- (december 2022)
Indonesia in 2022.
When people discuss the largest democracies in the world, they often forget
to mention Indonesia, which also happens to be the most populous Muslim country in the world: almost 200 million people voted in the 2019 elections.
The moderate Muslim president, Joko Widodo (aka Jokowi), was reelected but political Islam has never been so influential in the country like it is now.
In the old days, one could feel the power of political Islam only in conservative strongholds like Aceh, West Java and West Sumatra that introduced shari'a-based laws.
The turn towards a more radical Islam (in a country long known as a role model
for religious tolerance) came in 2016 when mass demonstrations took down
Jakarta's governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Christian ethnic Chinese. He was later sentenced to two years in prison for blasphemy against Islam.
Widodo's rival was, again, former general Prabowo Subianto, who was supported by Islamist religious parties and hardline Islamist clerics.
Jokowi himself had to take as his running mate a conservative Islamic scholar in order to win reelection in 2019.
A few weeks after winning reelection, Jokowi made peace with Prabowo Subianto and appointed him as his defense minister, and it looks increasingly like
Prabowo has been anointed as Jokowi's successor.
At the same time that Jokowi bent to the influence of the Islamists, he
cracked down on extremists. For example in 2020 he outlawed the very
Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Islam) that had been behind the Jakarta protests in 2016.
Nonetheless, recent polls show that as many as 72%
of Indonesia's Muslims favor adopting shari'a as the official law.
Indonesia's parliament is about to pass a law that will punish sex outside marriage with imprisonment of up to a year, a law that will apply to both Indonesians and foreigners.
The law was first proposed in 2019 but then withdrawn when young people took to the streets in Jakarta and other cities.
It is telling that now it is likely to pass.
The next presidential elections are scheduled for 2024 and the leading candidates to take on
Prabowo Subianto (technically, a candidate of his Gerindra Party and the National Awakening Party) are
Central Java's governor Ganjar Pranowo of Jokowi's
Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), also the party of
former president Megawati Sukarnoputri,
and former Jakarta's governor Anies Baswedan of the NasDem Party.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2022 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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