislators to reduce their open criticism of the government in the DPR and outside. Even Yudhoyono’s party was affected. Before the PD congress in May 2015, there were rumors that the Widodo government would use the event to encourage anti-Yudhoyono forces in the party to take over its leadership. Responding to these rumors, Yudhoyono deployed two strategies. First, he publicly called out Widodo, with whom he had a tense relationship. Yudhoyono’s son and chair of the PD caucus in the DPR, Edhie Baskoro, confronted Widodo in a consultation meeting between the president and the legislature, demanding that presidential intervention in the party’s internal affairs stop immediately (Prihandoko 2015). Second, Yudhoyono started a charm offensive to commit the president to attend the upcoming PD congress. The president’s attendance, Yudyohono was sure, would end the conflict.

The subsequent meeting of the former and incumbent presidents at the PD congress in Surabaya put their expertise in managing coalitional presidentialism on full display. Before the event’s opening, Yudhoyono told this author, “I am sure the president’s presence here will demonstrate that all the rumors of possible intervention into our affairs were false. At the same time, my party can demonstrate that it holds no ill will toward the government, and that we are prepared to cooperate in the legislature and other arenas” (interview, Surabaya, May 11, 2015). Widodo, for his part, lectured the ex-president’s party about the need for political stability and the necessity for harmony in the parliament in particular—something PD politicians had heard much about from their patron during his own presidency (notes by the author, Surabaya, May 12, 2015). In the end, both men got what they wanted: Yudhoyono remained in control of his party, having neutralized the potential power the president could exercise over it and its DPR legislators; and Widodo received Yudhoyono’s promise that while PD would not formally be in the president’s coalition, it would refrain from fundamental opposition in the legislature and other political arenas. With this, the Yudhoyono-Widodo arrangement was representative of the many day-to-day negotiations and compromises that typically occur when a president’s powers are leveraged against the equally significant authorities held by legislators. And in a fashion symbolic of the presidential-legislative interaction, too, the Yudhoyono-Widodo relationship settled into a stable equilibrium in which both sides did not necessarily like each other but accepted the counterpart’s existence.³

Managing DPR Coalitions

The discussion of the DPR’s and the president’s power resources suggests that both sides would have much to lose if they tried to paralyze or even destroy the other. Cooperation, by contrast, offers rewards that are not only substantial but also stable and predictable. Nevertheless, the establishment of a cooperative equilibrium is not automatic. On the contrary, it needs to be carefully managed and constantly renewed. The primary fuel that keeps the coalition between presidents and legislators running is patronage, which presidents channel to key DPR actors in formal and informal ways.

The highest-level formal channel of presidential-legislative interaction is the consultation forum. This is a rare event in which the president meets with the leaders of DPR bodies and caucuses, with the location of the gathering typically alternating between the palace and the DPR complex. In most cases, consultation forums convene when a major political issue needs to be discussed. In his first consultation meeting with the DPR in April 2015, for instance, Widodo had two items of interest on his agenda (Gera 2015). First, he needed the DPR’s support to help him resolve a crisis surrounding his first appointment of a new police chief (more about this in chapters 4 and 5). This was a calamity of his own making, and he had to ask the DPR to use its constitutional power of confirmation to make the problem disappear. The second item was the spending of Yudhoyono’s last budget—a topic of great interest to the president and the DPR alike. The connection between the two items, which Widodo proclaimed publicly, signaled that the president was prepared to trade concessions on the police chief issue with budgetary promises. The outcome confirmed this arrangement. Emerging from the forum, the president and the speaker of the DPR, Setya Novanto, announced that the legislature would consider Widodo’s proposed plan of action on the police chief issue and that the government, in return, would involve the DPR more in the ongoing expenditure of the budget. It is important to note that at the time of the meeting, Widodo was technically still a president without a majority in parliament. Yet a simple exchange of budget patronage against the endorsement of a key post allowed him to obtain approval for the latter in the short term and, by implication, for the executive’s budget in the longer term.

