Abstract
The rise to power of political dynasties in regional Indonesia has been the subject of much critical analysis by scholars and journalists, with most seeing the phenomenon as a symptom of the wider democratic shortcomings of the post-Suharto period. This article examines the successes and travails of political dynasties in regional Indonesia by focusing on the province of Central Kalimantan. It begins by defining political dynasty, differentiating it from allied terms, outlining competing scholarly explanations for dynastic formation, and noting the critical issue of inter-generational succession. The article then examines subnational dynasty formation in Central Kalimantan, where in seven out of eight districts in the relevant time period a sitting bupati (district head) attempted to engineer dynastic succession, but succeeded in only two. The examination shows that while political opportunity structure accounts emphasising state and party weakness help explain the explosion of attempts to establish political dynasties in democratic Indonesia, the failure of most such attempts to consolidate inter-generationally indicates that we must be cautious in judging how stable these new political formations will become. Would-be subnational dynasties in Indonesia continue to face formidable competing sources of political authority which make it difficult for them to establish themselves over multiple generations.
Siapa sih yg tidak akan mengorbitkan anaknya dalam dunia politik kalau bisa? [Who on earth wouldn’t launch their child into politics if they had the chance?] (Advisor to the bupati of East Kotwaringin district, June 2013)
One place where dynasty formation has been prominent is the province of Central Kalimantan, the topic of this essay. The most important local family is the Narang clan, headed by the chief of the provincial parliament, Atu Narang, and his brother, Teras Narang, the province’s governor between 2005 and 2015. Our focus in this article, however, is the district level. In most of the 14 districts in the province, signs of dynastic politics abound, with many district heads (bupati) installing family members in legislative or other posts. In this article, we focus on several such dynasties-in-formation, noting both their bases in politically connected business sectors (notably timber, mining, palm oil and contracting) prior to moving into formal politics, and their varied political strategies once in office. While our conclusions generally support the overall tenor of the literature so far, with the emergence of political families clearly part of a wider entrenchment of oligarchic politics, we also highlight challenges to dynastic consolidation.
In particular, we focus on the critical issue of dynastic succession, selecting as our cases only districts where incumbent bupati, having already served two terms in office, were unable to stand for re-election in the round of pilkada (direct elections of local government heads) between 2010 and 2013. 1 There were eight such districts in Central Kalimantan, and we identified attempts at dynastic succession in seven of them (the one exception was a rather odd case, East Barito, where the bupati had served two terms but ran as a deputy bupati, and lost). That retiring bupati tried to ensure their succession by sons, wives or other relatives in such a large proportion of our cases does underline how widespread dynastic politics is becoming in regional Indonesia. Equally important, however, was the fact that dynastic succession failed in five of these seven cases, a very low success rate. 2
In this article we focus on six of the seven districts where dynastic succession was attempted, examining not only the facilitating conditions and sources of political strength that explain the rise of political families, but also the many obstacles they encounter in entrenching their positions. 3 Our analysis of the reasons for the low success rate of dynastic succession suggests that we need to avoid drawing hasty conclusions about how central dynastic politics might become in Indonesian local politics. Rather than being a general phenomenon, it is possible that the geographic spread of dynasties will be patchy, pointing to a need to move beyond purely descriptive accounts and to think more analytically about patterns and sources of dynastic authority. Accordingly, before we proceed with the analysis, it is important to clarify two main analytical points. First, how do we define political dynasties and political families? And, second, what theoretical explanations might we test in explaining their emergence in contemporary Indonesia?
Conceptualising and explaining political families and dynasties
On the first point, many writings on political dynasties proceed without definitions, perhaps because the family is assumed to be such a natural unit of social analysis that it requires no explication. In day-to-day political discourse in Indonesia, meanwhile, the phrase dinasti politik has already become a widely applied term. But family groups that get involved in politics vary greatly in terms of the depth and extent of their power, and the roles assigned to family members. We thus begin with a definition of the most simple group: a political family consists of a family where more than one family member gains elected political positions in a particular geographic unit. For the purposes of this essay, we are especially interested in political families where a leading member attains the apex executive or legislative post in a district or province. However, a political family by this definition could also include a family where, for example, two sisters occupy positions in a district parliament.
