By Aqida Salma
Southeast Asia shows how democracy’s openness can be weaponized. Flexible illiberalism—the art of using democratic institutions to pursue illiberal ends—reveals how democracy endures not by collapsing, but by changing hands.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, liberal democracy appeared to have triumphed. Across much of the world, competitive elections, civil society, and constitutional rule seemed to confirm that no viable alternative remained. The “end of history” confidence—that democracy had become both the only and the best form of government—was widespread.
A quarter of a century later, that optimism has largely vanished. The world’s largest democracies, India, the United States, and Indonesia, are now led by figures who have mastered democratic procedures while weakening their liberal foundations. Illiberal democracy has become the new global norm. Citizens are using democratic means not to defend liberal values, but to reject them.
This reversal has not come through coups or revolutions, but through transformation from within. Around the world, illiberal actors have learned to operate through democracy rather than against it by weaponizing participation, representation, and digital mobilization to advance exclusionary goals. Democratic erosion today proceeds quietly: through elections, parliaments, and protests that claim to speak for “the people” while hollowing out pluralism and restraint.
Democracy’s decline today is not about coups or tanks—it’s about the slow mastering of its language by those who seek to empty it of meaning.
Cultural Roots of Illiberal Confidence
Yet this procedural adaptation is underpinned by deeper ideological currents. Across Southeast Asia, illiberalism has long drawn moral confidence from culturalist critiques of liberalism—echoes of the “Asian values” discourse of the 1990s that portrayed Western individualism as alien to Asian communitarian ethics. From Singapore’s meritocratic paternalism to Suharto’s “Pancasila democracy,” such narratives framed liberal democracy as disorderly and unfit for the region’s moral order.
These ideas never disappeared; they evolved. Today, movements and regimes alike continue to defend illiberal rule as the authentic expression of cultural virtue and social harmony. What once justified paternal rule now animates democratic contestation.
Southeast Asia thus offers a telling vantage point for understanding this transformation. In Indonesia and Malaysia, the world’s most prominent Muslim-majority democracies, the past decade has seen the rise of what I call flexible illiberalism: a political strategy that appropriates the institutions and symbols of democracy to pursue illiberal ends. Unlike traditional populism or nostalgia for strongman rule, flexible illiberalism is not a backlash against democracy but a way of winning within it.
Democracy Performed, Not Rejected
Illiberal actors across Southeast Asia have learned to play by democracy’s formal rules while redefining its spirit. Movements that once stood against democratic politics now operate within it by organizing rallies, filing court petitions, and invoking constitutional rights in the language of justice and equality. Their campaigns are framed not as defiance but as defense: of fairness, integrity, and the people’s moral will.
What once relied on coercion now presents itself as civic virtue. By translating exclusion into the vocabulary of rights and participation, these actors turn democracy’s openness into a tool of boundary-making.
Flexible illiberalism works not by rejecting democracy but by mastering it. It is not collapse but mutation—when ideals meant to protect inclusion become instruments of conformity. This pattern, visible in Southeast Asia, now defines democratic erosion globally: institutions endure, but their meaning shifts; participation widens, but pluralism shrinks.
Flexible illiberalism thrives by performing democracy so well that it becomes impossible to tell imitation from conviction.
The wider global context amplifies these trends. The shocks of terrorism, financial crises, and the pandemic have eroded public trust and made citizens more receptive to moral certainty and belonging. Flexible illiberalism flourishes in this environment, offering unity where institutions feel distant and grievance where equality seems hollow.
The struggle over democracy today is no longer between democrats and authoritarians but between rival visions of democracy itself—one pluralist and inclusive, the other moral majoritarian and exclusionary. Illiberal democracy is the political outcome of flexible illiberalism: the process by which movements that once stood outside democracy now inhabit it, hollowing it from within.
By examining how illiberal movements in Southeast Asia have adapted to democracy, we can see not only how illiberalism survives under democratic rule, but how democracy itself has learned to survive illiberally.
From Rigid to Flexible Illiberalism
The idea of flexible illiberalism grows out of a longer history of illiberal mobilization in Southeast Asia. Two decades ago, such movements were far more rigid, they were ideologically purist, hierarchically organized, and openly distrustful of democracy. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Southeast Asia’s illiberal actors, whether religious vigilantes in Indonesia, ethnic nationalists in Malaysia, or royalist conservatives in Thailand, relied on hierarchy, coercion, and exclusion.
By the 2010s, that landscape had shifted. Electoral competition, social media, and civic activism redefined how legitimacy was built. Movements that clung to rigid purity or coercive authority found themselves increasingly marginalized. To endure, they had to adapt—to rebrand exclusion as representation and domination as defense of “the people.” This evolution marked the emergence of flexible illiberalism: a form of political activism that embraces democratic performance while hollowing out democratic spirit.
Indonesia’s experience illustrates this transformation most clearly. Groups such as the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), once known for policing public morality through raids and intimidation, gradually reinvented themselves as civic movements fluent in the language of rights and justice. By the mid-2010s, most visibly during the 212 Movement, they were presenting sectarian grievances as democratic claims. Branded as “super-peaceful actions,” the protests were framed as proof that faith and democracy could coexist. Leaders filed court petitions, coordinated with labor unions, and invoked constitutional guarantees of assembly and expression. Their slogans “Justice for All” and “Equality Before the Law” echoed the language of democratic accountability even as they served exclusionary aims.
