Archive for the ‘Democracy’ Category

Pro-Israel but anti-Netanyahu: Democratic Party leaders try to find the middle ground – The Conversation Indonesia

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on March 14, 2024, The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel. It was an extraordinary public criticism of a longtime ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, by an American government official.

Against the background of imminent famine in Gaza, Schumer, the top Democrat in Congress and the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the U.S., said Netanyahu was an obstacle to peace and called for new elections in Israel.

Leading Democratic senators praised Schumers speech, while the GOP panned it. President Joe Biden said it was a good speech that raised concerns shared not only by him but by many Americans.

The Conversations senior politics and democracy editor, Naomi Schalit, interviewed scholar Dov Waxman about Schumers speech. Waxman, an expert on both Israeli politics and the American Jewish communitys relationship with Israel, described the speech as a watershed moment in the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Netanyahus response to Schumer was, The people of Israel will choose when they will have elections, and who theyll elect. What does Schumers speech mean for Netanyahu, both in the U.S. and in Israel?

I dont think most Israelis are paying much attention to what Schumer said. Theyre focused on the war and especially on the current negotiations to secure a cease-fire and hostage agreement.

But Schumer is right that the vast majority of Israelis have completely lost confidence in Netanyahu and his government and want him to be replaced as prime minister. Yet there isnt majority support for immediate elections. A plurality of Israelis want early elections to take place after the war ends. At the same time, I think the positions Schumer was putting forward particularly about the need to create a Palestinian state are not ones that are widely shared by most Israelis.

Schumers speech matters more for American politics than for Israeli politics. It marks the culmination of a process thats been underway for some time, whereby the Democratic Party has increasingly turned against Netanyahu. This is not just the progressive wing of the Democratic Party but also the moderate wing and the most pro-Israel Democrats. Schumer is one of the most pro-Israel senators in American history. Hes had a long relationship with Netanyahu and was considered a friend of Netanyahu. So, the break between Democrats and Netanyahu is now complete. Netanyahu has clearly become persona non grata for the Democrats.

What was Schumers strategy in giving the speech?

What Schumer, and to some extent the Biden administration, are doing is trying to position the Democratic Party as anti-Netanyahu but not anti-Israel. They want to make a distinction that it is possible and indeed necessary to take issue with Netanyahus policies, but that doesnt mean that youre not supporting Israel.

Thats an attempt to triangulate between the different political pressures that the Democrats are under and the political risks that Democrats now face. President Bidens strong support for the war in Gaza has become a domestic political liability for him and for the Democratic Party as a whole. On the one hand, they need to try to win back support among progressives, younger Democrats and especially among the Arab American voters who are outraged over the Biden administrations support for the war. But they need to do that without alienating Jewish American voters and moderate Democrats who support the war and, broadly speaking, support Israel.

This is an attempt to find that balance without incurring major domestic political costs.

Schumer can say what he wants, Biden can say what he wants, and Netanyahu keeps doing what he wants. If what Schumer and Biden say doesnt affect the behavior of the Israeli government, can it be effective domestically in the U.S.?

Buried in the speech is a real political bombshell. Schumer said that if Netanyahu and his coalition remain in power and continue to pursue dangerous and inflammatory policies that test existing U.S. standards for assistance, then the U.S. will be forced to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.

Its not the first time that a U.S. senator or policymaker is raising the threat of potentially conditioning U.S. military aid. But Schumer doing so sends a message to Israeli policymakers that mainstream, pro-Israel Democrats are now willing to consider something that was previously politically taboo, namely conditioning U.S. aid to Israel. That could induce changes in Israeli policy.

What kind of changes?

Specifically, the provision of humanitarian aid to Gaza, which has become a major public dispute between the U.S. and Israel. But whatever changes it does bring about in Israeli policy toward Gaza and the Palestinians, I dont think its going to be nearly enough to satisfy the left or progressives and others who oppose the Biden administrations policy.

But theres a moderate middle, particularly many American Jews, who dont want the Biden administration to stop supporting Israel but dislike Netanyahu and his right-wing policies. What Schumer is saying is that the Democratic Party is the party for them, that it is a place for people who, while supporting Israel, have deep concerns about the Israeli militarys conduct in Gaza, and are frustrated with the Israeli governments refusal to present a real plan for the day after, and its stonewalling on any prospect for a Palestinian state.

Schumer is expressing the sentiments of those voters, who we often dont hear about because its often those on the left and the right whose voices drown out that silent majority in the middle.