Below the consultation forum, formal interactions between the government and the legislature take place in the various DPR committees. There, legislators have the right to call representatives of the ministry allocated to their committee as a counterpart. These ministry delegates then have to brief the DPR on government initiatives and answer questions. As the majority of these hearings are public, they mostly serve the purpose of political pageantry. MPs want to demonstrate to their constituencies (via the press) that they take their control functions seriously, and executive leaders likewise wish to perform in a way that conforms to expected government accountability standards vis-à-vis the legislature (Rahman 2021). For legislators of government parties, these public events are an opportunity to both highlight their support for executive policies they view as useful for their constituencies and distance themselves from less popular government actions. Legislators not aligned with the president, for their part, use the chance to propose alternatives to the policies offered by the executive. While mostly perfunctory, the hearings fulfill an essential function in coalitional presidentialism by providing a public platform on which both sides can showcase their roles. This political theater suggests constitutional functionality, which is crucial to the operations and stability of the president’s coalition architecture. As Yudhoyono knew from the beginning, and as Widodo learned quickly in his presidency, the projection of a stable political order is the main goal of, and reason for, the sustenance of broad-based presidential coalitions that allow the government to operate and society to avoid “chaos”.

As important as the public display of functional interaction is for maintaining political alliances, the real work of keeping the necessary relationships in place happens informally. Presidents do this by building a network of contacts in the DPR, both with leaders of its bodies and with individual legislators. High-ranking DPR officials engage with the president or his representatives on specific issues, and once an agreement is reached, the former are expected to implement these deals. To the extent that caucus leaders have power over their fellow party MPs, presidents can ask the chairs of factions nominally integrated into his or her coalition to do the lobbying work. However, the chairpersons of DPR bodies often have greater influence over the members in their respective institutions, regardless of party affiliation. In persuading MPs to back presidential policies, DPR leaders distribute patronage to them, often by negotiating and then communicating executive approval for legislators’ special budget requests. Indeed, it is appropriate to understand the entire DPR hierarchy as a network of brokers that trades DPR support for policies against benefits for its members (Iaryczower and Oliveros 2016). In this system, the president is both a client (who seeks DPR approval of proposals) and a patron (as a dispenser of executive favors). At the apex of this network is the DPR speaker, who is assisted by four deputy speakers (see table 3.1). Each of the deputy speakers coordinates special bodies and some of the sectoral committees. The chairs and deputy chairs of these committees, in turn, manage individual MPs belonging to them. The caucuses, for their part, are represented in the Consultative Agency (Bamus), in which decisions are negotiated between the functional DPR leaders and caucus officials.

As the most senior official in the DPR hierarchy, the speaker is typically the chief broker between the president and the other elements of the legislature whose support the executive requires. It is not a coincidence that for much of the post-Suharto era, the post of speaker has been held by a politician of Golkar—the party most known for its transactional and tactical prowess (Tomsa 2008; Saragih 2021). Although no Golkar cadre has been president since 1999, the party has had five DPR speakers: Akbar Tandjung (1999–2004), Agung Laksono (2004–2009), Setya Novanto (2014–2015, 2016–2017), Ade Komarudin (2016), and Bambang Soesatyo (2018–2019). Only on two occasions have representatives of the president’s party held the speakership: PD’s Marzuki Alie (2009–2014) and PDI-P’s Puan Maharani, Megawati’s daughter (2019–2024). Rather counterintuitively, presidents have often found it easier to form alliances with legislators and extract deals from them when a Golkar politician is in the speaker’s chair. Using their wide networks and long political brokerage experience, Golkar politicians can reach agreements with MPs under them that DPR seniors directly linked to the president’s party might find hard to accomplish. The only post-Suharto president who failed to appreciate this circumstance was Wahid, whose 2001 impeachment was arranged in no small part by Akbar Tandjung. According to Tandjung, “[Wahid] did not understand that he needed the DPR. I told him that I could hold the DPR together for him if he wanted to, but he did not want to listen. At the end, as I predicted, he fell” (interview, Jakarta, February 11, 2008). Post-2004 presidents have learned that lesson and generally done well in upholding the DPR’s allegiance with the help of allied speakers who enjoy significant presidential patronage.