This adaptation marked the turning point from rigid to flexible illiberalism. What began as a movement of coercion evolved into one of persuasion, i.e.an illiberal politics that survives not by suppressing democracy, but by performing it.
The genius of flexible illiberalism lies in its civility: intolerance packaged as justice, exclusion staged as equality.
The State’s Illiberal Reflex
The rise of flexible illiberalism has placed democrats in a difficult bind. When movements trading in exclusion march under the banner of democracy, it becomes hard to tell where participation ends and manipulation begins. Their strength lies precisely in how convincingly democratic they appear. These actors do not reject democracy but claim to rescue it from corruption, elite domination, and moral decay that they believe have stripped it of integrity and justice.
They speak of honesty in politics, fairness in law, and dignity for ordinary citizens. Their leaders invoke constitutions, cite equality before the law, and brand their protests as “peaceful.” By mastering democracy’s own repertoire such as rights, legality, and accountability, they pursue exclusionary aims under democratic guise. Participation becomes performance; civic virtue becomes a means of drawing boundaries rather than expanding inclusion.
Governments, confronted by these mobilizations, often fall into the same trap. In their effort to defend democracy from illiberal challengers, they adopt illiberal measures of their own. In Indonesia, for example, the government dissolved several radical organizations by executive decree, framing the move as a defense of democracy against extremism. For a time, the strategy worked: the streets quieted, coalitions fractured, and public order was restored. Yet something deeper eroded in the process.
Defensive democracy risks becoming its own undoing when the fight against illiberalism is waged with illiberal means.
This is the paradox of defensive democracy: when democracies protect themselves through illiberal means, they forfeit the moral authority that makes them legitimate in the first place. Even during Indonesia’s authoritarian era, it was rare for mass organizations to be banned so directly. That such measures now occur under democratic rule reflects how authoritarian reflexes persist within democratic institutions. Both populist mobilizers and the state claim to defend democracy, one in the name of moral justice, the other in the name of legal order—yet both use its language to justify exclusion.
Illiberal tendencies now operate not only through movements but also within the state itself. When legality becomes a vehicle for loyalty and procedure a tool of consolidation, democratic institutions are hollowed from within.
The 2023 Constitutional Court ruling that allowed then-President Joko Widodo’s son to run for vice president despite being below the age limit illustrates this shift. The decision, issued by a panel chaired by Widodo’s brother-in-law, was defended as a neutral act of constitutional interpretation. Yet it exposed how institutions meant to safeguard democracy could be repurposed for dynastic ambition. It was an illiberal outcome achieved through impeccably democratic form.
This episode captures the logic of flexible illiberalism in practice: not the rejection of democracy, but its adaptation. The Widodo government’s use of legal instruments to dissolve movements, manage dissent, and secure political control shows how illiberalism now works from within democratic frameworks. Legality becomes performance; procedure becomes justification. The danger to democracy today thus arises not only from its opponents, but from those who claim to defend it. Illiberalism no longer stands outside democracy; it has become a governing logic within it.
Beyond Southeast Asia: Convergence Without Collapse
The Southeast Asian cases illuminate a broader global shift. The contemporary challenge is not that democracy is disappearing, but that it is changing hands. Illiberal actors have figured out how to live inside it.
The familiar line that the far left and far right “meet at authoritarianism” tells only part of the story. What we see instead is a different kind of convergence: illiberal purpose aligning with liberal form.
This new convergence marks a quiet transformation in how democracy works. Around the world, illiberal movements contest elections, invoke popular will, and master the aesthetics of participation. The same constitutional procedures and civic rituals that once upheld pluralism now sustain exclusion and majoritarian rule.Flexible illiberalism helps explain why democratic backsliding today rarely takes the shape of coups or abrupt breakdowns. The institutions remain intact, yet their meanings shift. Participation increases, but pluralism narrows. Legality persists, but its spirit is lost. This pattern, visible in Southeast Asia and beyond, shows how democracies erode not through rejection, but through imitation: when the forms of democracy endure even as their liberal core is quietly stripped away.
In Indonesia, this process is deepened by what scholars describe as a state of disorder—a political condition in which overlapping regulations, politicized law, and patronage networks are not anomalies but the very grammar of governance. This environment helps explain why flexible illiberalism could flourish so easily: democracy there was never consolidated on liberal foundations but built within a system where legality and power have long served as instruments of control.
Yet Indonesia’s experience should not be mistaken for an exception. Even in the world’s most established democracies, illiberal actors are learning to exploit the openness of democratic institutions to advance exclusionary agendas. In this sense, the revival of culturalist critiques of liberalism, once confined to the “Asian values” debate, now finds resonance in the West, where populist movements invoke rootedness and moral order against cosmopolitan pluralism. Illiberalism has gone global, not by rejecting modernity, but by redefining it.
This suggests that flexible illiberalism is not simply a byproduct of institutional weakness or endemic disorder, but part of a broader transformation in how democracy now functions. Democracy’s strength—its openness—has become its most exploitable feature. And as illiberalism learns to speak the language of rights, legality, and popular sovereignty, it reveals the unsettling possibility that democracy’s next crisis will not come from its enemies, but from its most fluent imitators.
Aqida Salma is a PhD Candidate in Political Science and Southeast Asian Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research focuses on democracy, illiberalism, and political mobilization in Southeast Asia.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
