Crisis Leadership Tested: Indonesia’s Response to a Covid-19 Second Wave

As major parts of Indonesia go into lockdown due to a second deadly wave of the pandemic, the question must be asked: Why have developing Asia’s democracies struggled to contain the pandemic and ramp up vaccinations?

Indonesia’s plight is mirrored on a more dramatic scale in India, which is emerging from its worst-ever national crisis since independence. That country’s medical system was under extreme stress and shortages of ventilators and oxygen cylinders became a metaphor for a country on life support.

A similar fate has befallen the Philippines, another democracy but ruled strongman-style by President Rodrigo Duterte with bluster, a harsh stance on law and order, exaggerated claims, and tough treatment of the media. To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, all Asian democracies may resemble one another but each unhappy democracy is unhappy in its own way. There are exceptions to this rule of course since Taiwan and South Korea have managed the pandemic fairly well, though they have had their own spikes.

Indonesia is the biggest country in Southeast Asia and has over the years since authoritarian rule collapsed in 1998 emerged as a seemingly robust democracy ruled by a succession of duly elected presidents. As such, how the country under President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, has fared during the pandemic may be viewed as a test of the effectiveness of a democratic government in handling a major crisis.

In recent days, it is Luhut who has stepped in to talk about the lack of oxygen supplies and has declared that the new surge was “under control”. This contradicted his boss’s assertion a few days earlier that the situation was “developing very fast”. With infections, particularly cases of the Delta variant, on the rise, on July 1, the government announced a lockdown on Java and Bali to last for at least 18 days.

To be fair, Indonesia has managed the economic impact of the pandemic rather better than the public-health emergency, in contrast to India which has mismanaged both. This is probably because Indonesian finance ministry and central bank technocrats are seasoned crisis fighters, with many of them cutting their teeth in managing through the financial and political crisis in 1998.

At the same time, Asian democracies are a work in progress and need to be nurtured by their leaders, particularly during a national calamity. Modi and Jokowi, however, appear to be drawing a different political lesson from their respective crisis and have been content to delegate crisis management to cabinet ministers.

Jokowi could perhaps a lesson from his predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who was in charge when the deadly tsunami devastated parts of Indonesia and the rest of Asia. Within 10 days of that calamity, Yudhoyono convened an international conference in Jakarta, with several heads of state and multilateral institutions in attendance, to coordinate the humanitarian response to that tragedy.

In Indonesia’s case, despite Jokowi’s hands-off management style during the pandemic, there are murmurs and even open expressions of support from a few prominent figures for him to run for a third five-year term, which he could only do if there were a change to the Constitution. The limit was the centrepiece of Indonesia’s hard-won democratic freedoms in the aftermath of the fall of Suharto. Any attempt to dismantle the cap could seriously undermine the country’s nascent democracy.

While Jokowi himself ruled out a third term in March this year, the campaign for him to be allowed to carry on is still gaining momentum. It all seems reminiscent of 1998 when supporters of Suharto who applauded his re-election in March that year turned up at the weakened dictator’s house a few weeks later to call on him to go.

Indonesia’s democracy has not yet developed as solid an institutional foundation as the four presidential transitions since Suharto might suggest. The nation has come too far on its journey of democratization to slide back and discard constitutional safeguards because one man is so idolized by certain elites. In recent years, there has been a rollback of democracy in member states where political openness had appeared to be on the rise, including the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Myanmar. Indonesia could follow them down that treacherous path – or it could stay on the track it has been on for 23 years now.

Jokowi can secure his place in Indonesian history by dealing squarely and publicly with the pandemic and in resolutely asserting that he will step down, as the law requires him to, when his second term expires in 2024. The question is: Will the president behave like just another politician or be the statesman his country needs?