Are Schumer and Biden ahead of American public opinion or behind it?

I think they are, as is typical of politicians, behind public opinion. The distinction between supporting Israel while criticizing its government has already been largely accepted for some time now among Jewish Americans. But it hasnt always been reflected among politicians, who felt that when they supported Israel, they had to uncritically support the Israeli government.

View original post here:
Pro-Israel but anti-Netanyahu: Democratic Party leaders try to find the middle ground - The Conversation Indonesia

Opinion | Biden-Netanyahu clash reveals limits of U.S. democracy rhetoric – The Washington Post – The Washington Post

The Biden administrations escalating spat with Israel over its war with Hamas in Gaza, now joined by Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), has included media leaks, pointed intelligence assessments and diplomatic dressing-downs. But perhaps the most telling piece was Vice President Harriss admonition last week not to conflate the Israeli government with the Israeli people.

As the Israeli journalist Amit Segal observes, There is a significant disparity between Israels leadership and its citizens but its the opposite of what people in Washington assume. The policies of Israels war cabinet are restrained relative to public opinion. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus foreign-policy instincts are moderate by Israeli standards. If the Israeli people somehow controlled the war in Gaza directly, it might be even more devastating.

So Harriss remark reflects a misapprehension of Israeli democracy. But more than that, it highlights how promoting democracy is a weak foundation for U.S. foreign policy in the first place.

Biden has made a global contest between democracy and autocracy central to his presidency. That pitch has failed to keep Congress united in support of aiding Ukraine against Russias invasion. The main deficiency is obvious: Many Americans wonder what the form of government in a faraway country has to do with their own lives.

Republicans are responsible for holding up aid to Ukraine. But Biden has accelerated partisan polarization over the war by casting it as an extension of U.S. domestic politics, with Ukraines fight against Russia parallel to the Democrats fight against former president Donald Trumps GOP. Portraying Republicans as part of the authoritarian menace you want to defeat abroad is obviously not a formula for winning their support on a foreign policy priority.

An overemphasis on democracy can be self-undermining, as the political philosopher Emily B. Finley argued in her 2022 book, The Ideology of Democratism. When democracy yields a controversial outcome, there can be a tendency to assume that democracy itself was corrupted that the problem is not a difference of opinion among citizens, but that nefarious forces prevented the true will of the people from emerging. One classic example is the liberal attribution of Trumps 2016 election victory to disinformation or foreign interference.

Harriss Israel statement betrayed a similar tendency. The Biden administration is displeased with the behavior of Israels leadership, so it signaled that Israels elected leadership is not actually a democratic reflection of its people. But if Segal is right about Israels warlike public opinion, thats misdirection. The Israeli conduct that angers the Biden administration is democratically representative.

Theres nothing wrong with trying to change a democratic countrys behavior. One benefit of American alliances is that they enable Washington to influence democratic allies to comport with U.S. interests. The Biden administration can lean on Israel as it wishes. But if it has to construct the fiction that it is leaning only on Israels leaders, not trying to overrule its people because the latter would violate the sanctity of democracy it is bound to miscalculate about what it can achieve.

Blocking a countrys collective democratic will takes more political muscle than persuading a single unrepresentative leader to change course. Bidens remark that an Israeli invasion of Rafah is a red line, for example, will go unheeded if as it appears the Israeli public overwhelmingly wants its military to finish the job against Hamas. Biden could end up diminishing U.S. authority and his own political standing by appearing to resist an Israeli action that happens anyway.

Other than Israel, of course, Americas Mideast allies are autocracies. It might have been more accurate for Harris to warn against conflating the governments of countries such as Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia with their people. Yet far from trying to open the gap between those governments and their populations, as Harris did with Israel, U.S. policy is to shore up moderate Arab regimes to check Iran and Islamist radicalism.

Indeed, a Saudi-Israel diplomatic agreement seems to be the linchpin of the Biden administrations ideal Middle East settlement after the Israel-Gaza war. That rapprochement would be driven by the monarchy in Riyadh, not democratic forces in the Arab street.

Its hardly a new discovery that popular opinion can, under certain circumstances, radicalize rather than moderate a states foreign policy. One politician in revolutionary France warned that democratizing foreign policy could lead France to be at war with every nation that we consider unjust, or which will not accept our system.

