Indonesians may wake up in 2026 with many reasons to worry, and with a question that can no longer be postponed: was it a mistake to keep giving President Prabowo Subianto the benefit of the doubt?
Or is it time for civil society groups, opposition figures, and political parties to stop waiting for reassurance and instead remind the President that the country is heading down a dangerous path, however one chooses to frame it? And in the meantime, should they begin thinking seriously about whom they will support to challenge the incumbent in 2029, and how they might actually win?
When Prabowo was elected, even his harshest critics, including those most alarmed by his dark past, reluctantly granted him a pause. After all, there was no denying a basic democratic fact: he had won the election. In a democracy, that fact still carries moral weight. It demands restraint from opponents and patience from citizens. But elections do not grant blank checks, and legitimacy is not a permanent asset. It must be renewed through conduct, not assumed as a one-time inheritance.
For much of Prabowo’s first year, many Indonesians chose to interpret troubling signals as isolated decisions rather than as part of a larger pattern. A militaristic tone was dismissed as mere style. The growing presence of uniformed figures in civilian governance was framed as discipline. The recentralization of state assets and revenues was sold as efficiency. The appointment of visibly incapable officials was excused as political compromise. Each move, taken on its own, could be debated, defended, or downplayed. Together, however, they form a far more unsettling picture: democratic rollback through accumulation rather than rupture.
The clearest signal came when the President and a majority of political parties publicly expressed agreement to roll back direct elections for governors, mayors, and regents, returning their selection to regional parliaments, the DPRDs. The justification was familiar and deceptively reasonable. Direct elections, the argument went, are expensive, chaotic, and corrupt. Official figures suggest that the 2024 simultaneous local elections cost at least Rp 41 trillion in public spending, borne largely by local governments for logistics, polling, and administration. Some estimates place the broader fiscal burden, including repeated voting and ancillary costs, at over Rp 80 trillion.
These are not trivial sums. But instead of cleaning the system and enforce the law, the decision is to remove voters from the equation altogether. This is intellectually dishonest and politically dangerous.
Indonesia has already lived under a system in which regional heads were elected by DPRDs. It was not a golden age of clean governance. Corruption did not disappear; it simply moved behind closed doors. Bribes were paid not to millions of voters but to dozens of legislators.
Accountability shifted upward to party elites rather than downward to citizens. The process became cheaper, quieter, and far easier to control. What is now being proposed is not an innovation but a restoration, one that resembles the New Order far more than it does any serious democratic reform.
The claim that this rollback is about fighting corruption collapses under scrutiny. Corruption in Indonesia is not caused by voters having too much power. It is driven by cartelized political parties, opaque campaign financing, oligarchic domination of the economy, and selective law enforcement. Its financial toll dwarfs even the most pessimistic estimates of election costs.
Consider the scale of major corruption scandals in recent years. The state-owned energy firm Pertamina has been implicated in a case estimated by investigators to have caused losses approaching Rp 193.7 trillion. The tin-mining scandal involving PT Timah is believed to have cost the state as much as Rp 300 trillion when environmental damage is included. Historical cases such as the BLBI bailout are estimated at around Rp 138 trillion, while more recent scandals at state insurers like Asabri have cost approximately Rp 22.7 trillion.
Removing citizens from local elections addresses none of these structural problems. Instead, it strengthens the very actors, party elites and legislative brokers, who have historically been central to transactional politics. What this reform truly reduces is not corruption but unpredictability.
That reduction of unpredictability is precisely what makes the policy attractive to the political establishment. Direct elections, for all their flaws, allow outsiders to emerge. They produce leaders who owe their legitimacy to voters rather than party hierarchies. They generate friction, negotiation, and occasionally defiance. Returning power to DPRDs recentralizes control within party machines, narrows access to office, and ensures loyalty flows upward. This is not a reform designed to serve citizens. It is one designed to discipline them.
