Last week, thousands of protesters converged on Indonesia’s national parliament in Jakarta to condemn a recent hike in lawmakers’ pay amid deepening economic hardship. Several members of parliament dismissed these concerns, with some openly mocking critics.
Public anger turned into nationwide outrage after a video surfaced showing a police truck running over a motorcycle taxi driver during the protest. Enraged demonstrators torched police stations and local parliament buildings in multiple cities, where at least nine more people died. Crowds also looted homes of the three lawmakers accused of mocking the public, as well as Finance Minister Sri Mulyani, who has been leading the government’s austerity measures.
Scenes of widespread chaos prompted comparisons to the violence of the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis, which toppled Suharto’s thirty-one-year rule. The turmoil that followed brought widespread ethnic violence and rapid leadership turnover, instilling a deep fear of inter-elite conflict.
Subsequently, Indonesia’s democratic architecture was designed to accommodate rivals through collusive power-sharing among political, economic, and social elites. This bargain has delivered stability—the past two elected presidents each completed two uninterrupted terms. But it has also produced an untenable accountability deficit, making elected officials unanswerable to voters. This collusive setup has been largely underwritten by a growing economy, which allowed politicians to pass on temporary dividends to the poor without meaningful representation.
Last week’s extraordinary events come on the back of a decade of authoritarian revival. Caught between economic precarity and a hollowed-out democracy, Indonesia’s most vulnerable have risen to set limits on those in power, making clear that stability and accountability can no longer be traded off.
President Prabowo Subianto, who played a key role in the Suharto regime as a senior general, has long cast mass protests as foreign-backed destabilization. He is unlikely to heed calls for reform, but can he show restraint?
Economic Pain Forges Broad Protest Coalition
Mass protests have been a recurring feature of Indonesian politics over the past decade, but not at this scale or intensity. A key factor behind the current escalation is an economic slowdown, partly due to global uncertainty but also to the large welfare bill and glaring budget deficit bequeathed to Prabowo by his predecessor, Joko Widodo. But chaotic policymaking within Prabowo’s oversized cabinet has made matters worse at a time when prudence is most needed.
The implementation of severe austerity measures to fund his flagship free-meals program for students and pregnant women has intensified the strain on local economies that still depend heavily on public spending. A series of ill-conceived policies, including the rollout of a new tax-collection system, has further angered citizens struggling to get by.
In May, growth slipped below 5 percent for the first time since the pandemic. Observers have warned of weak domestic demand and a faltering manufacturing sector. Mass layoffs have impacted tens of thousands of workers, youth unemployment remains high, and informal workers—the largest share of the labor force—face increasingly uncertain livelihoods.
This downturn has fostered a shared sense of grievance and a broader protest coalition than seen in recent years. Student groups and labor unions that have historically led mass protests in Indonesia. During Widodo’s presidency from 2014 to 2024, they staged frequent, nationwide demonstrations, but a sophisticated system of repression and harassment kept these anti-deregulation and pro-democracy actions short-lived. Now, with the economy weakening, the stakes are higher, and they are back on the streets.
Another factor that sets the current wave of protests apart is the scale of participation by a particular class of informal workers: ride-hailing motorcycle drivers (ojol). There are more than 1 million ojol in Greater Jakarta alone, and they constitute a significant workforce in other major cities. Earning the minimum wage during this downturn means working long hours, with no job protection or benefits. Many are saddled with debt for smartphones and motorbikes needed for work.
Relative to other informal workers, ojol are highly networked: They wear visible uniforms, gather at common waiting areas, and communicate through smartphones and social media. In the past few years, they have organized several protests to demand fair-pay regulation and minimum-fare rules, winning a few one-off concessions. The broader economic strain has now pushed them to the forefront of a wider protest movement.
An Untenable Accountability Deficit
These economic grievances are being voiced in the streets rather than settled in parliament because channels of democratic representation and accountability are effectively shut.
Patronage and pervasive vote-buying have stripped parties of their role as vehicles of representation, turning interactions between voters and politicians mainly transactional. The high cost of entry into politics means that the field is dominated by the wealthy, widening the gap between lawmakers and their constituents. Recent research finds that legislators’ preferences track upper-income voters more closely than the poor who elect them.
While elected officials are disconnected from voters, they are closely allied with one another. In a collusive power-sharing system, parties fight at election time but then rush to join postelection alliances with the presidential winner in exchange for lucrative ministerial posts. Under former president Susilo Yudhoyono, who pioneered the practice of oversized coalitions in Indonesia, there was still room for dissent; for example, his allies in parliament voted against unpopular fuel subsidy cuts he tried to push through in 2013.
But over the past decade, Jokowi revived authoritarian practices of the Suharto regime to dismantle checks on executive power. Threats of investigations and intervention in party leadership coerced loyalty from lawmakers, compromising their oversight function. The result was a spate of far-reaching regulations—most notably the procedurally flawed Job Creation Law—that stripped labor and environmental protections. Leaders of Indonesia’s large Islamic mass organizations, once a counterweight to narrow political interests, were also brought firmly into the government’s orbit with mining concessions.
