The eruption of protests across Indonesia from 25 August expressed pent-up anger at the greed and hubris of political elites, prompting comparisons with the 1998 mass mobilisation that helped end Soeharto’s dictatorship.

But this latest unrest — which saw at least 10 fatalities, attacks on government buildings and ransacking of politicians’ private residences — was much more a product of the present-day confluence of dysfunctional democratic accountability mechanisms and a deepening economic malaise.

A key element of the  democratic backsliding, led by former president Joko Widodo, was the reduction of Indonesia’s once-intractable national legislature to a rubber-stamp function. Widodo used a mix of patronage and legal coercion to  gain leverage over party bosses and, by extension, their legislative caucuses.

The upshot was that the street became a key arena for civil society to  contest the fruits of the legislative processes out of which they were increasingly frozen out. Widodo’s presidency saw some of the biggest anti-government protests since the fall of Soeharto. But thanks to his keen instinct for public sentiment and his close monitoring of opinion polls, Widodo was quicker to grasp than many of his critics that, as long he kept his lower-class base happy on hip-pocket issues, he could brush off attacks from progressive civil society.

Less than a year into his presidency, Prabowo Subianto is already more dominant over the elite than Widodo ever was, replicating his predecessor’s mix of patronage and coercion to enforce rigid discipline within his six-party governing coalition and to deter the two non-Cabinet parties from mounting any meaningful opposition. Yet, an increasingly palpable economic slowdown suggests the current wave of protests may be symptomatic of longer-term risks to Prabowo’s popularity – and potentially his dominance over other elites.

Having long posed as a tribune of the downtrodden, Prabowo is undoubtedly rattled by the working-class frustration signalled by the prominent role motorbike rideshare drivers played in August’s protests. Even on the eve of the unrest, technocrats and politicians in Jakarta were voicing concern about a dangerous insularity at the top levels of government, where Prabowo’s bullish outlook on the results of his dirigiste policy agenda goes unchallenged.

The protests still may not shake Prabowo’s complacency about  the economy. He has, so far, confidently stared down entrenched political and bureaucratic interests to radically restructure the national budget in favour of his key programs – including by slashing transfers to local governments, many of whom are now also the target of angry protests after slashing services and raising taxes in response. Prabowo has a mutually suspicious relationship with big business, especially Indonesia’s mostly ethnic Chinese-owned major conglomerates, who have been all but ordered to ramp up their support for his initiatives, including through  lending long-term capital well below market rates to Danantara, the new sovereign wealth fund.

Indonesian experts and technocrats are growing more publicly critical — and are privately scathing — of the rushed implementation and sustainability of policy initiatives like Prabowo’s  signature free meals program, set to cost more than A$31 billion in 2026 and a dubious village co-operatives scheme. Prabowo’s programs seem set in stone. If schemes like the free meals and cooperatives have a stimulatory effect on rural economies, they could turn out to be a political asset for him.

But he is yet to put forward a credible plan to address the big structural problems undermining Indonesia’s development ambitions – a shrinking manufacturing sector, waning consumption and the dominance of capital-intensive but labour-light industries as targets of foreign investment. Indonesia’s middle class is now in marked decline and young Indonesians — who  backed Prabowo by enormous margins in the 2024 elections — face a  deepening crisis of access to good formal-sector jobs.

Despite worries about whether “Prabowonomics” is fit for purpose, it has faced effectively no opposition from politicians, thanks to an atmosphere of deep trepidation about the consequences of being seen to frustrate the president’s agenda. Like many business owners and bureaucrats, political party leaders remain exposed to the threat of prosecution for corruption. Whatever their misgivings about Prabowo’s leadership, they “have no choice, because they know the president can replace them, or put them behind bars, at any time”, explained a senior figure from a government party in an August interview.

Detecting whether Prabowo’s coalition partners are risking their popularity by being tied to him, is harder than it ought to be, because of an unusual dearth of opinion polling. Elites, pollsters and media outlets are wary of embarrassing Prabowo by publishing — or even commissioning — surveys that would inevitably show Prabowo’s approval down from the 80% he scored in the last round of polls in January. Whether the ongoing protests are symptomatic of a wholesale collapse in public confidence in the administration, or an expression of more concentrated pockets of anger, is for now a matter of guesswork.

The political consequences of a sustained slump in the collective economic mood could be profound. Most Indonesians were willing to tolerate Widodo’s sabotage of democratic institutions because of the concurrent steady improvements in living standards. Some analysts have compared this dynamic  to the Cold War-era developmentalist bargain that marked Soeharto’s New Order regime.

If the state fails to deliver on its side of the bargain, it will have ramifications not just for Prabowo’s popularity, but also for the foundations of the political model that has safeguarded Indonesia’s democratic stability — even at the cost of its democratic quality — for the past quarter century.

Liam Gammon is a research fellow at the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research at The Australian National University and a member of the East Asia Forum editorial board.

This article draws on the Political Update paper the author will present at the 2025  _ANU Indonesia Update conference__. Readers can_  _register_ to watch the conference live via Zoom beginning 9am AEST on 12 September 2025.

Republished from EastAsia Forum, 7 September 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.