 Hello and welcome to New Mandala TV. I'm Ross Tapsul from the School of Culture, History and Language here at the Australian National University. I'm here with two professors of Indonesian Studies from the ANU College of Asia and Pacific, Professor Ed Aspinall and Professor Ariel Haryanto. Thanks for joining us. We're going to talk about the Indonesian election and a bit of a wrap-up and discussion about some of the issues from that. Let me start with you, Ed, because I'd like to ask what does this election mean for Indonesia? You've often talked about this being as a continuation of reformacy. Is that your view? Well, this really came home to me most of all actually on the day of the election itself, on the evening after the quick counts were announced. I went down with some friends to the main roundabout in the centre of Jakarta and met there with the people who were celebrating Jokowi's victory. So I met there with a lot of people I'd known from 15, 16, 20 years ago when I'd been conducting research on the opposition movement to the Suharto regime. So it was obvious that for many of them, for many of the pro-democracy activists of that earlier generation, that was exactly how they saw this election. I met this kind of broad coalition which had assembled 16 years ago to bring down the Suharto regime in many important respects, with some exceptions, sort of reassembled behind Joko Widodo this year. And I think that's partly because of Joko Widodo, who he represents, but it's largely because of Prabowo and that he was seen as representing a kind of reversal in the direction of new order style politics. Okay, Ariel, can you see it's a continuation of reformacy? In a way, yes, I would agree with that, even though we must also add that that sort of desire for liberty, for civil life was already there before and soon after the independence day, then get interrupted. So it's always that sort of pendulum that's being back and forth from time to time. Yes, the only difference, I'd say, a quite remarkable difference, though, I think, is that with the reformacy movement of the 1998, it's too, I would say, masculinist. There's a lot of force and violence involved. With this one, it's rather different, I'd say. If it's not too feminist, at least there's a lot of soft power being deployed and quite successful, I'd say. Okay, so Ed, you've been quite... ...in articles with Marcus Meatsner in New Mandala, arguing that Prabowo was a threat to democracy and indeed one was entitled, Vote for Me, but only once when talking about Prabowo. Were you specifically lobbying for Joko Widodo in this election? Was that your intention? I don't know if you would quite put it that way, but it's certainly the case that I was hoping, and I'm sure I can speak on behalf of Marcus in this case as well, that I was certainly hoping that Joko Widodo would win. You know, I'm a scholar of politics. A lot of my research down the years has been on issues to do with democratisation and democracy. And, of course, I saw in the Prabowo presidency, for all the reasons that we outlined in quite a few of those writings in New Mandala and elsewhere, that the Prabowo presidential campaign represented a serious threat to the democratic system that's evolved in Indonesia since those reformist years. So, of course, in writing about the presidential elections, it's very natural that we would try and highlight some of those dangers, in particular because we saw that that aspect of the Prabowo presidential campaign, it seemed to us, especially early on, wasn't really being noticed by a lot of the international media coverage. And domestic media too? Yeah, I think it's fair to say, and partly I think it's because the Joko Widodo campaign also didn't highlight that aspect of the Prabowo campaign. So, for us, I mean, it seemed very obvious that many of the things that Prabowo was saying that carried an implicit threat of an authoritarian reversal weren't being highlighted and understood that way in a lot of the media discussions. So, that's why we wrote some of those pieces. Ari, what did you make of Ed and Marcus' pieces? Great, great, fantastic. Yes, and I'm particularly happy with the responses that I received. But I was always already worried that somebody like Prabowo could have been nominated at all. So, I think the point that Ed and Marcus raised is only a part of larger worries for me. So, if Indonesians were not quick, I think the response is probably because of that. They are quite overwhelmed with the number and the amount and the scale of impunity that the previous criminals could get away with already in the past. In contrast though, you have written about challenging authoritarianism in Indonesia before, but for this election you've chosen not to write along the lines of Ed and Marcus. Why has your approach been different to theirs of worrying about? I think one of the articles was, don't be fooled, Prabowo still doesn't want democracy. Why have you had a different approach to Ed and Marcus? I'm sorry, I'm not sure. What do you mean by difference? Well, these guys have been writing for New Mandala consistently about the threat of Prabowo. And in your case, you haven't written much about it. That's right. Well, for one reason, before 1998, I was very excited to write a lot about things that were not allowed to be written by Indonesians. I was in Indonesia back then, so there's a lot of desire. But since then, the space was quite wide and open and a lot of people have written much better than I did. So, I feel really, you know, not best qualified to write the things I enjoy what others have written. So, I haven't written much about the election, as you said. Yes, you're right. I've quoted that, don't be fooled, Prabowo still doesn't want democracy. Do you think a lot of Indonesians weren't aware of this intention and then now seeing Prabowo's response to losing the election, that then a lot are now realising Prabowo's undemocratic tendencies? I mean, the idea that don't be fooled suggests a lot of people didn't realise. Is that what you think? Well, I mean, we chose that title in response to a particular press statement or a press conference that Prabowo was involved with where he was talking about direct elections. And he did what he often does, which is claim to be a Democrat and yet make various comments that hinted very strongly that in this particular case he wanted to do away with direct elections. And it seemed to us that from some of the feedback we got from people who were participants in that press conference, that they took on board the yes, I'm a Democrat part of it, but didn't fully get the implications of some of the other things he was saying. So that's what we wanted to highlight in that particular case. Now, as for the more general popular response to Prabowo and the support for him, I think this is one of the interesting things we're going to have to look into in a lot more detail over coming months now that the excitement