Below the speaker, a network of influential sub-brokers in committees and other DPR bodies (such as the crucial Budget Agency) ensures that individual MPs follow general agreements made with the president, and that they are sufficiently compensated for their support. Presidents also have the option of approaching sub-brokers directly, or even working with individual legislators. As one MP explained, “normally we get approached by the DPR leadership or the committee chairs. They say, ‘hey, the president’s team wants this or that. And they ask if there is anything they could do for us.’ Then we come up with a list of requests, normally in the form of budget items or policy changes. In some cases, presidential aides go to MPs directly. That hasn’t happened to me, but I know colleagues who have been called” (confidential interview, Jakarta, June 25, 2019). The key advantage of the president over other clients of the DPR brokerage network is his or her unique ability to move budgets officially and thus legally. Other clients, by contrast, have to use cash to get the DPR to fulfill their requests. These clients even include governmental institutions below the president. In 2018, Deputy Speaker Taufik Kurniawan was arrested because he had received bribes from at least two district government heads to arrange an increase in their Special Allocation Funds (DAK)—a transfer by the center to the regions that is normally set by a standardized process but can be changed through intervention (Aritenang 2020). In the case of Kebumen district, Kurniawan engineered the allocation of an additional Rp 93 billion (US$6.6 million) to the territory and received a fee of Rp 3.7 billion (US$264,000) in return. For his part, the district chief of Purbalingga sent Kurniawan Rp 1.2 billion (US$85,000) for a similar service (Galih 2019).

In trying to secure the DPR’s participation in broader presidential coalitions, therefore, the most powerful instrument of the head of state is his or her budgetary power. Presidents can also use other tools from their classic coalitional presidentialism toolbox (such as the promise of appointment or endorsement of DPR-drafted legislation), but the main glue that binds presidents and legislators together is direct patronage. While other brokerage clients of the DPR—such as interest groups, oligarchs, or non-presidential state actors—have to cross into spheres of illegality by paying for expected favors, the president can remain within the formal parameters of executive-legislative relations when engaging in patronage deals. This set of arrangements forms a stable foundation for semi-permanent alliances between presidents and MPs, regardless of who is formally in the governing coalition and who is not. The relative stability of Indonesian governance after 2004, and the absence of even the slightest indication of a serious impeachment drive, are due to this patronage-based system of mutually beneficial exchanges. But while most operations that protect this status quo take place behind closed doors, the citizenry has a general awareness of the DPR as a center of corruption. The DPR routinely finishes last in opinion surveys of public trust in specific institutions (Detik 2019b). Thus, the other side of the stability coin is a major trust deficit in a critical democratic body, contributing to the overall decline in the quality of democracy in Indonesia.

The Case of Setya Novanto

No other case can better illustrate the ways DPR brokers engage with presidents—and the deals that emerge from such engagement—than the rise of Setya Novanto to the position of DPR speaker. Novanto was the archetype of a class of transactional politicians who had transitioned successfully from Suharto’s regime to the democratic order (Budi 2016). Born in 1955, Novanto had built up a trading business in the 1980s and 1990s, forming a commercial alliance with Sudwikatmono, one of Suharto’s cousins. He also sought the patronage of Hayono Isman, a senior Golkar politician, and Wismoyo Arismunandar, the army chief of staff in the mid-1990s. In 1999, he ran for the first post-Suharto legislature, became Golkar’s deputy treasurer, and joined President Habibie’s re-election team. While juggling these campaigns, Novanto became involved in the first big political finance scandal of the democratic era. Through a company that offered debt recovering services, Novanto entered into a deal in January 1999 with the boss of Bank Bali, who sought the repayment of loans from two banks then under the supervision of the Bank Restructuring Agency. Novanto, closely connected to the government, promised Bank Bali to lobby for the return of the funds but asked for a whopping 60 percent of the money as a commission. Thus, Novanto’s company—which found it easy to get the funds released—obtained about Rp 546 billion (US$39 million) from the deal. Once the sum arrived at the company’s account, money was sent to multiple recipients, including another Golkar deputy treasurer. While the case went to trial and one of Novanto’s business partners was imprisoned, Novanto was not charged.

