If Indonesians are going to find a candidate to oppose the oligarchs, they need to start organising now
Jeffrey A. Winters
 |
The prospects for 2014 don’t always inspire positive responsesHenri Ismail/Poros Photo |
All modern democracies contain a strong element of oligarchy. But Indonesia represents a particularly extreme example of oligarchic dominance and distortion. This is partly because wealth, the defining power resource of oligarchs, is unusually concentrated in Indonesian society.
Some simple comparisons are illuminating. Focusing just on the net worth of the top 500 individuals or families in each case, the Senators of Rome were about 10,000 times richer than the average farmer or slave living in the Roman Empire. In the United States today, wealth is twice as concentrated – the top 500 Americans are about 20,000 times as wealthy as the average citizen. Singapore’s ratio is slightly higher than that of the U.S., at about 25,000 to 1. But in Indonesia, the top 500 oligarchs are about 600,000 times richer than the average Indonesian.
Money is one of the most versatile forms of power. Because society is so poorly organised and mobilised, its impact on Indonesian democracy has been overwhelming at all political levels since Suharto’s fall in 1998.
Media and party power
A small number of oligarchs now own the vast majority of Indonesia’s print, television, radio, and online media. Following a short burst of new media voices after 1998, big money moved aggressively to consolidate
