Indonesia in 2021: A Year of Crisis, Development, and Democratic Decline

In 2021, Indonesia became the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. This journal’s previous year-end analysis counted 20,000 confirmed COVID deaths in Indonesia in 2020 (Buehler 2021). One year later, the official death toll stood at over 140,000 (Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org). These official numbers, however, obscure the true scale of the tragedy that has unfolded over the past year.

Cases and deaths skyrocketed in July 2021. As the Delta variant ripped through urban centers, the country’s health infrastructure buckled. Without enough beds, staff, or oxygen tanks, many thousands of Indonesians died at home, in self-isolation, or in the queue waiting for a hospital bed. The shared trauma of the Delta outbreak was documented in harrowing detail on social media. For months, Indonesians’ Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram feeds were filled with panicked appeals for oxygen, and grief-stricken posts about the passing of friends and family members.

Why did Indonesia suffer to such an extent? Vaccination rates were low when Delta arrived; but even those who were inoculated, including medical staff and front-line workers, died at shocking rates. Indonesia had relied heavily on the Chinese vaccine, Sinovac, which ultimately had much lower resistance to this new and more contagious strain. The country’s poor health infrastructure is, of course, another major contributing factor. World Bank data reveal that before the pandemic Indonesia already suffered from a staggering shortage of doctors and hospital beds: just 0.38 per thousand people for the former and 1.04 per thousand people for the latter, as of 2017. Both figures are much higher in neighboring countries like Malaysia (1.4 and 1.8) and Vietnam (0.8 and 2.6).

Beyond such structural challenges, as Sana Jaffrey (2021) argues, the devastating health crisis of 2021 was ultimately the product of both “denial and dysfunction” on the part of the central government. For much of the pandemic, President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) and his ministers downplayed the scale of the crisis and chose not to impose large-scale lockdowns, dismissing warnings and advice from the country’s leading epidemiologists and medical doctors, as well as the World Health Organization (WHO). In this journal’s previous year-end analysis, Michael Buehler (2021: 107) reported that, at the start of the pandemic, even the health minister at the time, Terawan Agus Putranto, denied the virus was spreading rapidly throughout the country, suggesting that piety and prayer would protect Indonesia from the pathogen. Amid a series of embarrassing blunders and growing public criticism, Jokowi removed Terawan in December 2020.

But this change in leadership at the ministerial level had little perceptible effect on the government’s broader handling of the pandemic in 2021. Outright denialism was replaced with systematic efforts to manipulate public information about the scale of the crisis. Counting by regional governments, and by NGOs like LaporCovid-19 and KawalCOVID19, revealed major inaccuracies in central government figures. At the start of 2021, for example, the number of COVID deaths being reported at the national level was 58% lower than the numbers appearing in provincial government records (Rochmyaningsih 2021). NGOs found that many local governments were under-reporting death figures too, to avoid Red Zone categorization, which would trigger small-scale restrictions by the central government.

To be sure, low testing rates, combined with the country’s decentralized and highly fragmented data-collection and communication systems, complicated efforts to gather an accurate picture of the pandemic’s impact on the ground (Fuad et al. 2021). But the Indonesian government also went against WHO guidelines when it stopped including “probable” COVID-19 deaths in its fatality numbers, instead only counting those who died after receiving a positive laboratory test. This means the many thousands of Indonesians who died in isolation or in their home, unable to access a test, do not appear in the official numbers. The Health Ministry defended their controversial definition of a COVID-19 death, claiming fatalities should be based on “valid data.” Prominent epidemiologists and data experts strongly disagree, and accuse the government of intentionally lowering the count for political reasons (BBC News Indonesia 2021).

