Ahok is not Jokowi - New Mandala
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New Mandala
New perspectives on Southeast Asia
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Ahok is not Jokowi
The recent election defeat of Jakarta’s Christian governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok) raises
important questions about whether the Indonesian president Joko Widodo (Jokowi) will also fall to
the forces of right wing populism. Jokowi is up for reelection in 2019 and will likely face the same
coalition of parties that defeated Ahok. As other scholars have noted, the same forces of class,
ethnicity, religion, and their interplay will likely feature in the 2019 election.
Ahok’s opponent, Anies Baswedan and his running mate Sandiaga Uno, rallied all the forces of
intolerance: mass mobilisation by the vigilante group Front Pembela Islam and the Islamist Partai
Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS), a rumor campaign that millions of Chinese were coming to Indonesia
illegally and that voters for Ahok would not be buried in Muslim cemeteries, bogus allegations that
Ahok had committed blasphemy against Islam, and Baswedan himself comparing the election to
the 624 CE Battle of Badr when the prophet Muhammad faced an army of non-Muslims. We should
expect to see these tactics again in 2019, when President Jokowi will likely run against former
Lieutenant General Prabowo Subianto and possibly against Baswedan himself.
There is reason to worry about the future of Indonesia’s democracy. The world is in the midst
of democratic instability and decline. Military coups in Thailand and Egypt have pushed those
counties firmly into authoritarianism. Recep Tayyip Erdo?an’s Turkey is no longer a democracy.
The victory of elected strongmen in the Philippines and even the United States bodes poorly for the
future of democracy. Will Indonesia fall sway to the machinations of an autocrat like Prabowo?
And there are further reasons to be concerned about the future. Baswedan was once the archetype
of a ‘moderate Muslim’. He wrote his PhD thesis at the University of Northern Illinois on the
subject of democracy and decentralisation under the renowned political scientist Dwight King. He
spent seven years as Rector of Universitas Paramadina, trying to fill the shoes of the pioneering
democratic theorist Nurcholish Madjid. There is cause for alarm when a pedigreed intellectual like
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Baswedan deploys a craven election strategy. He knows better. Like Donald Trump and the
increase in hate crimes in the US, Baswedan’s campaign rhetoric will make life more difficult for
minorities in Indonesia. But Baswedan chose power over pluralism.
Even more troubling is that Baswedan won on that basis. When moderate Muslim voters reward
such tactics, there is reason to ask whether the civil Islam underpinning Indonesia’s successful
democracy has become prone to radicalism. Will Indonesia fall sway to the machinations of a
demagogue like Baswedan?
Yet, there is reason for optimism, too. Treating Ahok and Jokowi as the same—technocratic
centrists running on a coalition of non-Muslims and liberals—underemphasises their differences.
Jokowi is not Ahok in three ways that matter for 2019.
First and foremost, Jokowi is a Muslim. Ahok is a Christian. Indonesian Muslim civil society leaders
support democracy, pluralism, and the basic rights of non-Muslims but that has never meant they
are in favor of a non-Muslim becoming president or even governor of a city like Jakarta which is
overwhelmingly Muslim. Indonesia’s mass Islamic organisations are largely tolerant but they are
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not liberals who believe anyone should be able to hold any office anywhere, regardless of their
religious affiliation. Political analysts have a hard time understanding Muslim voters that are neither
liberal-secularists nor Islamists, but the overwhelming majority of Indonesian Muslim voters are
neither.
Survey data that I collected among leaders of the Islamic civil society organisations Nahdlatul
Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah in 2010 demonstrates this point most clearly. 86 percent believe
a Christian should be allowed to hold an unspecified government office. Such rates of tolerance are
extraordinarily high for a developing country. Likewise, 77 percent believe Christians should be
allowed to be mayor in Christian-majority Manado. But only 47 percent believe a Christian should
be allowed to become governor in Jakarta. Only 29 percent believe a Christian should be allowed
to be president of Indonesia. And only 20 percent believe a Christian should be allowed to be
mayor in Banda Aceh. In other words, at most 20 percent of Islamic civil society elites hold liberal
views about non-Muslim elected leaders.
If we narrow the survey sample to the leaders of NU alone, the most tolerant of the mass Islamic
organisations, only 52 percent believe a Christian should be allowed to be governor in Jakarta.
Surveys by Saiful Mujani and R. William Liddle, and by Robin Bush, suggest that the leaders of the
mass Islamic organisations are slightly more tolerant than the members, and the members are
about 10 percent more tolerant than the broader Muslim public. That means a Christian’s winning
the governor’s office without Jokowi’s coattails was always a long shot. We should be cautious
about drawing conclusions about Jokowi’s election prospects from Ahok’s defeat.