Prabowo has continued this integralist approach, even explicitly stating his dislike of political opposition, casting it as a Western import. He currently commands just over 80 percent of seats in parliament. The party that holds the remaining seats, PDI-P, insists it is “outside the government” rather than “in opposition,” as its secretary general and other figures who opposed Prabowo in 2024 are entangled in corruption probes.
But while Jokowi could offset his assault on checks and balances with economic dividends for voters, today’s slowing economy offers far less fiscal room for Prabowo—and with it, far less political capital. With most prominent figures co-opted into the ruling coalition, few credible leaders are left to be called upon to calm the public and build communication.
Impunity for Police Violence
The most immediate driver of this round of protests is unchecked police repression and a long-standing pattern of impunity.
The Indonesian National Police was separated from the military in 1999 to build a civilian force distinct from the military, which was widely discredited at the time due to its role in bolstering the Suharto regime. Over the past two decades, the police budget has soared while reform and oversight have lagged. Under Jokowi, the police force became an extension of presidential power when its leadership was stacked with loyalists.
The current police chief, appointed by Jokowi in 2021, has presided over a series of scandals, including repeated allegations of excessive force in land evictions and the 2022 Kanjuruhan Stadium tragedy, where the use of tear gas inside the closed venue resulted in a crowd crush that killed 135 people. In case after case, disciplinary measures have largely fallen on lower ranks, with limited top-level accountability.
Today, surveys place the police among Indonesia’s least trusted institutions, on par with parliament and political parties. Recent images of officers being chased from protest sites and stations set ablaze evoke the upheaval of 1998—only now it is the police, rather than the military, in the public’s crosshairs.
Reform Is Unlikely, but Restraint Is Essential
While the current protests echo those of 1998, there are important differences. Indonesia’s economy is slowing, but nowhere near the devastation caused by the Asian Financial Crisis. Public anger today is aimed chiefly at lawmakers, the police, and cabinet members. Most protesters are not rejecting Prabowo’s authority but are instead urging him to use it to enact reforms and hold his allies to account.
Prabowo is unlikely to heed this call for two reasons. First, he is personally suspicious of the protesters’ motives. In his weekend speech, he acknowledged the need to respect “pure aspirations,” but in the same breath, he instructed the police to take strict action against “treasonous” and “terrorist” acts. He also repeated, almost verbatim, his familiar stump line that Indonesia is on the verge of takeoff, yet vulnerable to forces that are trying to weaken it, mirroring how he has long described the 1998 crisis. Second, he has surrounded himself with loyalists, most with military backgrounds. His closest advisers either share his suspicions or would be unwilling to challenge his views.
Prabowo will likely try to ride out the protests with shallow concessions of the sort announced over the weekend: promising an investigation of police officers accused of running over a demonstrator, revoking lawmakers’ pay hike, and dismissing five legislators accused of mocking public sentiment.
The question is what happens when these measures fail to appease the protesters. The effect of last week’s events is hard to overestimate, and as long as the economy remains fragile, similar demonstrations may return with greater ferocity.
Prabowo’s role in bolstering the Suharto regime, including credible allegations of abducting pro-democracy activists in the leadup to 1998, has long fed fears about his capacity for using violence. The recent invocations of “treason” have similarly raised the prospect of a military emergency that would suspend democratic rights. His quest for foreign adulation may once have moderated his instincts, but in a world friendlier to autocrats, it may no longer be a reliable constraint.
Even short of extreme measures, signs point to increased repression. The ongoing protests are largely leaderless. Over the past decade, the security forces have grown adept at deterring mobilization through targeted arrests and digital surveillance that create a chilling effect. While this may pause the unrest, it is likely to deepen grievances and heighten the risk of more violent confrontations in the future.
Another risk of prolonged unrest is the emergence of spoilers looking to exploit the chaos for personal or organizational gain. The long-standing rivalry between the Indonesian police and the military has intensified after a recent law considerably expanded the military’s functions. It is already becoming a flashpoint in this crisis. The army has denied allegations that its officers were involved in inciting the violence. Increased deployment of the military to deal with the protests could be seen as an attempt to widen its remit and claw back primacy in the security architecture.
A Repression–Mobilization Spiral
Steady economic growth muted the consequences of democratic decline in Indonesia for the past decade. That padding is gone.
Economic strain is pushing Indonesia into a new phase of the repression–mobilization spiral, raising the odds of escalation on the streets and anxiety among domestic and foreign investors, as well as concern in neighboring capitals.
Two recent cases of popular uprisings offer stark warnings against the use of heavy-handed measures to suppress widespread economic grievances. In Bangladesh, brutal crackdowns boomeranged; in Sri Lanka, chaotic governance paired with repression deepened the crisis. Both resulted in violent showdowns.
Prabowo must exercise restraint in dealing with protesters and look for ways to provide short-term relief by reallocating resources from his costly flagship projects. Any crackdown or militarization risks escalation and could entrench an intractable crisis.