By the end of 2021, the peak of the Delta wave had passed, and life in Jakarta and other major cities was slowly returning to some version of normal. By mid-October, the official seven-day average daily infection rate sat at just over 1,000 cases, a massive drop from the high of over 40,000 in mid-July.¹ The vaccination program also picked up speed toward the end of 2021 with the arrival of AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and other vaccines (though it remained below the global average). According to Our World in Data, between July and October, the number of Indonesians who had received a first dose more than tripled, from just over 11% to almost 40%. But only around 20% of the population were fully vaccinated, and coverage was extremely uneven, with Jakarta achieving much higher rates of inoculation compared to outer islands.

A large minority of Indonesians continue to express hesitancy about vaccination, with various surveys indicating that around a third remain unconvinced that vaccines work (Aspinall et al. 2021; Kompas 2021). But the major obstacle to inoculating the country remains supply and distribution. Like many middle-income and developing countries around the world, and indeed in the region, Indonesia has struggled to secure enough of the more efficacious vaccines like AstraZeneca and Pfizer, and instead continues to rely on less expensive and more readily available Chinese vaccines. Fears of a third wave remain, with local analysts suggesting that a new explosion in case numbers may come as early as January 2022 if the number of fully vaccinated citizens does not increase more quickly.

The administration’s failure to prevent such large loss of life must also be understood in the context of Jokowi’s broader approach to governing. As many analysts have now noted, the president was much more anxious about the economic dimensions of the COVID crisis, so he avoided enforcing large-scale lockdowns (until the peak of the Delta outbreak)—and thus allowed the virus to spread out of control (Fealy 2020; Mietzner 2020; Setijadi, forthcoming).

The president’s concern for sustaining economic growth meant that at critical moments in 2021 he turned to economists and business elites, rather than health experts, for policy advice. For example, in late June, as case numbers began to skyrocket, the country’s health officials begged the president to initiate a full lockdown in urban areas, where hospitals were overflowing with patients infected by Delta. But following a meeting with business representatives, Jokowi rejected the idea, heeding their pleas that closing the economy would devastate business, investment, and jobs (Aditya and Heijmans 2021). The president also gave key pandemic management roles to people whose positions and experience were primarily in the economic field. For example, two ministers with economic portfolios have headed up the Committee for Managing COVID-19 (first Airlangga Hartoto and then Luhut Panjaitan). The minister for state-owned enterprises and tycoon-cum-politician, Erik Tohir, managed vaccine deals as well. In late 2020, the president appointed a new health minister, Budi Gunadi Sadikin, the former minister for state-owned enterprises and a private-sector professional with expertise in banking and financial management.

Jokowi’s strategy meant that, at least initially, Indonesia’s economy weathered the pandemic well, in comparative terms. For example, in 2020 Indonesia experienced a contraction in annual GDP of 2.1%; in contrast, the Malaysian economy contracted by 5.6%, and the Philippines, where the government implemented extended lockdowns, by 9.6% (Asian Development Bank 2021). Still, this contraction was enough to push Indonesia back into the World Bank’s lower-middle income category in 2021; it had only just achieved upper-middle income status a year earlier (Rahman 2021).

Ultimately the Delta strain, and the total collapse of hospital systems across Java, forced President Jokowi to finally endorse widespread restrictions on mobility. The policy shift brought case numbers under control in September; but the economy has, unsurprisingly, suffered. In mid-2021 analysts readjusted Indonesia’s projected growth downward by several percentage points. Before Delta, the World Bank had predicted Indonesia would bounce back from 2020 with 4.4% average GDP growth in 2021; in June that number was revised to 3.7%, along with similar downgrades for most other countries in the region. Poverty crept up in 2020 to 10.4% (from 9.2% in 2019), and while data on poverty and inequality since the Delta outbreak have not been released, most observers expect a significant rise in both indicators, given the many vulnerable Indonesians living close to the poverty line.