Electorally, Novanto entrenched himself in remote constituencies particularly prone to clientelism and patronage practices (Aspinall and Berenschot 2019). In 1999, he was nominated as a Golkar candidate in East Timor, which was then under the strong control of the Indonesian military. Novanto’s deep ties with the army—which began with Arismundar and were regularly refreshed with each incoming top brass—helped him to win the election in a territory he had no pre-existing relationship with (he was born in Bandung and resided in Jakarta). But as East Timor voted for independence in 1999, Novanto’s constituency was dissolved, and he moved to neighboring East Nusa Tenggara (NTT). From this basis, he easily secured re-election to the DPR another three times between 2004 and 2014. In the corridors of the DPR, it was rumored that Novanto routinely was among the top spenders in each election campaign—a tale that he seemed to have little interest in dispelling. On the contrary, the image of a man of great financial resources was exactly what he wanted to nurture. While building an increasingly wide web of contacts in Jakarta that connected the political and business worlds he operated in, he also became a major commercial player in the DPR constituency he represented. Building hotels, agrobusinesses, and power plants, Novanto treated his constituency as a business opportunity, which he exploited by facilitating additional development funds approved by the very legislature in which he worked as an MP (Seo 2014). His ability to escape the repercussions of the Bank Bali scandal gave him an aura of apparent invincibility, and he continued to test the limits; in 2003, he was involved in a scandal surrounding rice imports from Vietnam, but he once again was able to avoid legal consequences.

Slowly but steadily rising up the ranks, Novanto became chairman of the Golkar caucus in the DPR in 2009. In the following year, he engaged in a brokerage scheme that would eventually lead to his downfall; he worked with corrupt officials in the Ministry of Home Affairs, entrepreneurs, and individual legislators to pass a budget of about Rp 6 trillion (US$428 million) to produce electronic identity cards for every Indonesian citizen. The ministry had tried to get the project approved for some time, but the normal instruments of persuasion—that is, promises of special budget allocations in other areas—had not convinced the DPR to approve it. Legislators knew that there were powerful entrepreneurs who were interested in this project, as well as ministry officials who would get a cut, so DPR brokers wanted their share. Setya Novanto was the chief broker during the debates on the budget revisions in 2011, when a formula for the distribution of the project funds and fees was worked out. Of the total budget, 51 percent would be used for the actual work and 49 percent for commissions. Within the latter, 7 percent would go to ministry officials, 5 percent to legislators in Committee II (which was in charge of the project), 11 percent to Novanto and his team, 11 percent to Anas Urbaningrum and Nazaruddin (the chairman and treasurer of Yudhoyono’s PD respectively), and 15 percent as profit to the entrepreneurs (Gabrillin 2017). It was a project perfectly tailored to Novanto’s talents. The president—who credibly claimed he was not aware of the terms of the agreement—got a long-delayed project approved; Novanto benefitted personally; and money was flushed into the latter’s patronage network.

In 2014, Novanto climbed one step further in the DPR hierarchy, becoming speaker. The regulations of how a DPR speaker was selected had changed several times during the post-Suharto period, with the position open for election in 2004 but automatically filled from the ranks of the largest caucus in 2009. In 2014, the electoral mechanism returned to the competitive model, advantaging Novanto, whose party had only finished second in the preceding legislative ballot. With Widodo’s party coalition in a minority position and Golkar still outside the pro-government alliance, Novanto joined an oppositional ticket of candidates that was put up against a rival team headed by PDI-P’s Puan Maharani. Realizing their imminent defeat, pro-Widodo parties walked out of the proceedings, handing victory to Novanto and his affiliated deputy speaker candidates. But Novanto had no intention of being an oppositional speaker. Instead, he was determined to make the most of his new role as the key bridge between the president and the DPR, making himself indispensable to the former and the supreme broker in the latter. He lost no time letting the president know that he was ready to cooperate. Luhut Pandjaitan, the president’s incoming chief of staff, met Novanto even before his (anticipated) election. “Novanto is very friendly to us—I don’t think there will be any problem with him as speaker,” Luhut said then (interview, Jakarta, September 16, 2014). Indeed, the president’s team believed that Novanto might be easier to work with than Puan, given that the latter had made no secret of her reservations about Widodo’s rise (Mietzner 2014a). Novanto, by contrast, was a pragmatist without any grudges.

