Despite a stable economy and popular policies, Jokowi's re-election campaign has demonstrated a cynical side
once a roadside food stall in Kampung Baru, a village in eastern Java, a group of housewives is preparing food for a wedding. One shaves the last morsels of meat from a chicken carcass. Another chops vegetables while keeping an eye on a huge bubbling wok. Between chores, they happily answer questions about politics. Life in the village is slowly improving, they say. The main road has been paved and widened. One says a new health-insurance scheme has helped her pay for cold and cough medicine.
Such tendencies are nothing new to Indonesia. Sukarno, the country’s first president, having overseen an unstable parliamentary democracy in the 1950s, relied on the army to back a regime of “guided democracy” from 1957 onwards. In 1965 the army used a failed coup, blamed on the Communists, to tighten its grip on power. Hundreds of thousands died in the anti-Communist purge that followed, after which Sukarno was replaced by General Suharto, a kleptocrat.
Jokowi has also tried to boost infrastructure spending by other branches of government. He has implemented and championed a law passed under Mr Yudhoyono which sends government money directly to village leaders, bypassing district heads who are often corrupt and likely to steal it. In 2018 these payments reached $4bn split across 75,000 villages. There is no reliable third-party assessment of how well this has been spent.
Jokowi has also become more of an economic interventionist. In December he finalised the nationalisation of Grasberg, the world’s largest gold mine and second-largest copper mine, previously owned by Freeport-McMoRan, an American firm, and Rio Tinto, an Anglo-Australian one. “Reclaiming national resources” in this way was popular at home, but it may well make foreigners unwilling to invest in the country in years to come.
In the same year Basuki Tjahajha Purnama, known as Ahok, a popular governor of Jakarta who had been Jokowi’s deputy, was falsely accused of insulting the Koran. After huge protests he lost an election and was jailed for blasphemy. Jokowi said nothing. Again, he acted only later, when the government arrested some religious leaders and banned Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, a hardline but non-violent Muslim group which had been involved in the protests. After that he sought a level of conciliation.
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