Second, Ahok was extremely vulnerable to Baswedan’s smear campaign. Unless Jokowi does
something heroically stupid, a blasphemy campaign will not stick to Jokowi in the same way that it
did Ahok. There are also strategies that Jokowi can use to defend himself that were unavailable to
Ahok.
Baswedan is not the first unsavory politician to claim the mantle of ‘defending Islam’ in order to
win political power. Baswedan’s predecessors include Madjelis Islam A’la Indonesia (MIAI) in the
1930s, Masyumi in the 1950s, Sukarno in the 1960s, and Amien Rais in the 1990s and 2000s,
among others. In the 1930s, the MIAI was a coalition of Muslim organisations united by their
shared antipathy to heterodox interpretations of Islam; in that instance, defending Islam worked.
Likewise, in 1965 President Sukarno successfully mobilised support from Muslim organisations on
the grounds of defending Islam against animist and mystical religious sects in Java. Defending
Islam against threats of heterodoxy and blasphemy is often useful to politicians trying to transform
a latent Muslim identity into one that is politically salient.
But a common tactic is not always a winning one. In the 1950s, Masyumi failed to hold together a
coalition of Islamic organisations because modernist Muslims like Muhammad Natsir marginalised
NU’s influence. More recently, Amien Rais deployed the politics of demagoguery in the 1990s
and again in the 2014 election in support of Prabowo, but has had limited success. In both
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instances, NU prevented a single group from speaking on behalf of Islam. Such history provides
lessons for 2019. Moderates from NU, Muhammadiyah, and other pluralist Muslim organisations
will be crucial to defending Jokowi against the charge that he is a ‘threat to Islam’.
Ironically, NU and Muhammadiyah’s formal distance from electoral politics has had a paradoxical
result for democracy. By adhering to the liberal prescription to formally separate religion and
politics, they have weakened their ability to steer their followers in the direction of pluralism.
Nonetheless, some affinity exists and it is worth Jokowi’s attempting to gain support from Islamic
civil society.
Many observers would prefer that religion be ‘off the table’ of Indonesian politics, which is why
they savaged Jokowi’s admission that religion is inevitably involved in politics. But Jokowi was
correct. Survey data tells us that voters overwhelmingly expect their elected representatives to
believe in God and to bring religious values to bear on social issues. State institutions reflect those
preferences through religious education, mandatory membership in a recognised religion,
limitations on inter-religious marriage, restrictions on blasphemy, restrictions on inter-religious
proselytising, and other policies. Indonesian democracy is not secular in any meaningful sense of
the term, which means that candidates for office often align with powerful religious movements.
Third, Jokowi is Javanese. Ahok is Chinese. Jokowi’s Javanese background is likely to be
beneficial in 2019. Without more fine-grained data, is difficult to know whether Ahok’s ethnicity,
religion, blunt manner, or the campaign to ‘defend Islam’ cost him the most votes. Simplistic
depictions of voters as either primordialist or rational ignore the complex ways that identity
influences political behavior even in industrialised democracies.
From Jacksonville to Jakarta, ethnic similarity provides a way for politicians to establish trust with
voters from different religious backgrounds. In Indonesia, Muslims from religious diverse ethnic
groups like Balinese, Dayak, and Javanese tend to be more religiously tolerant than Muslims from
more religiously homogenous ethnicities like Sundanese, Acehnese, and Sasak. So, for example, a
Javanese Christian would likely have done better among Javanese voters than a Chinese
Christian. Given Baswedan’s Hadrami heritage, Jokowi may have a comparative advantage in
being able to appeal to Javanese voters.
That does not mean Jokowi should play the bumiputra (son of the soil) card in the 2019 election.
Again, demagoguery has no place in democratic politics. The long term health of the country
depends on the leaders of the state and society promoting the values that make democracy
work—tolerance, equality, liberty, and popular sovereignty—against the visions of xenophobic
nationalism and strategic intolerance harnessed by demagogue and autocrats.
...............
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Jeremy Menchik is Assistant Professor in the Fredrick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at
Boston University. His recent book, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without
Liberalism (left) explains what tolerance means to the leaders of the world's largest Islamic
organisations and elucidates the implications for democracy.
You can follow him on Twitter at @jeremymenchik.
Header and article photo: jars of indelible ink at a polling booth in Indonesia's 2009
legislative elections. Taken by the author.
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