Not long after his inauguration, Novanto boasted in meetings with politicians, bureaucrats, and businesspeople that he formed a “triangle” with Widodo and Luhut, and that together, they could bring “99 percent” of policy proposals to completion (DPR 2015). On one such occasion, in June 2015, Novanto met the CEO of Freeport Indonesia, a large gold and copper company operating in Papua. Freeport, which at that time was majority owned by American investors, faced the expiry of its contract in 2021, and it was under pressure to divest shares to the Indonesian government under any new cooperation agreement. In the meeting with Freeport Indonesia’s CEO, Novanto was accompanied by Reza Chalid, a businessman widely associated with shady oil deals during Yudhoyono’s rule (Bareksa 2014). Novanto suggested that he could help Freeport to negotiate an arrangement with the government but indicated that he was interested in obtaining 49 percent of shares in a future electricity plant in Timika from which the company would be obliged to buy set quotas of power (BBC 2015). Chalid, for his part, proposed to the CEO of Freeport that in its divestment, it should give 11 percent of its shares to Widodo and 9 percent to Vice President Kalla. Unbeknown to Novanto, the Freeport CEO recorded the conversation and gave the tape to the reformist minister for mining and energy, Sudirman Said, who reported the case to the DPR’s ethics committee in November. Ironically, Said had been appointed partly to end the government’s entanglement with Chalid’s oil business networks—only to encounter him again in a new role.

But the president did not show any signs that he was pleased with his minister for exposing a major political corruption attempt. On the contrary, Luhut reminded the public that Said had reported the case to the DPR without the president’s knowledge. According to Luhut, it was Said’s report to the DPR that had caused “chaos” and given the government “trouble” (Maharani 2015). The reason for the government’s anger, it appears, was that the affair undermined the president’s chief ally in the DPR. Although Novanto was again able to escape legal repercussions, the political pressure became too strong for him, and he resigned as speaker in December 2015. From the president’s perspective, Novanto’s sudden departure was unwelcome as he left just months after delivering on his promise to get Widodo’s first budget approved without problems. Recall that Widodo had taken office in October 2014 without a parliamentary majority, and that he had defiantly declared he would use last year’s budget if the DPR did not approve his submission. Although Widodo was still formally in a minority position in mid-2015 (Golkar and PPP changed their oppositional leaderships in 2016), his budget sailed through the DPR processes without a single vote of dissent. Novanto had been crucial in this effort, smoothing over any opposition by generously distributing patronage and mediating between the president’s representatives, DPR bodies, and individual legislators. Novanto’s replacement as speaker, Ade Komarudin, was also a Golkar politician, but he was much less experienced in oiling the patronage machine.

Widodo, consequently, helped Novanto to return to his old position as speaker in 2016. The Golkar chairman and Widodo opponent, Aburizal Bakrie, declared his willingness in late 2015 to vacate the party’s leadership, expressing his frustration over the government’s relentless intervention in its affairs. This triggered a race for his replacement, and Novanto—having just resigned as speaker—announced his candidacy. From the beginning, it was clear to all delegates of the extraordinary Golkar congress in May 2016 in Bali that Novanto enjoyed the president’s support. Once again, Luhut—also a Golkar member—played the key operator role. Asked later about the president’s and his support for Novanto, Luhut said, “we know that Novanto isn’t exactly clean. But do you think the others are cleaner? We did our homework, we looked into everyone. With Novanto, the cooperation [as DPR speaker] was good” (interview, Canberra, June 9, 2016). Novanto’s main rival was his replacement as speaker, Komarudin, who was backed by Vice President Kalla. Widodo had no interest in strengthening his vice president, giving him further reasons to support Novanto. On the floor of the congress, senior Golkar politicians who could read the political map collected votes for Novanto, despite their dislike for him. Agus Gumiwang Kartasasmita, who would later become a minister in the Widodo cabinet, was one of them. “We all know who Novanto is, but for Golkar’s positioning vis-à-vis the government, this is the best course,” he said while making calls that helped Novanto gain the upper hand (interview, Nusa Dua, May 17, 2016). Novanto won the Golkar contest, and half a year later, he reclaimed his role as speaker.