A political family becomes a political dynasty only when it is able to extend its power temporally, so that once the dynasty’s founder loses office, he or she is succeeded by a family member. This success can be intra-generational (e.g. when the founder is succeeded by a spouse or sibling) or inter-generational (typically, a child, son or daughter-in-law). This process of succession is accelerated in Indonesia because of term limits (provincial governors and district heads can serve only two five-year terms), meaning also that there has been what is probably an unusually large number of attempts to engineer intra-generational succession, notably wives trying to succeed their husbands. Because political dynasties are a feature only of the post-1998 democratic era, many political families have not yet been tested in their ability to engineer succession. We do not yet know how many political families will transform themselves into dynasties proper, and whether Indonesia will eventually match the record of neighbouring countries (notably, the Philippines) in producing resilient multi-generational political dynasties.
There is another important dimension of the power of political families. This concerns the family’s ability to extend itself horizontally, referring to its ability to spread through differing government agencies and through adjacent geographic units. Typically, such horizontal spread occurs when members of the political family come to occupy legislative posts representing part of the district or province headed by the founder. They can also take on important bureaucratic functions, especially as heads of government bureaus at the provincial or district level (though this can be harder to engineer given the bureaucratic requirements needed to fill such posts), or they can win political positions in neighbouring districts. Some of the best known political families in Indonesia have broad horizontal spread, extending their political control through several districts in a single province, and occupying positions in provincial and district executive governments, as well as seats in district, provincial and national legislatures. The best-known such families in Indonesia are those of Ratu Atut Chosiyah, former governor of Banten, and Syahrul Yasin Limpo, governor of South Sulawesi, both of which have spread their tentacles widely, holding district head positions in the provinces concerned, numerous legislative seats in district, provincial and national parliaments, as well as operating family businesses. Many other political families, however, are much narrower, holding only a few positions in a single district.
Finally, we should note that political families are typically embedded in wider familial networks, most of whose members are not political officeholders, but who can be mobilised to support the leaders in elections and other political campaigns. We define such a wider grouping as a political clan. Given that in Indonesia (as in the Philippines: McCoy, 1994: 9) kinship is defined bilaterally (through both the mother’s and father’s line), and given the high birth rate until recent times, most individuals can trace massive interlocking networks of family relationships should they need to do so. In some parts of the country, such as in much of Eastern Indonesia, these kinship structures play an important role in structuring core aspects of social life (such as the maintenance of adat or custom) and are thus relatively readily mobilised for political purposes. In Java, family structures are more amorphous and relatively centred on the nuclear family and immediate relatives and are thus less amenable for political use.
In Central Kalimantan, where family and clan networks are important socially, most politicians view their kinship networks as a core political resource. Many political candidates interviewed in the course of this research emphasised that they first turned to family members when building their ‘success teams’ (the campaign teams that organise their election campaigns) and that close relatives are their most reliable political supporters. In rural districts of Central Kalimantan, as in many parts of Indonesia, political candidates typically achieve their highest votes in their home villages and surrounding regions where their family ties are strongest, and they often map their political support in terms of clan geography. In Java, family or clan mobilisation is rarely so prominent in political strategy. It is an open question, therefore, as to whether the emergence of a particular political family or dynasty will be linked to the mobilisation of a wider political clan. Moreover, even where a family does rely on clan mobilisation, this is typically only one part of their strategy. Most family politicians also rely upon resources that are similar to those mobilised by other elite politicians: bureaucratic positions, informal networks, patronage and the like.
With these definitions and preliminary observations in hand, what theoretical explanations might we advance to explain the emergence of political dynasties in post-Suharto Indonesia or, for that matter, in other post-authoritarian states? Reviewing existing literature on Indonesia, and drawing on research in South East Asia and beyond, we can distinguish two broad approaches.