The president’s “business first” approach to the pandemic has not surprised Indonesia-watchers, many of whom have underscored Jokowi’s developmentalist approach to governance, prioritizing infrastructure and business investment at the expense of other pressing policy problems, like law reform, corruption, rights, and justice (Bland 2020; Warburton 2016). Indeed, since 2019, when he ran for re-election, Jokowi has intensified his alliance with the country’s business community, seeking counsel from corporate executives on a range of policy areas, appointing many private-sector professionals to ministerial positions, and pursuing a series of strikingly neoliberal policy reforms that reflect the demands of the country’s largest business interests and industry associations (Mietzner 2021).

One of the most powerful illustrations of this trend came in late 2020 with the president’s signing of the controversial Omnibus Law on Job Creation (Buehler 2021). The law, which amended a whopping 76 existing laws, sought to cut red tape for business and encourage investment. In February 2021, the government introduced over 40 implementing regulations that brought a range of controversial changes into effect, including undoing generous severance pay for workers, and limiting companies’ environmental protection responsibilities. Labor, environmental activists, and development economists have been strongly critical of the law. But in 2021 the government pushed ahead and continued to ignore or repress dissenting voices, while framing the intervention as “vaccine for repairing the national economy” (Susanto 2021).

New appointments at the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce (KADIN) further demonstrate the tightened overlap between Jokowi’s administration and the business elite. Breaking with convention, in 2021 KADIN’s new advisory board included several senior members of government, including the deputy minister for state-owned enterprises, and senior aides and advisors from other economic portfolios (Lai and Thomas 2021). During the campaign to elect a new chair of KADIN, the government clearly had a favored candidate: Arsjad Rasjid, CEO of a major mining firm, Indika Energy, and business partner of Megawati Soekarnoputri’s son-in-law (Megawati is chair of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, the largest party in Parliament and the party to which Jokowi belongs). Major media outlets reported that KADIN officials were under direct pressure from the National Intelligence Agency to back Arsjad (Anam 2021; Fitra 2021; Lai and Thomas 2021). Respected economist Faisal Basri, of the University of Indonesia, and Didik Rachbini, head of one of KADIN’s research institutes, warned against the “infiltration of the Jokowi government” into the Chamber of Commerce (Lai and Thomas 2021). To be sure, the lobbying group has always had close political ties, with President Yudhoyono (2004–2014) appointing former KADIN chairs to strategic ministerial posts; but in 2021 KADIN was subject to intense government intervention, and the line between the state and this vehicle for private-sector interests has all but disappeared.

The trajectory of democratic decline observed in this journal’s 2020 year-end review was sustained in 2021, with new threats to democratic accountability. One of the most critical moments in the erosion of Indonesian democracy in 2021 was the government’s purge of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK). Against a backdrop of increasing ideological polarization between pluralist and Islamist political camps (Buehler 2021), the Jokowi administration constructed a narrative that sections of the KPK had been infiltrated by radical Islamists. To weed out such threatening elements, the government designed a “national vision exam” with the purported goal of testing civil servants’ understanding of, and commitment to, the state’s officially pluralist ideology as articulated in the Pancasila.²

The test included a perplexing range of questions, many of which had no connection to corruption or to the integrity of the interviewee. For example, media reported that staff were interrogated about their personal relationships, their marital status, and their opinions on homosexuality (Guritno 2021). The National Human Rights Commission alleges heavy involvement of the National Intelligence Agency and other security bodies in designing the content of the exam. The testing led to the dismissal of 57 KPK staff, many of whom had been involved in investigating high-profile politicians, business people, and police (CNN Indonesia 2021). Those dismissed included the respected investigator Novel Baswedan, who in 2017 was blinded in one eye following an acid attack by active police officers. In an interview Baswedan described the test as “just a tool…to get rid of us” (Maulia 2021).

The new national examination and the removal of KPK staff constitute unprecedented direct state intervention into a watchdog agency and have strong echoes of how the former autocrat, President Suharto, wielded ideological tools to justify suppressing potential sources of opposition during the New Order. This is but one example of the various ways the Jokowi administration has manipulated and politicized legal institutions for partisan ends, sometimes using the pandemic as cover or justification (Setijadi, forthcoming), and it signals a critical moment in the country’s democratic decline.

