Dangerous divides bedevil South-East Asian democracies
Elite co-operation and consensus-building between elections paper over deep and abiding social divisions. But those divisions are still alive in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Around the time of Indonesia’s presidential elections in 2019, the word on every analyst’s lips was “polarisation”.
Coming after a gubernatorial election in Jakarta in 2017 in which a Chinese-Christian governor was ousted from office after a religiously-charged campaign, President Joko Widodo’s fight for re-election was portrayed as a battle over the identity of the Indonesian state: defined by Islamists or pluralists and minorities.
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Liam Gammon is a research fellow in the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research and an editor at East Asia Forum (www.eastasiaforum.org) in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific.
