The demise of emancipatory peasant politics? Indonesian fascism and the rise of Islamic populism

Indonesia

13 March 2018

The death of class-based rural movements in Indonesia has entrapped rural resistance in the clutches of market power.

Article by

Benjamin White
Abdul Rahman
Laksmi Savitri
Devi Adriyanti
Hanny Wijaya
Ciptaningrat Larastiti

Prabowo Subianto on horseback, Senayan City, Jakarta , Indonesia, 2014.

As Indonesia prepares for regional elections in 2018 and national elections in 2019, political operators try to curry favour with both the military right and radical religious groups, in the scramble for votes. Recent months have seen an escalation of fake news, penetration of extremist views into everyday discourse and violent attacks on the imagined evils of (supposedly) resurgent leftists, religious minorities and the LBGT community.

Symbols of the ‘New Order’ regime of President Soeharto, who was in power between 1966 and 1998, are being deployed by two new political parties, each sponsored by one of Soeharto’s children. The main rival of the current president, Joko Widodo, is Prabowo Subianto, Soeharto’s former son-in-law and military strongman. He appears at party rallies on horseback dressed like Mussolini, and once told a foreign journalist that he favoured a “benign authoritarian regime …Do I have the guts? Am I ready to be called a fascist dictator?”

What are the roots of Indonesian fascism? Why has it re-emerged on the political stage and accommodated Islamic populism? How does it shape and constrain emancipatory peasant politics?

This article is seventh in the series on ‘confronting authoritarian populism and the rural world’, linked to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI). The full article can be read here.

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