Observers are also increasingly concerned about the integrity of Indonesia’s electoral institutions. Elections for regional heads will run simultaneously in 2024, which means delaying 271 elections that were slated for 2022 and 2023. And in 2021, the government confirmed a plan to appoint civil servants as “placeholders” rather than leaving the current elected leaders in their posts until the 2024 elections. The 2016 law on regional elections outlines that in such situations, the regional leader position can be held by senior civil servants, and that active military and police can also act as temporary regional heads. Analysts expressed alarm at the proposal. On the one hand, civil servants appointed by the central government are likely to harbor partisan alliances, which will in turn favor incumbent parties in strategic elections, such as for governor of Jakarta (Republika 2021). Political observers also argue that military and police appointees will treat the temporary appointments as a career opportunity and a pathway into politics after they retire (Maulidar 2021). Indeed, many will see such an appointment as a means to establish themselves as candidates for the 2024 contest, creating opportunities for greater involvement of former security personnel in electoral politics.

In this journal’s previous year-end review, Buehler (2021) noted that the government was considering rolling back direct regional elections, with the minister for home affairs, Tito Karnavian, proposing that in underdeveloped provinces such as Papua, citizens with lower levels of education are not mature enough to participate in elections. While such deeply illiberal proposals are likely still on the table, in 2021 a different threat emerged: state officials are considering the idea of a third term for President Jokowi. A report in Tempo, a weekly magazine, in July 2021 outlined that ministers and senior members of the Presidential Palace are “planning a scenario for a third presidential term” and are lobbying party elites and polling institutes to support and campaign for the idea. The two-term limit enshrined in Indonesia’s constitution is the product of democratic reforms at the end of the 1990s, and was designed to protect against the rise of would-be autocrats. The fact that powerful political actors are seeking to reverse such reforms illustrates the depth of illiberal ambition within the Jokowi administration.

The campaign for a third term may ultimately fail, of course. Indeed, by the end of 2021 media attention had turned to routine speculation about the narrowing field of contenders for the 2024 presidential election, and in particular who would be the nominee for the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle. The contest is heating up between Puan Maharani, an uncharismatic figure with little popular appeal, and Ganjar Pranowo, a party cadre and the much-loved governor of Central Java. Puan is the daughter of the party’s chairperson, Megawati Soekarnoputri. While Megawati is reportedly desperate to nominate her daughter, Puan would almost certainly lose a presidential election (her polling numbers are consistently around 2%). Ganjar, on the other hand, is emerging as a favorite, and current polls suggest he has a good chance of defeating either Prabowo Subianto (minister for defense and chair of the Gerindra party) or Anies Baswedan (governor of Jakarta), two other popular potential presidential candidates.

In 2021, Delta’s spread throughout the region made vaccine access a major geopolitical issue, particularly against the backdrop of increasing US–China tensions in the Indo-Pacific. Indonesia, like many other Southeast Asian countries, turned to China for fast access to vaccines and thus further deepened its economic relationship with the superpower. US efforts to deliver vaccines to the region were far slower in comparison, which meant that while many countries in the region would prefer not to rely heavily on China’s supply, they had little choice through much of 2021 (Walden 2021).

China’s “vaccine diplomacy” in countries such as Indonesia cannot be separated from its long-held ambitions in the South China Sea. At a 2021 ASEAN-China Special Foreign Ministers Meeting, regional leaders issued a joint statement that expressed appreciation for China’s “provision of vaccines, medical supplies, and technical assistance,” and pledged self-restraint to avoid complicating or escalating disputes over the South China Sea (Law and Soeriaatmadja 2021). It remains unclear, however, the extent to which Southeast Asian countries’ deepening dependence on China during the pandemic has mollified regional leaders’ opposition to Chinese claims to the area.

Published online: February 9, 2022