Tom Pepinsky

Category: Islam

  • The Politics of Vice Presidential Picks, Indonesia 2019 Edition (UPDATED 9:20pm EDT)

    Note: please see update at the end of this post.

    Today Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo (a.k.a. Jokowi) announced his nomination for his running mate in the 2019 presidential election as Ma’ruf Amin, head of Indonesia’s Council of Ulema (MUI) and an influential voice for Indonesian Islam affiliated with the traditionalist Nahdhlatul Ulama, widely reported to be the world’s largest Muslim organization.

    Ma’ruf has a history of service in politics, but most recently made headlines for having signed a MUI document in late 2016 that held that former Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaya Purnama (Ahok) had indeed committed blasphemy against Islam. Ahok, a Christian of Chinese descent, was convicted and sent to prison on this charge. Expect Ma’ruf’s role in Ahok’s trial—he was a witness for the prosecution—to be a subject of much discussion in the coming months as Indonesians and others try to ascertain what Ma’ruf’s candidacy means for religious tolerance in Indonesia.

    Stepping back from that issue, though, what do we learn about Indonesian politics from Jokowi’s choice of Ma’ruf as his VP? Vice presidential choices in Indonesia are probably governed by the same considerations that affect VP picks in any presidential system, although Indonesia is perhaps unusual in having basically no norm against dropping a sitting VP at re-election time (which is what Jokowi is doing to current VP Jusuf Kalla).* The idea is that the VP choice addresses your political weaknesses, and shores up support there.

    In 2004, Indonesia’s first direct presidential election, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) chose Kalla as his running mate. Kalla, a big player in the authoritarian successor party Golkar and a Muslim from the island of Sulawesi, thereby helped him to seal up votes and support from key constituencies of “outer islanders,” religious Muslims, and Golkar, which probably was at the time the country’s most important political party.

    In 2009, SBY chose then-Governor of Bank Indonesia Boediono. A non-partisan technocrat, and ethnic Javanese, Boediono’s selection signaled SBY’s confidence in his reelection, which would have allowed him to focus on policymaking rather than shoring up weaknesses among particular electoral constituencies (although history shows this second term to have been something of a disappointment).

    In 2014, Jokowi chose Kalla, largely mirroring SBY’s logic in 2004.

    This brings us to 2019, and Ma’ruf. He is not a party figure like Kalla, nor a technocrat like Boediono. He is from the city of Tangerang, west of Jakarta, so he’s not an outer islander but he is also not ethnic Javanese, but rather Bantenese.** Bantenese, in the Indonesian context, are understood to be observant Muslims. Ma’ruf is also not a charismatic populist, or a wannabe charismatic populist like Prabowo Subianto (Jokowi’s 2014 opponent, whose name circulated as a possible VP choice earlier this year). Ma’ruf is, instead, an institutionally-connected Islamic politician.

    The conclusion to draw is that Jokowi perceives his main vulnerability to be his religious credentials, and that he fears an attack from Indonesia’s Islamists or from those seeking to exploit Islam for political purposes. Such an attack is entirely plausible given the way the 2014 campaign played out and how Indonesian politics has evolved since then. Ma’ruf credentials and public persona ought to make such an attack hard to sustain once he has joined the ticket. In Jokowi’s own words,

    Kami ini saling melengkapi, nasionalis religius

    We complete each other, nationalist religious.

    That, anyway, is Jokowi’s bet.

    NOTES

    * Although Kalla is term limited anyway.
    ** In 2016 he identified himself as orang Banten, or Bantenese. In that article to explains why forcing businesses to close during Ramadhan is a local tradition.

    UPDATE (9:20pm EDT)

    Having read more on the politics surrounding Jokowi’s VP choice, the preceding analysis makes a big assumption that turns out to be erroneous. That is, according to knowledgeable insider accounts of the past two days, Jokowi’s “choice” was not his own. He instead found himself—using the word’s of one expert—“ambushed” by his coalition. They, not he, chose Ma’ruf. Jokowi had intended to select Mahfud MD, a politician with rather different Islamic credentials. (Mahfud’s name had circulated for some time prior to yesterday’s announcement.)

    This changes the interpretation of the politics provided above substantially. It imagines the VP nomination as a coalitional game, which it always was, but one in which the President does not lead. Jokowi did not choose Ma’ruf to shore up a weakness. Jokowi chose Ma’ruf because his coalition determined that Ma’ruf best served its interests, and Jokowi feared that coalition would not survive his rejection of Ma’ruf. Now, I might try to salvage the above analysis by stipulating that that coalition’s interests are also in maximizing reelection probability and that they believe that Ma’ruf’s Islamic credentials accomplish that (fending off the Islamist challenge, etc.), but I won’t try. I will allow others to construct that argument.