The first approach focuses on political opportunity structure. This approach directs our attention towards features of the political system that facilitate dynasty building or, more commonly, towards the absence of features that might forestall it. Obviously, in the Indonesian case, the shift from authoritarian to democratic rule is critical, given that this shift created possibilities for influential local actors to contest via elections for political positions that were previously appointed, and thus reserved for individuals with appropriate bureaucratic credentials and, critically, who were favoured by Jakarta. Many provincial governors, district heads and mayors were not even indigenous to the areas they governed; in the post-Suharto era, local networks and credentials are critically important (Buehler, 2009).
More broadly, the prominence of families, clans and cognate informal groupings in official politics is generally seen as a function of state weakness and the mutual inter-penetration of state and social forces that occurs when the state lacks institutional integrity. This understanding has been highly influential in studies of developing-world states since works of Migdal (1988, 2001; see also McCoy, 1994: 10–19). One variant of this explanation is historical and, as explained by McCoy, concerns the sequencing of class and state formation: in countries where the development of strong landed aristocracies precedes the establishment of strong states, local states institutions are likely to be captured by powerful landed families as they come into being (McCoy, 1994: 5–6). Though this version of the approach cannot explain the emergence of new political families in regional Indonesia many decades after state building commenced, their rise might be viewed as a symptom of the state’s weakness, or at least of its penetration by informal ‘shadow state’ networks that organise power outside formal rules (Aspinall and van Klinken, 2011; Hidayat, 2007).
As well as highlighting state weakness generally, many analyses of Indonesia point to the absence, or at least weakness, of other political institutions that could counter the influence of political families. In particular, the weaknesses of political parties as a means of recruiting local leaders and running their elections is generally seen as one reason why locally powerful and wealthy elites, including those from political families, have been able to dominate local politics (Buehler and Johnson Tan, 2007; Mietzner, 2010, 2011). Writers like Hadiz (2010) and Winters (2013) see the emergence of political dynasties as a symptom of a political system marked by the absence of movements based in the subordinate classes, with predation by dynasties and clans merely one part of a broader complex of phenomena stemming from the resulting hegemonic power of oligarchs.
All such variants of the political opportunity structure approach thus explain the dominance of political families as being a consequence of the absence of countervailing political institutions or forces, whether the key absence is strong state institutions, effective political parties, counter-hegemonic movements or, conceivably, other institutions. While this emphasis appropriately directs our attention towards the broader political context in which political families are embedded and emerge, it also leaves many questions unanswered and rests on some potentially problematic assumptions. Such an approach, much like the local politician in Central Kalimantan whose comment begins this article, assumes that all politicians will naturally endeavour to entrench their relatives in political power if given the opportunity, especially in a political system founded on rent-seeking and patronage, when office-holders are empowered to build up their personal fortunes. Put most simply, the political opportunity structure approach argues that political families and dynasties dominate because they can. Rather than asking why politicians seek to build family power, it naturalises the family as the basic unit of political contestation, in much the same way that primordialist understandings of ethnicity naturalise ethnic groups, without asking how, why and under what conditions such groups are themselves constructed and mobilised by political actors.
It is thus appropriate to supplement political opportunity approaches with a second broad class of explanations that emphasise dynasty building as strategy. Rather than assuming that individual politicians will seek to aggrandise their families if given the opportunity, this approach directs us to ask why relying upon family networks and building dynasties might be an effective political strategy among the universe of alternative strategies available to local political actors. A number of possible approaches suggest themselves here. Let us mention three.
The first is that dynasty building might be a defensive strategy. Given that the key to political success in regional Indonesia frequently lies in the attainment and distribution of patronage resources in ways that are formally illegal, it is not surprising that political officeholders will seek ways of building power that also protect themselves from legal investigations or prosecutions (in mid-2012, the national government revealed that just under half of all local government heads had been or were being investigated in corruption cases: Kompas, 2012). Installing family members in power may be one way to do that. Thus, Buehler (2013) writes that ‘establishing a dynasty is often also a protection strategy: incumbents want to be succeeded by their family members in order to shield themselves and their “nearest and dearest” from being jailed for corruption’. New power-holders who are relatives can be expected to reliably cover up the evidence of their predecessors’ wrongdoing.