of the campaign itself has passed. You know, what was the nature of Prabowo's support base? My colleague, Marcus Mitzner, thinks that there's a sort of a hard core of support for Prabowo, maybe something like 15, 17, 20 percent who accepted the full program and understood Prabowo to be an anti-democratic figure and liked that, you know, and supported him completely, whereas there was another much bigger group which sort of built up during the election campaign who coalesced around him, supported him, but who supported him for other sorts of reasons. They didn't think Jokowi was really a presidential figure, for example. They thought that Prabowo presented himself better as a more educated and fluent, capable leader or they liked the nationalism or whatever it might be. Aril, why do you think 47 percent of Indonesians voted for Prabowo? It really remains a mystery to me, but if I may just continue what Asa said and if I am allowed a little bit to play devil advocate here, I would say that Prabowo was just being very honest when he said that he didn't want democracy but then need to defend himself when being a question. I would say, and quite speculatively, I must admit, I think most powers that be, if given the opportunity, would rather not have democracy. It's just too costly, it's just too difficult for them. In other words, everybody would prefer to be a king if they can, let's say. But not many people are allowed to do that. We didn't allow them to do that. So in that case, I think Prabowo was just being honest. I remember the time when Zoharta was in power, there was no possibility for anybody else to challenge him. And yet he held the elections every five years. So very costly, almost from his point of view, unnecessary rituals because everybody knew who is going to be the winner. So in that sense, democracy is a good thing, but I think if you are in a position of power, I think you'd rather have it as least costly as possible. In your piece in the conversation which you wrote just a couple of weeks ago after the election, you said most international commentators have overlooked or underestimated the critical force behind Indonesia's historic moment. And that's individual citizens in contrast to the flow of familiar money politics. Individual citizens proudly publish bank slips on social media showing off their tiny share of donations to Jacqui's election campaign. So what is the key message when you're talking about international commentators missing? What's the key message? I think overall, I would like to make even a broader statement to that effect by saying that most of us, I think, prefer to study, we meaning scholars and outside Indonesia, prefer to study people at the very top layers of the society hierarchy or at the very bottom. Those who are dictators, those who are corrupt, those are brutal, for all kinds of reasons, moral or otherwise, because it's an easy target and we have sympathy for those who are the victims of those people. More difficult is people in the middle. If you look at all kinds of study even among scholars of Indonesia, I think there's not enough has been done to really look at the dynamics of the middle classes. There's so much written already on Suharto, on SBY, Prabowo, Jokowi. And you're cutting yourself in this crowd? No, no. Precisely not. Maybe because it has something with my personal life, because I came from a place away from Jakarta. I don't know anybody who is well connected to the elite. But neither am I the most disadvantaged and the worst victims of the system. I'm somewhere in between and there are millions of people like me and I felt we need a place there somehow. Not to say that I understand what we're there. Do you want to say anything about the money politics aspect of this comment? Well, I would agree with Ariel that this election has been interesting for many, many reasons, but one of them is precisely this issue of where the nature of the middle class, the different groupings within the middle class... Did you underestimate the individual civilians in this stuff about Prabowo that don't be fooled of Prabowo? Well, one thing we did see, and this links it to your question about the money politics, is one thing that we did see when we visited campaign centres of the two camps when we went to various middle sized towns and so on in Java and elsewhere, was that the Prabowo campaign was extremely well funded, it was a classically money politics standard Indonesian style campaign to that extent. Oligarchic funding at the centre greased by money in the regions and a lot of money was being distributed to build these networks and to encourage people to come to meetings and so on. But on the other hand, you had the Jokowi campaign which to us looked... And this is why we were worried because it was volunteeristic, poorly funded, often rather kind of ramshackle and very sort of amateurish really in the way it was being organised in a lot of these places. And when you put the two campaigns next to one another, it just seemed that the Prabowo side was so much better organised, better funded and on an upwards trajectory. So that was where we... so perhaps we did underestimate. I mean all's well that ends well I guess so in that degree and the volunteeristic characteristic of the campaign pushed Jokowi into the lead in the end. All right, let's conclude. Ed, you've said that in many ways Jokowi has already performed perhaps the greatest service he will ever perform for his country and that's preventing Prabowo from becoming president. So is that how you're going to frame Jokowi's presidency from now on? How do you think we'll see a Jokowi presidency from here? Well, I mean that's... I mean a lot will happen of course. But I think that's something that in the future when the inevitable disappointments come and people have these very high hopes they see him as a great reforming figure and yet we already know of course that his campaign too is not completely divorced from the power of money and oligarchic interest. Former generals with bad backgrounds and human rights abuses themselves on his team when all of those disappointments seep into our evaluations of the Jokowi dodo presidency I think we shouldn't forget that he did perform a great service and he did prevent Ariel to borrow Ariel's term before that pendulum swing right back towards the new order. Final comment? I would say I would give more credits not to Jokowi but those who make him president. I think from day one when he was hesitant it was other people the nameless masses mainly middle class who keep pressing him quite impatiently that he should run for president and make himself. So my thanks are to them really more than to Jokowi actually. Okay, thanks everyone for watching. Thanks to Ed and Ariel for coming in and New Mandala of course has been a great success for us here at the ANU during your selection and feel free to click on all the articles and sign up and comment. Thanks very much.