That brings us back to Hamas, the entity that started this war with its Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis. The Biden administration made headlines after Harriss remarks by releasing an intelligence assessment saying that Netanyahus leadership may be in jeopardy. But the striking line in the assessment was not the assertion that Netanyahus popularity is eroding among Israelis but that Hamas enjoys broad popular support among Palestinians. Hamas won a Palestinian election in 2006 and, if the American spies are right, can still claim a kind of democratic legitimacy even after bringing ruin on its people.

Democracy is an attractive theme with a long tradition in U.S. foreign policy. But appeals to democracy wont arrest the GOPs turn toward noninvolvement when it comes to Ukraine, and they offer no framework for mitigating Middle East violence. Hardheaded statecraft has to come first to protect the United States global interests.

Read more:
Opinion | Biden-Netanyahu clash reveals limits of U.S. democracy rhetoric - The Washington Post - The Washington Post

Trump nearly derailed democracy once here’s what to watch out for in reelection campaign – The Conversation Indonesia

Elections are the bedrock of democracy, essential for choosing representatives and holding them accountable.

The U.S. is a flawed democracy. The Electoral College and the Senate make voters in less populous states far more influential than those in the more populous: Wyoming residents have almost four times the voting power of Californians.

Ever since the Civil War, however, reforms have sought to remedy other flaws, ensuring that citizenships full benefits, including the right to vote, were provided to formerly enslaved people, women and Native Americans; establishing the constitutional standard of one person, one vote; and eliminating barriers to voting through the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

But the Supreme Court has, in recent years, narrowly construed the Voting Rights Act and limited courts ability to redress gerrymandering, the drawing of voting districts to ensure one party wins.

The 2020 election revealed even more disturbing threats to democracy. As I explain in my book, How Autocrats Seek Power, Donald Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020 but refused to accept the results. He tried every trick in the book and then some to alter the outcome of this bedrock exercise in democracy.

A recent New York Times story reports that when it comes to Trumps time in office and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, voters often have a hazy recall of one of the most tumultuous periods in modern politics. This, then, is a refresher about Trumps handling of the election, both before and after Nov. 3, 2020.

Trump began with a classic autocrats strategy casting doubt on elections in advance to lay the groundwork for challenging an unfavorable outcome.

Despite his efforts, Trump was unable to control or change the election results. And that was because of the work of others to stop him.

Here are four things Trump tried to do to flip the election in his favor and examples of how he was stopped, both by individuals and democratic institutions.

Anticipating defeat

Expecting to lose in November 2020, in part because of his disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump proclaimed that all over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. He called mail ballots a very dangerous thing. Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and aide, declined to commit one way or the other about whether the election would be held in November, because of the COVID pandemic. No efforts to postpone the election ensued.

Trump warned that Russia and China would be able to forge ballots, a myth echoed by Attorney General William Barr. Trump illegally threatened to have law enforcement officers at polling places. He falsely asserted that Kamala Harris doesnt meet the requirements for serving as vice president because her parents were immigrants. Asked if he would agree to a transition if he lost, he responded: There wont be a transfer, frankly. Therell be a continuation.

Threatening litigation

Aware that polls showed Biden ahead by 8 percentage points, Trump declared, As soon as that election is over, were going in with our lawyers, and they did just that. Adviser Steve Bannon correctly predicted that on Election Night, Trumps gonna walk into the Oval (Office), tweet out, Im the winner. Game over, suck on that.

Trump followed the script, asserting at 2:30 am: we did win this election. This is a major fraud in our nation, though the actual results werent clear until days later, when, on Nov. 7, the networks declared Biden had won.

Although many advisers said he had lost, Trump kept claiming fraud, repeating Rudy Giulianis false allegation that Dominion election machines had switched votes a lie for which Fox News agreed to pay $787 million to settle the defamation case brought by Dominion.

Taking direct action

Trump allies pressured state legislators to create false, alternative slates of electors as a key strategy for overturning the election. Trump contemplated declaring an emergency, ordering the military to seize voting machines and replacing the attorney general with a yes-man who would pressure state legislatures to change their electoral votes.

Encouraging violence

Trump summoned supporters to protest the Jan. 6 certification by Congress, boasted it would be wild, and encouraged them to march on the Capitol and fight like hell, promising to accompany them. Once they had attacked the Capitol, he delayed for four hours before asking them to stop.

Yet Trumps efforts to overturn the election failed.

Trump claimed that voting by mail produced rampant fraud, but state legislatures let voters vote by mail or in drop boxes because of the pandemic. Postal Service workers delivered those ballots despite actions taken by Trumps postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, that made processing and delivery more difficult.

DeJoy denied any sabotage in testimony before Congress.

