Hello friends!

A very special Thursday newsletter today as Indonesia sits on the edge of a constitutional crisis. 

I feel a bit frantic writing this today. There’s so much we don’t know still and a lot to play out. I would also like to offer a major disclaimer that I’ve almost certainly missed some things here or gotten a bit of the legal stuff off a smidge. This is certainly not intentional and I welcome any feedback — a big learning curve here for a lot of people, I think!

I had a brilliant chat last night with Kevin O’Rourke of Reformasi and Wahyu Dhyatmika from Tempo. It is super illuminating (I swear you’ll be able to hear pieces of the puzzle click in my brain in real-time) and I’m looking forward to sharing that when it’s ready to go later today.

But I have never seen anything like the response to this. Protests are planned in the capital today and tomorrow. Keep an eye out, this has the potential to be very, very big. 

Stay safe out there!

Erin Cook

🇮🇩 A crisis looms

On Tuesday, the country’s Constitutional Court rolled back a law that requires political parties to have x amount of seats in the local legislature before nominating candidates. Few parties anywhere clear that hurdle outright and most are jumping into the very broad coalition tent. 

In the immediate, this would mean races across the archipelago that are currently only fielding one candidate — largely backed by the mammoth coalition behind Prabowo Subianto — could become competitive. A number of races, including Jakarta, are facing the possibility of just one candidate pairing against the ‘empty box’ option. This ruling frees up the minimum eligibility for a party from the current 20% of seats in the local legislative to around 10%. 

No, that’s not right, says the Legislation Body of the House (Baleg). In record speed, the House passed a reform to the election law yesterday, which would render the ruling moot. Now, it just has to go to the Constitutional Court for approval and it’s all over. Hang on a second. 

Also on Tuesday, the Court overruled the Supreme Court’s earlier decision that would recognise the minimum age requirement of would-be candidates from 30 at the point of registration to 30 at inauguration. As Kevin O’Rourke said in the soon-to-be-dropped Reformasi episode: this affects only one very prominent 29-year-old. Kaesang Pangarep, the youngest son of Jokowi, has his eye on running as deputy governor in Central Java. 

Under the DPR’s readings, it’s the Supreme Court ruling that needs to be abided by. “Yesterday the decision refused. Rejecting it does not mean cancelling the existing article and not removing it, does not change the existing article. The article in the Pilkada Law is only called 30 years old, it is not stated when,” Baleg deputy chair Achmad Baidowi said, as reported by VOI.

President Jokowi hasn’t said much. He’s offered a few ‘let’s respect our institutions’ — though doesn’t say which institution ought to be respected — lines, as per Reuters. Defence Minister and President-elect Prabowo Subianto has dodged it all, he’s been out my way enjoying Canberra’s fake spring for defence treaty talks that, God bless Australia, is so far down the list of priorities in Jakarta right now it has not hit the front page of any online daily.   

Titi Anggraini, a well-known elections and legal expert from the University of Indonesia, issued a written statement yesterday that has cut through the noise and has been widely covered. The court’s decision is final and binding, she said. “If it is overruled, then there has been a defiance of the constitution and if it is allowed to continue, then the 2024 elections are unconstitutional and not legitimate to be held,” she said, as per CNN Indonesia. 

It’s hard to overstate what an immense moment this is. (I almost said it! I almost said the ‘crossroads’!) The rules have been pushed, bent and changed so much in the last 12 months to get this coalition what it needs for electoral dominance, human and political rights activists, legal experts and other fellow travellers have sounded an alarm which was never heeded. This feels like something else. This feels like it’s been pushed so far, the rules have snapped. 

I am certainly no Indonesian law expert. I will be closely watching what people like Titi have to say, as well as the analysis pages of the various nerd-blogs. My interests lean toward people’s movements and how politics is discussed online. So when I first saw a University of Indonesia student post about digging out the yellow jacket and getting the bus up to Senayan, ooh! 

Demonstrations are planned for today and tomorrow out the front of Parliament in Senayan. These already feel different to similar student and union-led protests of the recent past. Protests against legal reforms that would dull workers’ rights, defang the anti-corruption body and loosen environmental protections in favour of industry were sizable and met with heavy-handed law enforcement. These failed to break through for a number of reasons — the pandemic is underrated here, I think — and have, erroneously, been written off as stillborn attempts by younger Indonesians to live out 1998 dreams. It’s a very ungenerous reading that probably reflects the wider support for Jokowi in the electorate at the time. 

This has cut through in a way I, personally, have not seen before. The blue Peringatan Darurat (Emergency Warning) image has completely taken over the internet. And not from the usual suspects either (that is, my friends). Ainun Najib, the force behind a number of online initiatives to track elections and COVID-19, has compiled a list here of all those who have reposted the image. It includes film directors, anti-corruption advocates, stand-up comedians and football supporter groups (wildly influential at times). 

To my reading, there are two drivers here. The first is this is so blatant it’s offensive. Put the dance on a little bit or something. The second driver is best summed up in an image of an expensive sandwich: 

The sandwich, shot in the US and I think it’s like that lobster roll thing they do there?, cost an outrageous IDR400k (around USD$26). Enjoyed by Kaesang and posted by his wife Erina to Instagram, it’s gone astronomically viral. The comparisons to Marie Antoinette are so obvious it’s almost on the nose, but users online are getting a lot of mileage out of it. 

Because it underscores a key problem here. These arrests of democracy are coming at a time of extraordinary economic stress. Indonesia is not immune to the cost of living crisis happening everywhere and seeing this goddamned sandwich posted without a thought of how it would look to a people who must feed whole families for much less and enjoyed by the man whose name on a ticket is apparently worth breaking the constitution for really smarts. 

I don’t know what happens next. I do know that we should expect some extraordinary footage and photos from Jakarta in the coming days and I’m very interested to see if similar protests crop up elsewhere in the country. 

We’ll be back!