Jakarta, Indonesia—Democracy in Indonesia always seems to come at a high price. At least a hundred people died while keeping the polls open on Election Day last week, from causes such as heat-stroke and exhaustion. The Indonesian islands straddle the Equator and most of them are hot, at least eighty degrees, every day of the year. They are home to 264 million people and are the stage for world’s largest single-day election, which is deeply impressive in its logistics. Seven million citizens volunteered to keep the polls running last Wednesday across more than 800,000 polling stations. Ballots were distributed to the periphery via planes, canoes, and elephants. The voting booth volunteers who died have been dubbed locally as “martyrs of democracy.” [...]
Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country and about 90 percent of its citizens are Sunni Muslims. It is not a secular state but has defined itself since its postcolonial independence in 1945 as pluralist and multi-faith. It was ruled for three decades, from 1965 to 1998, by the military strongman Suharto, whose dictatorship still casts a long, dark shadow on its contemporary politics. In the post-Suharto era, Indonesian democracy has developed hand in hand with a religious revival, particularly among Muslim groups that were suppressed during the dictatorship.
Although it is not new for politicians to bolster their credibility and standing by parading their Islamic faith and values, religion was unusually foregrounded in this last race. This was because the general elections took place in the wake of a vitriolic local contest in Jakarta in 2017, when Islamist zealots mobilized mass protests to agitate for the trial and prosecution of a popular ethnic-Chinese Christian governor of Jakarta for allegedly blaspheming against Islam—attacks that led to his defeat at the polls. The eruption of a populist, hardline Islam in 2016 and 2017 seemed to catch Jokowi by surprise, and he quickly caved to the demand to put the governor—his own former deputy and close ally—on trial. In an earlier show of conciliation, he even prayed alongside his Islamist critics during their second mass rally in December 2016. (Ma’ruf and the Ulama Council actively supported these rallies, too.) [...]
“I can see why many progressives were disappointed by Jokowi’s pick of Ma’ruf, given his human rights record,” said Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, a scholar of Islam who used to run the Liberal Islam Network. “In my opinion, it has been the most polarizing election ever—like the Jakarta election but national.” On the other hand, he said, it is not inherently negative that religion continues to play a large part in the country’s politics. “Democracy will develop in a different way here than it did in the West,” he said, noting also that many conservative movements, such as Salafism and the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party, have moderated over time as they’ve taken their places under the figurative big tent of Indonesian Islam. [...]
Sri Vira’s conception of family values includes actively campaigning to criminalize homosexuality, which has been painted by its opponents as a foreign imposition. Her politics do not fit into easy categories: she is Islamist but also nationalist, a family-focused activist but not a feminist. She ran for office partly because she didn’t see enough women like her represented; at the same time, she is skeptical of the quota system whereby all political parties must have at least 30 percent female candidates. “According to me, it depends on the women,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard to find women [candidates] who are credible, they may not have the background or experience.”
