The Populism of Islamist Preachers in Indonesia's 2019 Presidential

The Populism of Islamist Preachers in Indonesia’s 2019 Presidential Election Yuka Kayane University of Tsukuba Populism without leadership? he literature on populism in Asian countries over the past two decades has generally featured charismatic and often autocratic leaders, as notably demonstrated elsewhere by the rise (and fall) of Thaksin Shinawatra due to his vehement rhetoric that antago- Tnized political elites in Bangkok, Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal and lawless war on drugs, and the continuous electoral success of Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, which prop- agates a divisive rhetoric that alienates Muslim minorities.1 Those analyses and media com- mentaries have highlighted personalistic leaders’ political strategies for seeking or exercising governmental power based on direct, unmediated, un-institutionalized support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers.2 While the aforementioned top-down populism with powerful leadership has often attracted significant attention, recent studies have shown that there are varieties of other forms of populist mobilization; some take bottom-up forms of social movement, while others have both personalist leadership and social movement.3 In addition, its characteristics substantially depend on local context, such as the ideological bases that are most appealing to the specific society, the figures best positioned to succeed in gaining acceptance as a representative of the people, and how antagonistic oppositions are constructed. The term ‘populism’ was widely used during the 2014 Indonesian presidential election, in which both candidates––Joko Widodo (Jokowi) and Prabowo Subianto––leveraged the 1 Joshua Kurlantzick,“Southeast Asia’s Populism is Different but Also Dangerous,” Council on Foreign Relations, November 1, 2018, https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/southeast-asias-populism-different-also-dange rous, accessed December 12, 2019. For populism in Asian countries in 2000s, see Kosuke Mizuno and Pasuk Phongpaichit, Populism in Asia (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2009). 2 For a political strategy approach to understand the populism, see Kurt Weyland, “A Political Strategic Approach,” The Oxford Handbook of Populism, eds. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 49-50. 3 See Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 42-61. © 2020 Hartford Seminary. DOI: 10.1111/muwo.12368 605 THE MUSLIM WORLD • VOLUME 110 • AUTUMN 2020 public’s dissatisfaction with the former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and employed nationalism to draw support.4 Jokowi emphasized his casual demeanor and successful political ascendance from being a regional head in Solo, Central Java, to the governor of Jakarta, the nation’s capital. On the other hand, Prabowo emphasized his “firm leadership” and per- sonal charisma as a former military commander. However, the subsequent 2019 presidential election––which had the same candidates––was held in the midst of a major ideological con- frontation that was molded by popular Islamist mobilizations. The shift took place once Islamist forces succeeded in organizing unprecedented movements from the end of 2016 to early 2017, which sought to accomplish their candidate’s victory in Jakarta’s gubernatorial election. As a result, Islamic political ideology became the central and most contested issue in the presidential election. As neither candidate directly represented Islamic ideological interests, incumbent President Jokowi accommodated Java-based Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) as the country’s largest Islamic organization, whereas Prabowo was backed by the burgeoning Islamist forces. NU has been under the pluralist leadership of Said Aqil Siradj, who empha- sizes the importance of respecting the equal rights of non-Muslims as well as Muslim minorities. On the other hand, Islamist groups claim that Sunni Muslims’ interests should be prioritized over those of other religious believers based on their majoritarian view of democracy. As a result of the heated contestation between these groups during the campaigns, Indonesian politics was left deeply divided by these antagonistic views. If the aforementioned approach of populism––which features personalistic leadership–– is considered, the Islamist mobilization before the presidential election cannot be classified as populism because it lacked apparent popular leadership. However, if we look to Mudde’s ideational approach, which recent scholarly works have acknowledged to be broadly applica- ble, it enables us to identify the distinct characteristics of