From the Streets to the Parliament: The Role of Elite Collective Alignment in Indonesia's 1998 Democratic Transition

Clarice Handoko, University of Wisconsin-Madison

On May 21, 1998, Indonesia’s President Suharto resigned in a publicly broadcasted speech, effectively ending his 31-year authoritarian regime, and beginning Indonesia’s democratic transition. The watershed event was simultaneously desired, by the growing civil society opposition, and unexpected, given his far-reaching network of oligarchic elite that had long been in favor of his presidency. The popular explanation for Suharto’s self-initiated political end has largely gone unchallenged. It argues that mass student protests had given growing public grievances—against the government’s inefficiencies and rampant corruption— an accessible channel for dissent, which eventually reached a fever-pitch that made holding on to the presidency no longer viable for Suharto. This paper takes two related limitations of the aforementioned popular account as its starting point: First, that the oligarchic structure of the people’s assembly would have shielded presidential decisions from the public’s discontent. Second, that the accumulation of discontent would have required the opening of a political opportunity from within the parliament to build up the regime-changing political pressure on Suharto. Looking to an overlooked intermediary group—the parliamentarians caught between the student protesters and Suharto, I detail the positional shifts, and ultimately, collective alignment amongst Suharto’s proponents and opponents in parliament that would have been necessary for the student’s protest to have its transformative effect. Using archival materials documenting the events of May 12 to 21, 1998, I present an event structure analysis showing the interplay of individual and collective decision-making processes within the parliament in the final days of the Suharto administration. Apart from tampering the weight of student protests in explanations of Indonesia’s democratic transition, I suggest that the observed political pragmatism at the heart of elite collective alignment in 1998 may be a contributing factor to the enduring oligarchic tendencies in the country’s democratic present.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 138. Elite Politics and Relational Power: Rethinking Political Change across Regimes