After another year as speaker, the KPK finally caught up with Novanto. The anti-corruption agency had for many years unearthed layer after layer of the electronic identity cards scandal, and was ready to make its indictment of Novanto by the middle of 2017. He clung to office until December but then resigned as speaker a second time. In April 2018, he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for his role in the affair. While Widodo had lost Novanto again, there was no need for him to be concerned this time around. Novanto was replaced by Golkar’s Bambang Soesatyo, a politician from Novanto’s mold. The owner of thirteen luxury cars, Soesatyo came to office with a transactional understanding of politics similar to Novanto’s, and the cooperation between the president and the DPR was as smooth under him as it had been under his predecessor. In 2019, when Soesatyo had to make way for Puan as the next DPR speaker,⁴ Widodo made sure that the former remained influential, assisting him in getting elected to the position of MPR chair by acclamation. As the new DPR chairwoman, Puan inherited a well-oiled patronage machine that worked to produce majorities for the president and deliver massive benefits to the legislators running it. Eying the presidency for herself, Puan had little interest in changing this status quo, and so she continued to play her role in maintaining the post-2004 balance between the president and the legislature that has proven so profitable to both sides.

At the heart of coalitional presidentialism studies has been the challenge of presidents to co-exist with legislatures marked by fragmented multi-partyism. In most cases, this is done by creating post-election party coalitions in which the president offers cabinet representation to parties that, in exchange, order their legislators to support the government’s policies when they come up for a vote. Formally, this is what happened in Indonesia. Yudhoyono and Widodo turned initial minority positions in the DPR into large majorities, and they subsequently ruled without significant interruptions by the legislature. But as this chapter has shown, Indonesian presidents have gone far beyond simply securing party support and hoping such support will translate into legislative control. Indonesian legislators are semi-independent political actors that require presidential attention and incentives on their own. In a system where legislative committees and other agencies rather than party caucuses are the central arenas of executive-legislative negotiations, legislators demand concessions that add to, and sometimes contradict, those arranged by party leaderships. Accordingly, presidents must use their powers vis-à-vis the DPR—most importantly, their budgetary authority—to persuade legislators to cooperate. Unsurprisingly, then, the main currency governing the presidential-legislative relationship is budget patronage, with the president engaging in a complex system of brokerage to deliver it to the DPR’s leaders and—often through them—to its individual members.

The apparent smoothness of presidential relations with the legislature, even if compared with Latin American cases of effective coalitional presidentialism, should not mask the intense power struggles behind the scenes. For every unanimous—or in rare cases, majority—vote on a budget or bill, presidents must make hard-fought compromises that can result in bad policy at best or corrupt wastage of public funds at worst. Yudhoyono’s complaints about how the DPR interfered with his government’s budget—and his finance minister’s description of how legislators undermined “rational policy”—are illustrative of executive frustrations in this regard. But it is equally telling that Yudhoyono accepted these sacrifices as the price for a decade of stable rule and that Widodo—despite initial protestations to the contrary—continued this tradition. The cost of the patronage-soaked negotiations with the DPR was higher than just the inconvenience of the president, however. The fact that a figure such as Setya Novanto managed to place himself at the center of the DPR’s relations with the palace—and that a president not only tolerated but actively promoted such a figure—highlighted deep and worsening defects in Indonesia’s democratic polity. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Setya Novanto was in the speaker’s chair not despite but because of his well-known track record of corrupt dealings during the Suharto and post-1998 periods. In other words, Setya Novanto was not an accident, but the outgrowth of both the legislature’s and the president’s need to have a chief broker to make the deals that tie them together.

We have also noted that in some cases, even the vast resources of the presidency are insufficient to purchase the legislature’s cooperation. In the case of the electronic identity cards project, the government had tried for years to gain the DPR’s approval but was ignored every time. Only the intervention of entrepreneurs and rogue bureaucrats with vested interests in the project broke the deadlock and delivered the patronage impetus that legislators had been waiting for. In this instance, external actors pushed a project that enriched themselves but that the president also wanted as part of his policy plans. In other cases, third party actors promoted causes in the DPR that were not only outside of the president’s agenda, but incompatible with it (such as the tobacco clause presumably removed at the request of the cigarette industry). Thus, it is important to recognize that presidents compete with other actors to pursue their legislative goals, and that it is not enough to focus on presidential-legislative relations as the sole analytical arena of coalitional presidentialism research. Presidents need to deal with non-party and non-legislative actors to prevent them from sabotaging their government. In doing so, they have to apply strategies similar to those used to get parties and legislators to cooperate. The rest of this book, consequently, explains how presidents have integrated non-party and non-legislative actors with potential veto power capacity into their broader presidential coalitions, expanding the arena of coalitional presidentialism in the process.