Indonesia has long maintained a fragile relationship with democracy, teetering between dictatorship under Suharto until 1998, to becoming one of Asia’s most celebrated democratic success stories in the 2000s, and now again slowly backsliding towards authoritarianism since 2014. Joko Widodo, despite being the primary perpetrator of Indonesia’s democratic erosion, sustained a remarkable level of popularity among the Indonesian populace, stepping down from his ten-year tenure as president in 2024 with a 75 percent approval rating (Teresia 2024). However, his successor’s time as president has presented a very different story. In the past year, Prabowo Subianto has become increasingly unpopular, with his approval rating falling 37 percentage points in the last year (Reuters 2026).

This widespread disapproval can be seen no more clearly than in the student protests which took place on October 20th, 2026. A group of protesters, consisting of university students from across the nation, surrounded the regional parliament in Yogyakarta demanding the reinstatement of checks on the executive. Tensions exploded that night, with protestors clashing with police forces and no agreements with the government being reached. As a result, nationwide student protests have been planned for October 28th to push the government to agree to the protestors’ terms.

However, this focus on the erosion of democratic institutions seems confusing, given that Prabowo’s predecessor enacted anti-democratic reforms to a much more severe degree and in a more frequent manner, restricting the independence of the anti-corruption commission, criminalizing insults against the president, and co-opting opposition parties into a government coalition with him. This contrast presents an interesting question, why do some backsliders maintain popular support, while others face widespread public pushback?

A common tactic of backsliding actors is to establish control over the legislature and judiciary to restrict the ability of these institutions to exert horizontal accountability upon the executive branch (Bermeo 2016; Pérez-Liñán, Schmidt, and Vairo 2019). Once these checks on executive power by other governmental institutions have been removed, vertical accountability, through votes in elections, the mobilization of protestors in the streets, and actions by civil society groups, becomes ever more important. Yet, by that same token, it becomes vital for backsliders to maintain public support and stay in power until they can also restrict vertical accountability. 

Political scientists have found that inequality acts as a salient factor in mobilizing against democracy, allowing populists to capitalize on economic grievances to win elections (Bermann 2021; Engler and Weisstanner 2020). This has created an incentive for many backsliding actors to make redistributive promises as part of their campaign, such as Maduro’s CLAP food boxes, Erdoğan’s frequent minimum wage increases, and Orbán’s family benefits. These programs are effective at retaining a strong voter base. For example, in the ruins of Venezuela’s collapsed economy, 83 percent of Maduro voters cited CLAP boxes as being their family’s primary source of food, allowing Maduro to engage in a clientelist bargain, where supporters were given food in exchange for votes, under a credible threat from the PSUV to withhold food if voters veered from the party in elections (Rendon and Mendales 2018).

Did Prabowo follow suit and make similar distributive promises? Yes. As part of his 2024 campaign, one of the Indonesian president’s primary policy goals was enacting a free meals program. However, coming to the end of 2026, it has become clear to Indonesians that Prabowo has failed to bring this program to fruition. The policy’s funding was drawn from the state budget for education and healthcare, damaging vital government programs. In many provinces, food failed to be distributed, with the ones who did receive it being given low-quality goods, causing mass food poisonings (Kuwait Times 2026). 

In the absence of formal institutions of accountability, individuals have previously been found to turn to solidary groups to push government actors to provision public goods (Tsai 2007). Lacking a strong judiciary through which they can push back on the President, Indonesian university students did the same, turning to labor groups to organize the protests on October 20th and the planned protests on the 28th, believing they could engage in vertical accountability and protect direct regional elections or make the executive accountable to binding court decisions. Their hope is that these reforms would allow the people to either vote Prabowo out of office or use the courts to bring back the functioning of other welfare programs in Indonesia.

President Prabowo’s failures present a lesson for other backsliding actors. While redistributive promises can be a powerful tactic for rising to power, following through on those same promises is a necessary condition for consolidating their rule. Instituting targeted goods provisions allows backsliders to suppress public dissent until they can adequately erode mechanisms of vertical accountability. However, when backsliders fail to, at least on the surface, address the economic grievances that brought them to power, it can turn supporters against them, pushing those supporters toward informal institutions to mobilize against authoritarian agendas. 

References:

Ananda Teresia. 2024. “Poll Shows Indonesia President’s Approval Rating Falls After Protests, but Still Popular.” Reuters, October 4, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/poll-shows-indonesia-presidents-approval-rating-falls-after-protests-still-2024-10-04/.

Berman, Sheri. 2021. ”The Causes of Populism in the West.” Annual Review of Political Science 24 (1), 7

Bermeo, Nancy. 2016. “On Democratic Backsliding.” Journal of Democracy 27(1): 5-19.

Engler, Sarah, and David Weisstanner. 2021. “The Threat of Social Decline: Income Inequality and Radical Right Support.” Journal of European Public Policy 28 (2): 153–73.

kuwaitTimes. 2026. “Indonesian Police Arrest Dozens in Anti-Govt Protest | Kuwait Times Newspaper.” Kuwait Times. Kuwaittimes. June 27, 2026. https://kuwaittimes.com/article/45556/world/indonesian-police-arrest-dozens-in-anti-govt-protest/.

Pérez-Liñán, Aníbal Nicolas Schmidt, and Daniela Vairo. 2019. “Presidential Hegemony and Democratic Backsliding in Latin America, 1925-2016.” Democratization 26 (4): 606-625

Tsai LL. Solidary Groups, Informal Accountability, and Local Public Goods Provision in Rural China. American Political Science Review. 2007;101(2):355-372. doi:10.1017/S0003055407070153 

Rendon, Moises, and Jacob Mendales. 2018. “The Maduro Diet: Food V. Freedom in Venezuela.” Www.Csis.Org. July 9, 2018. https://www.csis.org/analysis/maduro-diet-food-v-freedom-venezuela.

Reuters Staff. 2026. “Indonesia to Deploy More Than 9,000 Security Officers at Protests Marking Prabowo’s Two Years in Power.” Reuters, October 20, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/indonesia-deploy-more-than-9000-security-officers-protests-marking-prabowos-two-2026-10-20/.