Seen in isolation, the rollback of local elections may look like a technocratic adjustment. Seen in context, it functions as a keystone in a broader architecture of power consolidation. At the same time that citizens are being distanced from choosing their local leaders, the state is moving toward greater militarization of civilian life. Retired generals and active military figures are increasingly visible in roles once reserved for technocrats and professional civil servants. The language of command, order, and discipline has returned to public discourse, replacing the reformist vocabulary of participation and accountability that once defined the post-1998 era.
This remilitarization is unfolding alongside an aggressive recentralization of assets, revenues, and strategic decision-making. Regional autonomy, already weakened over the past decade, is being hollowed out further. Control over natural resources, fiscal flows, and development priorities is increasingly concentrated in Jakarta. Decentralization was never perfect. It was messy, uneven, and often corrupt. But it forced negotiation. It created multiple centers of power and allowed local resistance to emerge. Centralization, by contrast, is tidy. It is efficient. And it is dangerously quiet.
The rollback of local elections fits neatly into this logic. When regional leaders are no longer accountable to voters, and when fiscal and administrative authority is pulled back to the center, local governments become extensions of central command rather than representatives of local interests. Political dissent loses its institutional anchors.
This shift is reinforced by an increasingly personalized style of governance under the current administration. Decision-making revolves more around loyalty than competence. Appointments that would once have triggered public outrage now pass with minimal scrutiny. Incompetence is no longer treated as a flaw but as a feature. Officials who lack independent authority, expertise, or public credibility are easier to control.
The result is a hollowing out of institutions without the drama of outright dismantling them. The House of Representatives still convene. Courts still operate. But their autonomy erodes, replaced by informal hierarchies and personal networks. This is how contemporary authoritarianism works, not through spectacle, but through attrition.
By 2026, this structural shift may be reinforced by the enactment of a deeply flawed new Criminal Code, the KUHP, alongside a revised Criminal Procedure Code, the KUHAP. Legal reform is often presented as a neutral, technical exercise. It is anything but.
Under the new Criminal Code, criticizing ruling elites becomes far riskier, narrowing the space for free expression and encouraging self-censorship. Insulting the president or state institutions can carry prison sentences of up to three years, while the dissemination of ideologies deemed contrary to the state ideology may result in penalties of up to four years. The code’s broad definition of “attacking honor or dignity,” including damage to reputation or self-worth, opens the door to criminalizing dissent through defamation and libel.
Meanwhile, the revised KUHAP grants police sweeping discretionary powers over arrest, detention, evidence gathering, and the classification of dissent. In an environment where power is increasingly centralized, militarized, and personalized, vague legal provisions are not safeguards. They are weapons waiting for instruction.
Indonesia does not need openly tyrannical laws to slide into authoritarian practice. It only needs laws that are ambiguously worded, selectively enforced, and embedded within institutions that no longer function independently. The danger lies not in what the law declares, but in who controls its interpretation.
What makes this moment particularly troubling is the elite consensus surrounding these changes. Political parties that once claimed the legacy of Reformasi now support policies that would have been unthinkable two decades ago. Civil society resistance is fragmented. Public debate is drowned out by managerial language, social media buzzers and appeals to stability. The argument is no longer that democracy is unnecessary, but that it is inefficient, a luxury Indonesia can no longer afford.
This is the most insidious shift of all. When participation is framed as a cost rather than a right, democracy becomes negotiable. When citizens are told they are too corrupt, too emotional, or too expensive to be trusted with choosing their leaders, the moral foundation of popular sovereignty collapses. Authoritarianism rarely announces itself with a single decisive blow. More often, it advances through reasonable arguments, legal amendments, and bipartisan agreements, until one day the public realizes that the space to object has quietly disappeared.
What is at stake is not nostalgia for imperfect elections or romanticism about decentralization. It is the basic principle that power in a democracy flows upward from citizens, not downward from elites. Once that principle is abandoned, restoring it becomes far harder than defending it in the first place.
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Omong-Omong Media’s editorial is also published in The Jakarta Post every Monday.