Most state election officials, regardless of party, loyally did their jobs, resisting Trumps pressure to falsify the outcome. Courts rejected all but one of Trumps 62 lawsuits aimed at overturning the election. Government lawyers refused to invoke the Insurrection Act and authorize the military to seize voting machines. The military remained scrupulously apolitical. And Vice President Mike Pence presided over the certification, in which 43 Republican senators and 75 Republican representatives joined all the Democrats to declare Biden the winner.

That experience contains invaluable lessons about what to expect in 2024 and how to defend the integrity of elections.

Read more:
Trump nearly derailed democracy once here's what to watch out for in reelection campaign - The Conversation Indonesia

Indonesia’s Corrupted Democracy | Margaret Scott – The New York Review of Books

The strategy of Indonesian president Joko Widodoknown by all as Jokowihas worked: his chosen successor, Prabowo Subianto, and his own son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, were elected president and vice-president on February 14 in a landslide, with more than 58 percent of the vote. It is really Jokowis victory, though, long in the planning and enormously consequential. He has secured power for Prabowo and Gibran by overseeing a gradual hollowing out of Indonesias hard-won democratic system while maintaining his own sky-high popularity.

Indonesia is the worlds third-largest democracy, and Jokowi became the face of its success in emerging from decades of dictatorship. Now he has corrupted that success. He couldnt run for a third term, so he anointed Prabowo, a former general who was once denied a US visa because of allegations of human rights abuses in the 1990s, and Gibran, a businessman and the mayor of Solo, who was too young to be on the ballot until a surprising Constitutional Court decision cleared the way. The losing candidates in the three-way racethe former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan and the former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowoare challenging the results and claim that Jokowi and his government unfairly meddled in the election, but the outcome is unlikely to change, given the large margin of victory and sparse evidence of outright vote rigging. The meddling that mattered took place before election day.

Two nights before the polls opened, I attended an event called A Prayer for Truth and Justice, organized by activists and artists from the Reformasi movement that in 1998 ousted General Suharto after thirty-two years of military dictatorship. They gathered at Utan Kayu, a community center in East Jakarta that was one of the command posts for the uprising against Suharto. A procession of dancers, singers, poets, academics, and student activists took to the outdoor stage to protest what they called Jokowis rigged election. An minence grise of Reformasi, the eighty-two-year-old journalist, poet, writer, and painter Goenawan Mohamad, was there. He had been one of the presidents earliest supporters and was active in his 2014 presidential campaign, when Jokowi became the first nonelite politician to win direct election after the repression and corruption of the Suharto era.

All that has changed, Goenawan told me: Jokowi is a traitor and he betrayed Reformasi when he accepted the Constitutional Court ruling, issued in October, that the thirty-six-year-old Gibran could run despite the constitutions requirement that candidates for president and vice-president be at least forty. The campaign has been rigged to ensure Prabowos victory. It is hubris and against democracy, Goenawan said. We are here to build up pockets of resistance. From the stage, a young poet read a famous poem by Widji Thukul, a prodemocracy activist who was kidnapped in 1998 on Prabowos orders and has not been seen since.

All the singing and the chants of We were duped by Jokowi and Resist and fight belied the funereal mood. The anti-Jokowi resistance was too little, too late. By then the polls were clear that Prabowo would win. Like Goenawan, most of those gathered that night had been exuberant Jokowi supporters well into the presidents second term.

Jokowis ability to co-opt large swaths of Indonesian society while consolidating immense power is a remarkable and complicated tale. His success with the Utan Kayu and Reformasi supporters provided a useful base that he steadily and deliberately expanded. By the time Goenawan and many others turned against him, Jokowi had perfected his increasingly authoritarian hold on power and had set in motion his plan to secure his influence after his term ended through Prabowo and his son. Most importantly, he had assiduously built his presidency and his popularity on three pillars: maintaining stability, suppressing the threat of radical Islamists and their demand for political dominance, and delivering development, from countless new roads to a gleaming high-speed train to cash handouts from the state. As the election approached, Jokowis approval rating hovered near 80 percent. He handed out free rice and cash on the campaign trail. He never explicitly endorsed Prabowo and Gibran, but the message was clear: a vote for them was a vote for a continuation of his rule.

How Jokowi came to dominate Indonesias sprawling political landscape and became the first president to determine his successor provides an after-the-fact subtext to The Coalitions Presidents Make: Presidential Power and Its Limits in Democratic Indonesia by Marcus Mietzner. While Mietzner, an Australian National University professor and leading scholar of Indonesia, wrote this important book long before the election, it offers a road map of what has happened. His theme is Indonesias never-ending quest for political stability, and he wonders if that quest is itself the source of democracys decay. Time and again, the answer is yes.

