Gde Dwitya Arief Metera and Iqra Anugrah

By 2025, Indonesia has been an electorally democratic polity for over a quarter of a century since the collapse of the authoritarian New Order regime (1966-1998) in 1998. Yet rather than consolidating democratic institutions, the country has entered a slow but discernible trajectory of democratic backsliding—what scholars of comparative politics term a process of “autocratization.” This democratic regression has been most visible during the latter years of President Joko Widodo’s administration and the state’s repressive handling of recent civil society protests in major Indonesian cities is one of its manifestation.

In the last decade, Indonesia witnessed erosion of democratic norms marked by the weakening of judicial independence and the rule of law, the systematic narrowing of civic space, the suppression of dissenting voices in the media and civil society, and the expansion of oligarchic interests.

Simultaneously, there has been a gradual reassertion of military influence in political and civilian domains, reversing the post-reform norm of military disengagement from politics.

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These developments have unfolded not through abrupt authoritarian rupture, but via incremental institutional changes and legal reforms that legitimize executive aggrandizement supported by the parliament and a politicized constitutional court.

In this way, Indonesia’s democratic decline mirrors a global pattern where the dismantling of democracy is achieved not by overt coups, but by exploiting democratic procedures themselves.

Scholars of Indonesian politics have advanced various explanations for the country’s recent democratic decline, ranging from presidential leadership styles to coalition dynamics and patronage politics. Many of these accounts emphasizes actor-centered variables focusing on the decisions, strategies, and personalities of political elites in the post-reform period.

These existing approaches, undoubtedly are valuable for understanding proximate causes and present dynamics of democratic backsliding in Indonesia. There are, however, at least two limitations. First, they sometimes adopt a narrow temporal lens that begins and ends within specific administrations or electoral cycles. Second, while acknowledging the persistent influence of New Order elites as a structural weakness of Indonesia’s democracy, it overlooks other key historical factors. Our research explored these historical factors, ranging from the militarized judicialization of politics under the New Order to the regime’s role in consolidating a global financial empire led by the US, its constrained state capacity, and its authoritarian ideologies. By underexploring these long-run preconditions, much of the existing literature risks mistaking the symptoms of democratic erosion for its root causes.

Building on this gap, our research workshops in May and June 2025—which featured contributions from four early-career Indonesian scholars—shifted the analytical lens toward structural-historical approach that situates contemporary patterns of democratic decline within the longue durée of Indonesia’s political development.

Rather than treating the post-1998 democratic era as a self-contained episode, we trace how institutional designs, elite and capital configurations, ideological struggles, and state–society relations forged during the New Order and the turbulent transition years have shaped the terrain on which democratic politics now unfolds.

This perspective allows us to identify the enabling conditions of democratic vulnerability that predate, and in many ways precondition, the choices made by present-day political actors. By integrating these structural and historical factors with an analysis of recent governance trends, we seek to move beyond existing accounts toward a fuller explanation of Indonesia’s gradual autocratization, one that recognizes the interplay between inherited constraints and contemporary political agency. This framework, we argue, not only sharpens our understanding of Indonesia’s democratic trajectory but also contributes to comparative debates on why some new democracies consolidate while others falter.

Central to our investigation is the concept of authoritarian legacies, understood as the institutional, political, economic, and sociocultural inheritances from a prior authoritarian regime that shape the trajectory of a subsequent democracy.

These legacies can take the form of democratic endowments—institutional capacities, policy frameworks, ideational underpinnings, or state structures that, while forged under authoritarian rule, can be repurposed to support democratic governance—and democratic deficits—structural weaknesses, elite networks, and normative dispositions that inhibit the deepening of democratic practices.

In the Indonesian case, we pay more attention on how democratic deficits have been transmitted from the New Order into the transition period and beyond, influencing the declining of democratic norms. Our analysis assesses how these inherited conditions might manifest in areas such as judicial independence, state-society relations, and patterns of interaction with the global political economy.

This approach underscores that the fate of new democracies cannot be fully understood without accounting for the historical baggage they carry from their authoritarian predecessors.

This introductory essay opens an expanded discussion on the legacy of the New Order regime. In the coming weeks, four essays from the workshop presenters deriving from their larger article projects will be published in RevDem in no particular order:

The first essay by Norman Joshua, a historian and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, traces the origins of military-lawyers who shaped the judicial-bureaucratic apparatus and culture of both Guided Democracy (1959-1966) and New Order regimes. In this essay, he focuses on Basarudin Nasution, a civilian jurist whose role had a profound influence in shaping civil-military collaborations in legal affairs.

The second essay by Farabi Fakih, a historian and lecturer at the Department of History at Gadjah Mada University, analyses competing norms and mechanisms of governmentality emerging during the New Order. In it, he shows the battle between liberal developmentalist consensus and nationalist norms in the shift toward deregulation and neoliberalism in Indonesian political economy.

The third essay by Gde Dwitya Arief Metera, a political scientist and researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Institute for Advanced Research at Indonesian International Islamic University, argues that the deteriorating quality of Indonesian democracy can be traced back to the legacy of the New Order regime, when a modernist strand within the regime was sidelined amid internal power struggle, making post-authoritarian democratic reforms constrained.

Finally, the last essay by Iqra Anugrah, a political theorist based at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Modern Cultures at the University of Turin and the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, offers a new interpretation of New Order’s authoritarian conservatism formulated by its anti-communist intellectuals. Their brand of conservatism, he argues, is not only about corporatism and modernization but also about a radical vision of counterrevolutionary politics in the name of “saving democracy.”

Acknowledgement: We would like to thank Edward Aspinall for providing valuable input in improving this introductory essay. Institutional support from IFAR at UIII, IIAS, CEU Democracy Institute (DI) and Review of Democracy, and University of Turin’s Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Modern Cultures and Institute of Studies on Asia made the workshops and this project possible. Iqra acknowledges Fondazione Compagnia di San Paulo (under CONTREV SoE project) and CEU DI’s Global Forum Fellowship for their financial support.

Gde Dwitya Arief Metera is an Assistant Professor in Political Science and Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Research (IFAR) at Indonesian International Islamic University (UIII). A former Arryman Scholar at Northwestern’s Buffett Institute, his research examines state-society relations under autocracy and, more recently, environmental politics in Indonesia.

Iqra Anugrah is a Trapezio MSCA Seal of Excellence Fellow at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures at the University of Turin. He holds affiliate positions at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden University and the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Education, and Information (LP3ES). Formerly, he was a Global Forum Fellow at CEU Democracy Institute. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Northern Illinois University.

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.