In 2024, Indonesia will hold its fifth presidential elections since democratic reform began in 1998. For the last two years, candidates have been positioning themselves to replace outgoing President Joko Widodo, who is constitutionally barred from running again. Three leading contenders have emerged: Prabowo Subianto, the former son-in-law of long-time autocrat Suharto; Ganjar Pranowo, the former governor of Central Java; and Anies Baswedan, the former governor of Jakarta. But to what extent does it matter who wins? Since 2004, Indonesian presidents have managed to maintain stable, inclusive coalitions that include a wide range of party and non-party actors. Drawing from his upcoming book The Coalitions Presidents Make: Presidential Power and its Limits in Democratic Indonesia (Cornell University Press), Marcus Mietzner will argue that the coalition likely to be built after the 2024 elections will be similar to previous ones - but that the political persona of the president still matters in determining the coalition's overall direction.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Marcus Mietzner is Associate Professor at the Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific affairs, Australian National University, Canberra. He has widely published on Indonesian politics.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).