Mietzners starting point is the chaos that erupted across this archipelago of 17,000 islands strewn along the equator after Suhartos ouster. Indonesia faced the challenge of creating a new political structure that would be acceptable to its more than one thousand ethnic groups, who speak more than seven hundred languages; more crucially for the worlds largest Muslim population, the country had to resolve its most controversial issue: the place of Islam in politics.* It took years and four prodemocracy constitutional amendments for a presidential system to emerge that relied on coalitions to govern. In 2004 Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono became the first directly elected president and, fearful he would be impeached, insisted on ruling by coalition. Mietzner chronicles how Yudhoyonos grand coalition ushered in stability for a time, but voters had soured on him by the end of his second term.

When Jokowi won in 2014defeating Prabowothe scrawny former mayor of Solo was a weak outsider who was loved by the Reformasi and prodemocracy contingent and somewhat ambivalently backed by the party headed by Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of Indonesias first postindependence president, the flamboyant, autocratic Sukarno, and president herself from 2001 to 2004. Jokowi faced blocked cabinet nominations, lack of support from his own party, and recurrent humiliations from Megawati and, more ominously, from Muslims who rejected his proclaimed commitment to pluralism and democratic reform. It didnt take him long to embrace what Mietzner calls coalitional presidentialism. Within a year he had meddled in the leadership of two opposition parties (which had backed Prabowo in the 2014 election) so that he controlled the majority of parties and seats in the legislature.

As Mietzners book makes clear, the crucial milestone in Jokowis road to political dominance occurred in 2016, when an alliance of conservative Muslim leaders, hard-line Islamist vigilantes, and Saudi-influenced preachers accused his close ally, the ethnically Chinese and Christian politician Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as Ahok, of insulting Islam while campaigning to be elected Jakartas governor. They organized a series of rallies that were some of the largest in Indonesias history. The capital was flooded with more than 700,000 Muslims demanding that Ahok be charged with blasphemy. It was a political earthquake, and Jokowi acquiesced. Ahok was charged and given a two-year sentence. And he lost the governors election to Anies Baswedan, one of the unsuccessful presidential candidates this year.

The anti-Ahok movement transformed Jokowi and Indonesia. Jokowis Reformasi supporters, including Goenawan, were horrified, and so were some of the leaders of Indonesias gargantuan traditionalist Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), which considers puritanical Saudi-influenced Islam an existential threat to its own relaxed, pluralist, local Islam. Jokowi aligned himself with both NU and his prodemocracy supporters. With their support, he eventually sidelined the Islamists behind the protests, all the while strengthening his base.

In February I met with Ulil Abshar Abdalla, now a deputy head of NU, and over lunch at Hello Sunday, a trendy spot inside a colonial-era Art Deco gem in downtown Jakarta, we discussed NUs alliance with Jokowi. It has been very good for NU, and very good for Ulil. Jokowi understood that he could take advantage of the widespread fear of Islamists, but he needed NUs backing to suppress them. For NU, the alliance meant a steady flow of state support. For Jokowi, NUs support meant a huge pool of voters, especially on Java, where more than half of Indonesias 279 million citizens live, and he handily won reelection in 2019.

Mietzner describes how Jokowi, emancipated from his party by this backing and buoyed by his popularity, began his second term with a substantially broadened and consolidated coalition. Prospects of any pro-democracy breakthroughs, however, were also much reduced. The president had become a virtuoso of coalition politics and Indonesias patronage democracy, refining the give-and-take that delivered both stability and democratic decline. He rewarded those who did his bidding and punished those who did not. The political parties, the army, the police, the bureaucrats, the Muslim organizations, and the oligarchs all needed to be part of Jokowis circle. In return, he needed to keep them happy.

NU became a state favorite once Jokowi was reelected. Yahya Cholil Staquf, a Jokowi ally, became its head, and his brother, Yaqut Cholil Quomas, became the minister of religious affairs. Ulil, Yahyas protg, was given a job promoting NUs version of Islam with a great deal of state aid. Many jobs in the ministry of religions enormous bureaucracy went to NU followers. NU also expanded a campaign to put what it calls Indonesias version of tolerant, humanitarian Islam on the global map. (NU celebrates its tolerance, but it did not extend to Communists or leftists in 1965 and 1966, when, after a failed coup, hundreds of thousands of them were killed by, among others, NUs willing executioners. And it doesnt extend to Islamists, Shias, or gay Indonesians today.) Ulil proudly pointed out that more than 50 percent of Indonesians identify themselves as aligned with NU. When Jokowi cracked down on Islamists and banned two Islamist organizations, NU leaders applauded. Jokowi knew there is a deep fear of the Islamists, and he knew NU would help him use that fear, said Ulil.