Indonesia’s powerful, bottom-up form of populism. Indonesia’s Islamist mobilizations in 2019 are clearly aligned with this approach’s definition of populism. Mudde––a leading advocate of this approach––defines populism as “a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be separated into two homo- geneous and antagonistic groups––‘the pure people’ and the corrupt elite––and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.”5 According to this approach, populism is a “thin-centered” ideology, which only “offers few 4 See Edward Aspinall, “Oligarchic Populism: Prabowo Subianto’s Challenge to Indonesian Democracy,” Indonesia 99 (2014): 1-28. For Jokowi’s populism in 2014, see Marcus Mietzner, “How Jokowi Won and Democracy Survived,” Journal of Democracy 25, no. 4 (2014): 111-125. On the other hand, Hadiz made an early analysis on Islamic populism in Indonesia, which he considered as an unsuccessful case in comparison to Egypt and Turkey. According to him, unlike the two countries, Indonesia’s Islamic populism did not have significant power because they failed to dominate either state institutions or civil society. Vedi. R. Hadiz, Islamic Populism in Indonesia and Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 5 Mudde and Kaltwasser, Populism, 5-6. Similarly, drawing on Mudde’s definition, Fossati and Mietzner conducted an analysis through a survey to measure populist attitudes among Indonesian constituents, and their results demonstrated that populist attitudes were stronger in Indonesia than in countries like the Netherlands that represent Western Europe’s trend toward anti-establishment and anti-immigration populism. Diego Fossati and Marcus Mietzner, “Analyzing Indonesia’s Populist Electorate Demographic, Ideological, and Attitudinal Trends,” Asian Survey 59 no. 5 (2019): 779. 606 © 2020 Hartford Seminary. THE POPULISM OF ISLAMIST PREACHERS IN INDONESIA’S 2019 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION specific views on political institutional or socio-economic issues.”6 Therefore, it requires a more comprehensive ideology, such as socialism or liberalism, as a host ideology. As for the case of Indonesia’s recent Islamist mobilizations, the Islamist figures vehemently criticized the corrupt “anti-Islam” government for abusing its power to criminalize the ulama, activists, and Islamic mass organizations. They also claimed to embody the interests of the disenfran- chised “umat Islam” (Muslim community), who were positioned as the ‘pure people.’ The emerging Islamist forces tactically echoed a populist rhetoric to appeal to Muslim constituents during the 2019 presidential election, by offering a set of ideological solutions of Islamism as the host ideology to address the issues embedded in the established system and order. However, there were serious discrepancies between Prabowo and the Islamists, particu- larly in terms of the ideological stances each of them represented. The Indonesian Islamists, despite the variation of their ideological articulations, have commonly strived to implement sharia laws at all levels of the state. Although Prabowo––as a son-in-law of late president Suharto and the former commander of national army special forces ––cultivated an informal tie with Islamists seeking to use them to counter opposition forces in the 1990s,7 he never earned grassroots Islamic credentials. Prabowo had neither the educational upbringing nor the political background that bound him to Islamism, nor did he seem to share Islamist values. Prabowo himself dared to acknowledge that “he lacks the knowledge of Islam” in front of Islamist figures.8 Although the Islamist forces had no other plausible opponent for Jokowi in 2019 than Prabowo, it is rather ironic to endorse the type of irreligious elite that they repeat- edly criticized. Therefore, the ideological representation and popular legitimacy of their choice was debatable.9 The question is how the Islamists would be able to convince their fellow supporters and swing voters and consolidate their bases to contribute to the increasing votes for Prabowo––an obviously miscast representative for their ideological goals. 6 Cas Mudde, “An Ideational Approach,” The Oxford Handbook of Populism, eds. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 30. 7 Prabowo initially tried to accommodate Islamist groups in the late 1980s due to his rivalry with Benny Murdani, a Catholic General in the military. By 1997 he began to openly speak about the “tyranny of mi- nority,” referring to conspiracies regarding the Chinese Indonesian and other “enemies of Islam,” notably the Catholics and the Jewish. Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 201-207. 8 Marlinda Oktavia

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