Can This Emerging Market Icon Put Authoritarian Rule Behind It?
It would be ironic if Jokowi, elected as an outside reformer, made Indonesia an inside game. The president should leave office in 2024.
Another run?
Photographer: Michael Nagle/BloombergA central plank of Indonesia’s democracy is being gnawed away by allies of President Joko Widodo. Important officials are canvassing the idea that he cling to power beyond the end of his second five-term in 2024, a contentious step the popular leader refuses to disavow. Such a casual view of the constitution, that it can altered when inconvenient, is dangerous and risks setting the emerging market icon back decades.
Prolonging the tenure of Jokowi, as he’s known, would put the world’s fourth-most populous country on a path toward authoritarianism. That’s the very thing he was supposed to be the antithesis of when elected as a populist reformer eight years ago. Jokowi isn’t about to replicate Suharto, the general who seized power in a bloody anti-Communist purge in 1965 and ruled for three decades. The present intrigue is nevertheless worrying, because it suggests powerful sections of the Jakarta elite clearly find key elements of democracy tiresome. They would love to devise a workaround.