These measures were just the beginning of Jokowis use of that fear to consolidate power. His loyalists were put in charge of Indonesias vast police apparatus, which steadily marginalized and criminalized Islamist activists. Beyond the banning of organizations, people deemed pro-Islamist were removed from campuses and the state bureaucracy. Slowly this marginalization broadened to include all government critics, not just Islamists. The NGO Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network reported a drastic increase in the criminalization of online expression in 2022, with 107 people charged under Indonesias Electronic Information and Transactions law, a threefold increase from the previous year. Most were charged with defaming state officials and institutions. Much of the incremental crackdown went unnoticed, except by those seen as threats to Jokowis expanding control. He is a master of knowing his voters, and he tracks polling data to determine what is possible and what will create a backlash.

Jokowis reelection, Mietzner writes, led to two important turning points in the consolidation of his coalitional presidency. First, under pressure from political parties in his coalition, Jokowi failed to stop the wrecking of the Corruption Eradication Commission, known as the KPK, one of most important institutions established in the reform era that followed the end of Suhartos regime. The KPK has been exceedingly popular and effective in rooting out widespread political and business corruption. Scores of local and national politicians have been hauled off in front of TV cameras over the years, wearing the telltale orange vests of KPK suspects. More than five hundred politicians, businesspeople, police officers, and civil servants have been prosecuted by the KPK. And for years politicians tried to curb its extensive investigative powers but were always stopped by an outcry from civil society. Then rumors circulated on social media and political talk shows that Islamists had infiltrated the KPK. Support for it waned, and in 2019 a law was passed that destroyed the KPKs independence and left it a shell.

The second turning point was Jokowis surprising choice of Prabowo as his defense minister. Prabowo had been a rising general under Suharto and had married one of the dictators daughters. In the regimes waning days he oversaw a special forces unit, called the Rose Team, that was accused of kidnapping and torturing more than twenty activists, thirteen of whom are still missing and presumed killed. Prabowo has admitted that there were kidnappings, but he denies any involvement in the killings of anti-Suharto activists. He has also been accused of human rights abuses in East Timor during the now independent nations long, brutal occupation by Indonesia. And he was associated with a segment of the army that instigated riots in Jakarta in a failed attempt to prolong Suhartos rule during its last weeks. After Suhartos overthrow, Prabowo was vilified as a symbol of the regimes brutality. He was forced to retire early from the military and spent more than a year in exile in Jordan.

Zulkarnain/Xinhua/eyewire/Redux

President Joko Widodo voting in Indonesias general elections, Jakarta, February 14, 2024

Over the years this dark history simply faded away. Prabowo became a business tycoon and politician. He ran unsuccessfully for president twice against Jokowiin 2014 as a nationalist strongman and in 2019 as a defender of the Islamists. After his appointment as defense minister, he seized the chance to reinvent himself again. He praised Jokowi as the nations best president and went out of his way to present himself as Jokowis protg. The US, too, softened its view, granting him a visa once he became defense minister. Jokowi and Prabowos reconciliation helped them both. Mietzner writes:

Prabowos integration into the presidential coalition not only accommodated Widodos archrival and neutralized the threat of him becoming an anti-government agitator, but it also sent further signals to the military that it did not have to fear legal prosecution and could rest assured that its officers had opportunities to prosper under democratic rule.

Since Jokowis second term was consumed with the Covid-19 pandemic and his pet projectbuilding a new national capital in the jungle in the province of East Kalimantan on the island of Borneothe president and his advisers started hinting that he needed a third term to finish all that he had started. Megawati, the imperious head of the PDI-P, the party that had twice nominated him as its presidential candidate, refused to go along, citing the constitutional limit of two terms. Jokowi, irked by Megawatis opposition, had his advisers explore other options for retaining influence. There were several, and his strongest asset was his consistent 75 to 80 percent approval ratings, which ensured that his support would be significant to the candidate he backed in the election. For a while it seemed that Jokowis choice as successor would be Ganjar, PDI-Ps candidate, but his deteriorating relationship with Megawati helps explain why he rejected that option.

