| Home > South-East Asia >> Indonesia | |
Yudhoyono's decade of peaks and troughs
Jakarta Globe - October 17, 2014
Through his Twitter account @SBYudhoyono, the departing president asked Indonesian "netizens" to share their views on his decade-long presidency, using the hashtag #KopdarPamitan (a farewell meet and greet).
The winners, not surprisingly, were picked among those who gave positive reviews. Reviews cited infrastructure development, international achievements and democracy, among other things, including one that complimented the president's penchant for song writing.
But it is the hashtag #KopdarCelamitan – which mocks the outgoing president for "avariciously" asking people to sing him praises – that gained more popularity, making it into Indonesia's trending topics on Twitter on Tuesday.
The outgoing president has continued to list his achievements during public speeches. However, many members of the public and critics alike think there are more notable failures, than achievements during his decade in power.
Siti Zuhro, a political expert with the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, or LIPI, said the outgoing president's declining popularity is evidenced through his Democratic Party's plunging vote in the April 9 legislative elections.
"In 2004 and 2009, the public admired SBY," Siti said, referring to Indonesia's first and second direct presidential elections – both of which were won by Yudhoyono.
"But recently, his popularity has been declining drastically, because he is perceived as an indecisive leader, with a lack of enthusiasm in terms of [policy] execution."
Economic bubble
Yudhoyono's decade in power has been marked with political stability, which, along with reforms in several sectors like banking, has been hailed for attracting investment and driving economic growth.
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008, when countries all over the world suffered growth slumps, Indonesia's economy has managed to continue to expand. Indonesia became the world's 10th largest economy earlier this year. Concurrently, Yudhoyono has been widely credited for Indonesia's increasingly powerful role in global affairs.
"Since 2009, Indonesia's gross domestic product growth has been the second fastest among G-20 member states [after China]," the president's official website, presidenri.go.id, said in its report entitled: Reflections on 10 Years of Development and Five Year Projection."
However, upon peaking in 2011, the country's economy has since slowed down. Last year it expanded by only 5.78 percent, and the figure is expected to further decline this year to between 5.1 percent and 5.5 percent.
The trade deficit continues to expand, and the rupiah continues to depreciate against the US dollar. The yet-to-be-addressed burgeoning fuel subsidy has become an increasing threat to fiscal health – harming Indonesia's status as one of the world's fastest growing economies.
The Yudhoyono administration has boasted increasing the per-capita income of Indonesia's middle class. Yet, the country's Gini coefficient, which measures inequality among income distributions, has risen from 0.37 in 2012 to 0.41 last year.
Ari A. Perdana, a member of the government-run National Team for Poverty Eradication, said the latest Gini ratio was worse than figures during the New Order, during which it never passed 0.39. "We can feel [the wealth gap]," Ari was quoted as saying by Indonesian news portal Merdeka.com.
University of Indonesia economist Faisal Basri added that Indonesia's wealth gap was even worse than that of India.
Grand plans, poor implementation
The Yudhyono administration has also been noted for its big plans and programs but also for poor implementation.
The flagship infrastructure program, the Master Plan for the Acceleration and Expansion of Indonesia's Economic Development (MP3EI), for example, was launched in 2011, but the impacts have barely been felt, particularly in eastern Indonesia where the program is supposedly focused.
Yudhoyono's administration says under the MP3EI, it has initiated 382 projects across the nation worth Rp 854 trillion ($72 billion) since 2011.
The allocated figure, however, is far short of the Rp 4,000 trillion Indonesia required for infrastructure development in order to achieve the target of becoming a high-income country by 2025. Currently, most state spending is swallowed by the burgeoning fuel and energy subsidies.
Additionally, there is doubt as to whether the administration of Joko Widodo, who will be inaugurated as Indonesia's seventh president on Monday, will continue to fund the MP3EI program.
After 32 years under the late president Suharto's dictatorship and the associated political turmoil at the beginning of the reform era, Indonesians have largely enjoyed political stability and freedom of speech. Even press freedom was guaranteed under Yudhoyono's democratic rule between 2004 to 2014.
Indonesia also has been recognized as the world's third-largest democracy. As the world's most populous Muslim nation, the country has often been hailed as a potential role model of how democracy and Islam can coexist.
Rights activists, though, have repeatedly slammed the Yudhoyono government's failure to enforce the law in addressing rising cases of religious intolerance, including attacks on members of the minority Islamic sect Ahmadiyah and the Shiites in several regions of Indonesia.
The 2008 Law on Electronic Information and Transactions, meanwhile, has been considered a threat to freedom of speech and press freedom. The key point of contention pertains to it's section on defamation vulnerable to abuses.
Siti acknowledged that Yudhoyono at least had managed to create what she referred to as "political harmony," gathering most political parties under the government coalition and thereby reducing potential frictions with other parties.
"He was able to manage existing political powers, creating political harmony with his commendable patience. It is not easy to stay patient while dealing with members of his coalition with differing perspectives," she said. "And with that, he's considered relatively successful in maintaining political stability."
But rather than simply leaving the "autopilot" mode on, he could have done much more, Siti said. The term autopilot refers to the idea that the political stability Indonesians have largely enjoyed under Yudhoyono's leadership has not been his achievement. Rather, it has been the result of a natural process, following the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, and the beginning of the reform era.
Democracy at a price?
Regarding the issue of direct elections of regional leaders, Yudhoyono could have done something to improve this mechanisms during his 10 years in office. Rather, he waited until the last minute to recommend improvements to the system, according to Siti.
Yudhoyono was widely criticized last month after his Democratic Party walked out of the plenary session in the House of Representatives that saw the passage of a new law scrapping direct regional elections.
Instead, the law handed over the right to elect regional leaders to local legislative councils, as was practiced during the authoritarian New Order era.
An overwhelming majority of Indonesians, more than 80 percent according to a survey, still favor direct elections.
The Democrats claimed they conducted the walkout after their proposal of 10 improvements to the direct election bill was rejected.
Yudhoyono soon issued a regulation in lieu of law, to annul the law following a wave of public anger directed at him for the Democratic lawmakers' move. The regulation, known as a Perppu, though, needs to be approved by the House if it is to stay in effect much longer.
"The international public and institutions might praise our democracy because we are a populous predominantly Muslim nation that is able to implement democracy. They think the organization of elections in Indonesia is largely successful," Siti said.
"But in fact, the Constitutional Court alone has received 980 lawsuits disputing the results of regional elections since 2005 [when direct elections of regional leaders were launched], including elections of legislative candidates in regions. That indicates massive potential for foul play. It also indicates that our democracy is of low-quality; it's deprived of meaningful substances and morals."
With the "legacy" left by Yudhoyono, the incoming administration of former Jakarta governor Joko Widodo definitely has a lot of work to do.
Siti suggested, though, that Joko starts with law enforcement and bureaucratic reforms. "Uphold the supremacy of the law. That way we can improve the quality of our democracy, and much more," she said.
Source: http://thejakartaglobe.beritasatu.com/news/yudhoyonos-decade-peaks-troughs/.
See also:
 |