    Here’s a case where knowing the actors’ strategies and choices, rather than just their interests, matters tremendously for interpreting the outcomes of complex decisionmaking process.

  • Jakarta’s New Governor Doubles Down on Identity

    Jakarta’s new governor, Anies Baswedan, was inaugurated in a large and highly publicized ceremony last night. After a highly racially and religiously charged gubernatorial campaign that saw Anies defeat incumbent governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama—a Chinese Christian since imprisoned on charges of blasphemy—many Indonesians had hoped for a period of calm. Anies might have contributed to that by delivering a moderately religious but clearly nationalist and inclusivist inauguration address in his first speech as governor.

    This is not what he delivered. Instead, Anies has doubled down on the identitarian religious rhetoric that sustained his campaign and propelled him into office. One particular line from his speech as attracted particular attention among Indonesia’s liberals, progressives, and religious and ethnic minorities:

    Jakarta juga memiliki makna pentingnya dalam kehidupan berbangsa. Di kota ini, tekad satu tanah air, satu bangsa dan satu bahasa persatuan ditegakkan oleh para pemuda. Di kota ini pula bendera pusaka dikibartinggikan, tekad menjadi bangsa yang merdeka dan berdaulat diproklamirkan ke seluruh dunia. Jakarta adalah satu dari sedikit tempat di Indonesia yang merasakan hadirnya penjajah dalam kehidupan sehari-hari selama berabad-abad lamanya. Rakyat pribumi ditindas dan dikalahkan oleh kolonialisme. Kini telah merdeka, saatnya kita jadi tuan rumah di negeri sendiri.

    Jakarta also has a special place in our national life. It was in this city that the youth proclaimed “one country, one nation, one language.” It was in this city that the flag of our heritage was raised, in which our will to become a free and sovereign nation was proclaimed to the whole world. Jakarta is one of a few places in Indonesia that for centuries felt the everyday consequences of the colonial presence. The indigenous people have been oppressed and defeated by colonialism. Today we are free, and it is time for us to become the heads of our own country.

    There are three important observations from this excerpt.

    1. Even after nearly seventy years of independence, colonial legacies matter. Anies is able to compose a powerful political message that invokes the socioeconomic effects of colonialism. Anies (or his speechwriters) believe that this is message that still resonates. In my view, he is right.
    2. This is a presidential speech, not a gubernatorial one. The looks exactly like the speech of a candidate preparing himself for a 2019 presidential run, placing Jakarta at the center of national politics and staking a claim for himself as a national politician. Elsewhere in the speech he invokes folksy sayings from ethnic groups around the archipelago (Acehnese, Batak, Banjar, Madurese, Minahasa, Minang), figuratively pushing a pin in each of Indonesia’s regions and saying “I am speaking to you too.”
    3. Every Indonesian who hears this speech will understand that it is targeting ethnic Chinese Indonesians. Specifically, it is associating Chinese Indonesians with the long colonial period and its legacies on everyday politics. Pribumi is a term that connotes indigeneity, but specifically, it identifies those citizens of Indonesia who are viewed to be descended from foreign populations (Chinese, Arabs, Indians, Europeans, and others). Anies appears to have conveniently forgot that he himself is of Hadrami descent. Alternatively, he might not have forgotten at all, but rather he knows that Indonesia’s wealthy Arab Indonesian elite faces none of the discrimination that Chinese Indonesians face in places like Jakarta. (I have written about this here [PDF].)

    The visual imagery surrounding Anies’s installation reflects similar kinds of politics. One notable banner that has generated much discussion appears below:

    Source: Tagar News

    The full banner reads Terpilihnya Anies – Sandi adalah Simbol Kebangkitan Pribumi Muslim, or “the election of Anies-Sandi is a symbol of the awakening of the indigenous Muslims.”

    The long term consequences of this for Jakarta and Indonesian politics are hard to predict. However, anyone hoping that Anies would revert to the moderate Islamic persona that he had cultivated prior to his gubernatorial campaign must now be disappointed. His lickspittles might argue that his use of non-Muslim religious language at the beginning and end of his speech signals his understanding that Jakarta (like Indonesia) is a religiously diverse city. But this view ignores the reality of Anies’s inauguration: the pribumi/non-pribumi cleavage is alive and well in Indonesian politics, and a leading politician is betting that exploiting this cleavage is good politics.