The Slow Boiling Of Indonesian Democracy

At the same time, Widodo's government increasingly relied on a broad governing coalition. International IDEA notes that Indonesia's coalition presidentialism can produce a political“cartel” in which large numbers of parties enter government, leaving little effective opposition and weakening scrutiny of executive action. By the end of Widodo's presidency, this dynamic had become particularly pronounced.

The culmination came in 2023. The Constitutional Court created an exception to the minimum age requirement, allowing 36-year-old Gibran to run for vice president alongside Prabowo. Anwar Usman, Widodo's brother-in-law and Gibran's uncle, then headed the court.

An ethics panel subsequently found Usman guilty of an ethical violation and removed him from the chief justice position. However, the ruling itself remained in force. The frog, in other words, had not suddenly been thrown into boiling water. The water had been warming for years.

Prabowo's rise, then, cannot be understood as a complete break with the political order that preceded him. He was, in fact, one of its beneficiaries and participants.

His 2019 appointment as defense minister transformed a bitter electoral rivalry into a governing partnership and brought one of the country's most important poles of opposition from outside the government inside.

The logic grew clearer in the 2024 election. Prabowo ran with Gibran, whose eligibility the contested court ruling had secured, and the pairing joined two political trajectories that had once been separate: Prabowo's long-held presidential ambitions and Mr. Joko's growing dynastic influence.

This is where the idea of political absorption is more useful than the simpler language of repression. Opposition does not always have to be banned. Sometimes it can be incorporated.

That distinction matters because Indonesia remains a functioning electoral democracy. Parties compete, elections are held, journalists and civil society groups continue to criticize the government, and political disputes remain visible.

Freedom House still classifies Indonesia as“Partly Free,” rather than an authoritarian state. Yet it also records concerns about weakened opposition, dynastic politics and declining institutional checks.

Prabowo's seventh Cabinet reshuffle on October 1, 2026, and the formation of a new Presidential Advisory Council the following day, provide the latest illustration. The reshuffle changed several senior positions, including the foreign minister and national police chief.

One day later, Prabowo appointed 26 members to the Presidential Advisory Council, bringing together politicians, former ministers, business figures, religious leaders, security officials and intellectuals, including Rocky Gerung and former Constitutional Court chief justice Anwar Usman.

None of these appointments, taken individually, proves democratic erosion. The more important question is cumulative: what happens when an increasing share of political, economic, religious and intellectual capital is located inside the presidential orbit?

Rocky Gerung and Syahganda Nainggolan offer two particularly revealing examples, although they represent very different political trajectories. Rocky, one of Indonesia's most prominent public intellectuals and critics, now sits on the Presidential Advisory Council.

His appointment does not mean that he has abandoned his critical views. Indeed, he has said that he intends to remain critical. Yet the institutional location of criticism has changed: a voice that once operated primarily outside presidential power now has direct access to its advisory machinery.

Syahganda's trajectory is even more striking. During the 2024 presidential campaign, he was listed as a spokesman for the Anies-Muhaimin national campaign team. He later moved closer to Prabowo's administration and, on October 2, 2026, was appointed head of the Government Communications Agency (Bakom).

The point is not that Syahganda was“neutralized” or that Rocky has been transformed into a government loyalist. What the appointments show is structural: people who once occupied political space outside the presidential establishment can be incorporated into the institutions through which presidential power is exercised.

That is a different mechanism from repression. It is elite incorporation, and once enough potential counterweights are incorporated, the question changes from whether opposition exists to whether enough independent political capacity remains outside the executive orbit for opposition to be effective.

Significantly, the political reconfiguration is occurring alongside an expansive populist policy agenda. That matters because institutional consolidation does not necessarily require an unpopular government.