Jokowi’s Chances in West Sumatra And Why He Is Likely To Lose – Analysis – Eurasia Review

title

Joko Widodo is likely to lose the 2019 presidential election in West Sumatra. Jokowi’s poor electoral prospects in the province are based primarily on his association with the PDI-P which has links to founding President Sukarno and his role in ending a rebellion in the province in the 1950s and 60s.

By Adri Wanto*

West Sumatra is the only province in Indonesia where more than 50% of its population are consistently dissatisfied with the performance of the Joko Widodo (“Jokowi”) government. This is based on data from various surveys since 2014. The data also predicted Jokowi to experience poor electoral prospects in the 2019 presidential election in the province.

According to a survey by Indikator Politik Indonesia and Saiful
Mujani Research and Consulting (SMRC), more than 60% of West Sumatran
people, better-known as the Minangkabau ethnic community, are
dissatisfied with Jokowi’s performance. Both survey results were in line
with the 2014 presidential election results, where the Jokowi-Kalla
ticket only received 23.1% of the votes while their rival Prabowo-Hatta
camp gained 76.9%.

Trend Not Favouring Jokowi

Since the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998, the Indonesia
Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) has belaboured to gain political
ground in the province of West Sumatra. In the 1999 national legislative
elections, although the PDI-P gained a national majority of seats in
parliament, they only won two seats (out of 14) in West Sumatra
province. In the 2004 and 2009 elections, the PDI-P failed to gain even a
single seat in the province, only finally gaining back two seats in
2014.

Presidential candidates supported by the PDI-P have also fared poorly
in the province. In the 2004 presidential election, Megawati
Sukarnoputri only received 16% of the votes in West Sumatra, while her
rival Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (running as a candidate from the Democrat
Party) received 84% of the votes. This trend was repeated in the 2009
presidential election, when Megawati, backed again by the PDI-P, pulled
in only 5.9% of the votes compared to SBY’s 79.9% in the province.

The 2014 presidential election showed this trend was not just about
individual candidates, but more broadly linked to party affiliation,
when the PDI-P backed the Joko Widodo-Jusuf Kalla ticket. Even though
Jusuf Kalla’s wife was an indigenous member of the Minangkabau ethnic
community, the ticket only garnered 23% of the votes compared to their
rival Prabowo Subianto’s 76.9%.

Sukarno’s Painful Legacy in West Sumatra

Jokowi, nevertheless, has been more successful than Megawati in
consolidating some support from Minangkabau elites. On 17 March 2018, a
number of prominent Minangkabau leaders residing in Bandung expressed
their support for the president. On 17 September, ten local government
heads (two Mayors and eight Regents) in West Sumatra also declared their
support for Jokowi in the 2019 presidential elections.

These supporters consider the development of infrastructure in
Indonesia under the Jokowi administration to have improved
significantly. They have also generally approved of his increased
visibility in the region, having visited West Sumatra five times in the
first four years of his term to foster development projects. This
resulted in the creation of the hashtag #MinangPemilihJokowi (“Minang
Vote Jokowi”) in support of his candidacy.

However, while some local political leaders and Minang elites based
in Java Island support the president, Jokowi must still contend with the
controversial historical legacy of his political allies. The prevailing
opinion of Jokowi among many Minangkabau people is that he is an
‘employee’ of the PDI-P and thus a tool of the party’s leader Megawati.

The crackdown by the Sukarno government on the PRRI movement in
Sumatra in the 1950s caused a deep and longstanding wound among the
Minangkabaus’ older generation. Therefore, any individual candidates and
political parties associated with President Sukarno will not win major
support from Minangkabau people.

Psychological Scars of PRRI Remain

After Indonesia declared independence in 1945, it went through a
period of instability as it struggled with economic development, foreign
debt and governance failures. This challenge was exacerbated by the
fact that the newly-formed nation was composed of many diverse and
fractious provinces and not all of them were satisfied with the
Java-centric direction the country was taking under Sukarno.

As a result, from 1958-1961 several provinces in Sumatra declared
their independence and attempted to separate from the new nation-state
of Indonesia. Known as the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of
Indonesia (PRRI), the movement was considered a rebellion against the
central government and military forces were dispatched to Sumatra to
suppress it.

The crackdown on the PRRI movement caused a deep and longstanding
wound among the Minangkabaus’ older generation. PRRI leaders were
persuaded by the Sukarno government to negotiate but all of them were
arrested and sent to prison. During the conflict, thousands of
Minangkabau people were victims of the ferocity of the government army
and many were displaced from Sumatra.

Jokowi’s Current Policies on Islamist Groups Not Helping

Based on the Indonesia Programme’s research in the province of West
Sumatra at the end of November and the beginning of December 2018, this
historically painful narrative still occupies a prominent place in the
memories of some public figures and continues to generate resentment and
distrust of anything associated with the ideology and legacy of
Sukarno.

Furthermore, in general Minangkabau culture is quite conservative, adhering to a traditional philosophy of adat bersandi syarak, syarak bersandi Kitabullah (“traditions are built on religion and religion is built on Al-Quran”).

Jokowi is generally viewed skeptically by hardline Islamic
organisations and his dissolution of conservative groups like Hizbut
Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) and purported ‘discrimination’ toward militant
clerics like Habbib Rizieq are considered harmful to Islam by some
conservative Minangkabau people. This, coupled with his association with
the PDI-P, Megawati and the toxic legacy of her father hurts Jokowi’s
electability in West Sumatra even as his developmental agenda gains
popularity.

*Adri Wanto is an Associate Research Fellow with the Indonesia Programme at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.

jokowi