All the while Prabowo wooed Jokowi, even promising that Jokowi could select cabinet ministers if he won. By August of last year the Constitutional Court, the other hallowed reform-era institution, had before it a case challenging the clause of the constitution preventing Gibran from running for vice-president. On October 16 the court, whose chief justice was Jokowis brother-in-law, Anwar Usman, issued a ruling allowing Gibran to be on the ticket. (A few weeks later the courts ethics council removed Anwar from his post as chief justice, but he was allowed to remain on the court, and the ruling was binding.) Prabowos support went from 37 percent in October to 47 percent in December. Jokowi had, once again, correctly read his voters.

By the time I had lunch with Ulil, the Prabowo-Gibran campaign had set its sights on winning over 50 percent of the vote in the first round and avoiding a runoff. Prabowos team had successfully recast him as a cute, cuddlygemoy in Indonesiangrandpa, and TikTok was full of images of the rotund Prabowo sashaying across campaign stages, doing his signature gemoy dance. NU is supposed to be neutral in elections, but its head, Yahya Cholil Staquf, known as Gus Yahya, was clearly pushing for Prabowo. Ulil was keen to explain to me why Yahya and NU had no choice but to back him. Prabowo is the bet on the table, and Prabowo is the best bet for NU. We have to fight for what is good for NU, and that is state support. We have big plans, and it is expensive, he told me.

Im not comfortable, but I have to help Gus Yahya. He had to make a calculation, and Gus Yahya decided that only Prabowobecause of Jokowican guarantee us a partnership with the state. That is what NU needs.

I went to Jombang, a town in East Java considered the heartland of NU, to see if the mostly NU voters there agreed with Gus Yahyas and Ulils assessment. Jombang, a bustling place with no skyscrapers, is known as a kota santria city of Muslim studentsbecause of its thousands of Islamic boarding schools, or pesantren. Despite this being the hometown of Muhaimin Iskandar, the vice-presidential candidate on Anies Baswedans ticket, nearly everyone I met was voting for Prabowo. In a neighborhood of Jombang called Tambak Beras, about fifty pesantren, with some 12,000 students, are scattered along the winding lanes. Mohammad Hasib Wahab Hasbullah, the titular head of the area, invited me to sit in his garden and talk about the campaign. He sounded like Ulil as he explained why he supported Prabowo: NU must be close to the government. As students walked through the narrow streets, the girls in colorful headscarves and the boys in batik sarongs, Hasbullah said that Jokowi had done so much for NU, from creating a national Santri Day to endorsing a bill that bolstered the standing of pesantren in the national education system to adding Hasbullahs grandfather to the roster of national heroes. And now, just like Jokowi, we want Prabowo, he added.

The soft-spoken head of a pesantren close by also invited me in to talk. He told me that even though Gus Yahya had said he would be neutral, it was clear he was supporting Prabowo. In December Gus Yahya invited about two hundred pesantren leaders from Jombang to the Shangri-La hotel in Surabaya and asked them to turn out the vote for Prabowo. Then the head of the pesantren invoked what I came to think of as Ulils mantra: NU needs to be close to the government. At this point, his wife joined the conversation. This is a very bad election. This is a dynasty election. Why choose Gibran? Why him? she asked. Because that is what Jokowi wants, and Gus Yahya goes along. She said she would not be voting for Prabowo-Gibran.

Everywhere I went there were young students participating in English storytelling competitions and preaching contests. When I asked a few of them which candidates they favored, most shyly smiled and then raised two fingers, indicating Prabowo and Gibran, who had the number two spot on the ballot. Jokowis popularity was a huge reason for this support, but there was also some not-so-subtle pressure.

Ahmad Athoillah, the head of the Anies-Muhaimin team in Jombang, complained that the campaign was not fair. We were betrayed by Prabowo. There was an agreement that Prabowo would team up with Muhaimin. We worked for a long time and introduced Prabowo to many of the pesantren here, he said as we sat in the campaign offices. But Prabowo broke that promise, and now even NU is backing Prabowo. NU must say that all citizens are free to choose, but instead they are saying you must vote for Prabowo. Athoillah described pressure on village heads to get out the vote for Prabowo. He brought up the case of East Javas popular governor, Khofifah Indar Parawansa, who is also the head of NUs powerful womens arm. She had initially refrained from supporting Prabowo, but she made a big public endorsement just weeks after the KPK searched her office for evidence of alleged misappropriation of funds. This isnt fair, he repeated.

