LATE last year Joko Widodo, then governor of Jakarta, Indonesia’s
vast and messy capital, took Banyan with him on one of his daily blusukan or “spot-check”
inspections of the city—to Benhil, a dilapidated market. We were joined by a
flock of local press and hangers-on, but only three security guards. On October
13th Jokowi, as he is known, took another visitor, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook,
to another Jakarta market, Tanah Abang. Not only does Jokowi, now
president-elect, keep better company these days; he is also trailed by a
security detail numbering dozens, including snipers. At Benhil, he chatted at
length with stallholders in his direct, unassuming way; at Tanah Abang he and
Mr Zuckerberg lasted barely quarter of an hour.
That it will be harder to drop in on ordinary Indonesians and
chew the fat seems a small price to pay for the highest office in the land. But
Jokowi, who was inaugurated as Indonesia’s
seventh president on October 20th, says he intends to govern the country as he
did Jakarta, and before that Solo, the town in central Java where he was first
elected mayor in 2005. That is, he wants to retain his contacts with the people
who elected him, and use his personal popularity to sweep political obstacles
aside.
Adapting
this approach to leading a country of 250m people, however, will not be easy.
Foreign policy, for example, does not lend itself to blusukan, and in his first
month in office Jokowi will be plunged into a whirlwind of summitry in China,
Myanmar and Australia (which he may duck out of). And even at home, political
troubles have been piling up since he won the presidential election in July.
Jokowi, the little man, the first from outside the metropolitan elite to lead
the country, takes office looking less like the vanguard of a triumphant
reformist army and more like the leader of a beleaguered opposition.
The
most obvious problem is that he lacks a parliamentary majority. A “red-and-white”
coalition of parties marshalled by Prabowo Subianto, the presidential candidate
whom Jokowi defeated in July, controls the new parliament convened on October
1st as it did the outgoing one. Jokowi has disdained the horse-trading that
presidents use to buy parliamentary support, typically by offering cabinet
posts for votes. Well, almost: he has retreated from his hope of a cabinet
stacked with independent technocrats. But he still intends to give “professionals”
fully 18 seats out of 34. The remaining 16 are barely enough to satisfy his own
Indonesian Party of Democratic Struggle, the PDI-P, and its coalition, let
alone to win over the opposition. The cabinet will be scrutinised for evidence
of whether Jokowi really is his own man.
The
red-and-whites have already done mischief. They have overturned the practice of
giving the parliamentary speakership to the largest party—the PDI-P in this
case—in favour of a vote, which the red-and-whites won. More egregiously, they
passed a bill to abolish direct elections for hundreds of local posts (such as
mayor of Solo and governor of Jakarta) and to have the jobs filled by indirect
elections in local legislatures instead. Since the red-and-whites control 31
out of 34 provinces, and Indonesian government is highly decentralised, this
would enormously complicate the president’s job. It would also represent the
old establishment’s revenge on reforms that allowed outsiders such as Jokowi to
rise to the top. It might make him the first and last president from outside
the elite. His outgoing predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, overturned the
new law by presidential decree. But his veto still has to be ratified by a vote
in the new parliament.
It
is not just the opposition Jokowi has to worry about. He also has to keep the
PDI-P happy, which means deferring to its leader, Megawati Sukarnoputri,
daughter of the country’s founder and a former president herself. That
complicates, for example, efforts to patch things up with Mr Yudhoyono and his
Democrat Party. She has never forgiven him for replacing her as president.
Jokowi’s vice-president, Jusuf Kalla, who returns to a job he held under Mr
Yudhoyono in 2004-09, is a veteran political operator. But having an
influential and capable deputy may well turn out to be a mixed blessing.
The
third big difficulty is that Jokowi assumes the presidency at a time when the
economy is slowing, the outlook is clouded and it appears harder than it has
for some time to fulfil his long-held mission. He wants to show that democracy
is capable of working as an economic proposition in producing leaders who can
improve the lives of the poor Indonesians who elected them. To have the money
to do that, he needs to cut the fuel subsidies that consume about one-fifth of
the government’s budget. Despite the recent fall in the oil price, this still
means sharply higher fuel costs for consumers, and hence demands for higher
than usual settlements in the minimum-wage negotiations due in the coming
months. Parliamentary weakness will make it harder for Jokowi to resist
populist pressures.
Power
to the people
Jokowi’s
enduring popularity, however, remains a great advantage. His strategy is to use
it to embarrass the politicians into doing his bidding, and to intervene
directly to remove blockages to progress—in the landownership wrangles, for
example, that can delay the big infrastructure projects Indonesia so badly
needs. And Jokowi did not become the first Indonesian since independence in
1945 to rise from nowhere to the presidency without also acquiring some skills
in close-quarter political fighting. Both within the PDI-P and in dealing with
the parliamentary majority, he will need them. The red-and-whites have promised
to use their power “to investigate and to obstruct”. But under the Indonesian
constitution, the executive branch also has considerable power. The
red-and-whites’ hope, for example, to neuter the anti-corruption commission,
the KPK, will be impossible to realise so long as Jokowi stands firm. He may
lead the opposition, but he does so with the power of the presidency. By Banyan
for The Economist
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