At a womens gathering one night, Muhaimins mother, Muhasonah Iskandar, led the group in prayers and recited from the Quran. She is a beloved figure in Jombang, but many of the women whispered that that wouldnt stop people from voting for Prabowo. Prabowos campaign has so much money, they said as we sat on a carpeted floor. One woman, a pesantren teacher, told me that Prabowos team gave the head of one pesantren a new car. Another was given funds for a new dormitory. Someone else was promised a trip to Mecca.

In the last days of the campaign, a long documentary called Dirty Vote was released online. By election day it had been viewed more than 13 million times. It attempted to reveal on a broad, national scale the state pressure Ahmad Athoillah had complained of in Jombang. Dirty Vote alleges that the campaign was tilted in Prabowos favor by a pattern of extensive state intervention, some legal and some illegal. Dirty Vote went viral, but it didnt alter the outcome.

The Prabowo-Gibran government will not be sworn in until October, leaving plenty of time for a new coalitional presidency to emerge. Indonesias democracy will not improve under Prabowo, but it wont necessarily get worse, either. He has no reason to blow up the diminished system he will inherit. He has all the tools he needs to silence dissent and can use state resources to consolidate power. But there are risks. Will his alliance with Jokowi last? What will Jokowi do? Would Prabowo prevail in a contest between them?

A falling-out is probably inevitable. One cause could be the budget. Construction of the new capital, Jokowis pet project, is very expensive, and Prabowo built his campaign around a promise of free lunches to all students, with a price tag of $28.8 billion over the next five years, according to the head of his campaign. Prabowos chameleon personality may change again, and his earlier disdain for democracy may reemerge. He may see the tactics used in this campaign as a precedent for intervention in future elections. Then there is the issue of his health. He is now seventy-two, and if he doesnt make it to the end of his five-year term, Jokowis son will become president. So much has changed in Indonesia, but the sense of uncertainty that plagued the nation after Suharto fell has roared back for many. Jokowis victory has come at a high cost.

March 7, 2024

Here is the original post:
Indonesia's Corrupted Democracy | Margaret Scott - The New York Review of Books

Trump predicts the end of U.S. democracy if he loses 2024 election – Yahoo! Voices

By Tim Reid

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Donald Trump said on Saturday if he does not win November's presidential election it will mean the likely end of American democracy.

The Republican presidential candidate, speaking to supporters in Ohio, made the claim after repeating his baseless assertion that his 2020 election defeat to Democratic President Joe Biden was the result of election fraud.

During an outdoor speech that was whipped by strong winds and punctuated by some profane language, Trump predicted that if he does not win the Nov. 5 general election, American democracy will come to an end.

"If we don't win this election, I don't think you're going to have another election in this country," Trump said.

Trump, who is under criminal indictment in Georgia for trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election there, this week won enough delegates to mathematically clinch the Republican nomination.

A general election rematch with Biden is likely to be extremely close. A Reuters/Ipsos poll last week found the two candidates in a statistical tie with registered voters.

Trump opened his remarks in Dayton with a tribute to his supporters who are currently in jail for rioting at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as they sought to block certification of Biden's 2020 election win.

Trump saluted and called them "patriots" and "hostages".

The former Republican president has been using increasingly dystopian rhetoric in his campaign speeches about the state of the country.

In the middle of a section in his speech about placing tariffs on imported cars, and foreign competition for the U.S. auto industry, Trump declared: "If I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole country."

Asked what he meant, his campaign pointed to a post on the social media platform X by a New York Times journalist, which said Trump's "bloodbath" comment came amid a discussion about the U.S. auto industry and the economy.

Asked for a response to Trump's "bloodbath" comment, Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer condemned Trump's "extremism", "his thirst for revenge", and his "threats of political violence".

Trump also appealed to Blacks and Hispanics, voters who will play a key role in deciding November's election.

Trump has been narrowing the gap with Biden in opinion polls with non-white voters, who formed a core part of Biden's winning coalition when he defeated Trump in 2020.

Trump cited a central campaign theme, that too many illegal immigrants have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border since Biden took office, in his appeal to minority voters.

"No-one has been hurt by Joe Biden's migrant invasion more than our great African American and Hispanic communities," Trump said. He claimed without citing any evidence that illegal immigrants were taking their jobs.

(Reporting by Tim Reid in Washington; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

Read the rest here:
Trump predicts the end of U.S. democracy if he loses 2024 election - Yahoo! Voices