Protection from legal sanction, however, points to a wider issue: the critical importance of building trust in the context of clientelist politics (e.g. Bjarnegård, 2010: 184). It is not simply that political actors who rely on the informal distribution of patronage must fear law enforcement; they also know that the informal deals they make cannot be enforced legally and are thus constantly at risk of being dishonoured by their own allies and collaborators. In the organisation of election campaigns, for example, political candidates in local elections in Indonesia face constant problems of embezzlement and defection by the brokers who are recruited to their campaign teams (Aspinall, 2014b). Similar acts of betrayal can occur in all the deals to pass legislation, arrange promotions, make back-channel payments, reward supporters, manipulate tendering processes, lobby national politicians and do the thousands of other things that are the daily stuff of shadow-state politics in regional Indonesia. Where trust is a rare but valuable political commodity, building an inner circle that consists partly of family members, or placing family members in strategic political positions, might be one way to minimise the risks of defection, embezzlement and other forms of betrayal that politicians see as a major challenge.
A second approach might view the family as a network resource. As noted above, the political family whose members occupy key government posts in a particular locale might be embedded in a wider clan structure, which can be used as a network of political mobilisation, either during election campaigning or at other moments. In this regard, family and clan structures might be just one of several potential networks that politicians can rely upon to mobilise support (parties, business networks, the bureaucracy etc.). In some places, however, clans might be particularly important in organising social affiliations, and it can be expected that in such places political families will be more prominent.
A third and related approach views the family as an identity resource. It is possible to treat the family or clan as an identity category just like any other (ethnicity, region, religion, etc.) and to ask how the category is constructed and how individuals are encouraged to view themselves as affiliated to that identity and owing it their loyalty. This approach has been used productively in the study of clan politics in Central Asia (e.g. Schatz, 2004) and is most useful in places where clans are mobilised as a network resource in the way described in the preceding paragraph. Likewise, in parts of eastern Indonesia, in particular, it has already been convincingly shown that family and clan structures can be used for the purposes of electoral mobilisation (Rohi, 2016; Sumampouw, 2016). Extending this approach, even if the family is seen as being a relatively narrow group, it might nevertheless be widely identified as holding desirable attributes that could be useful politically. Writing on the Philippines, McCoy notes that ‘elite families … are often thought to transmit their character and characteristics to younger generations’ (McCoy, 1994: 8). There may be many political attributes of the family which are seen as being inherited and which can be beneficial politically; likewise, family membership might itself be seen as a signalling device, for example as a sign that the individual concerned has the political backing and financial support of the district head.
Central Kalimantan: Attempts at dynastic succession at the district level
Central Kalimantan province has hosted among the most widespread dynastic politics of post-Suharto Indonesia. As with many local government leaders in the first decade of democratisation, most of the political families who emerged here can trace the roots of their influence and wealth to the New Order years, when key family members were senior bureaucrats and/or involved in extractive industries. During the New Order, natural resources – especially timber – were a massive source of rents throughout Kalimantan. The massive deforestation of those years has now largely run its course, having exhausted most virgin forest with devastating environmental effects. The central place once occupied by timber in the province’s political economy has now been assumed by successor industries, notably mining and palm oil. Involvement in rent-seeking in post-Suharto natural resource industries is not surprisingly therefore a theme that weaves itself through most of the following family stories. Another important part of the background is demography: around 47 percent of the province’s population consists of a complex array of indigenous Dayak subethnic groups, for whom clan structures are an important part of social organisation and therefore, potentially, a significant political resource for would-be politicians. Despite this, most attempts to engineer dynastic succession have failed.
Pulang Pisau: The Amur family
Pulang Pisau is a district that was created in the early post-Suharto years, being split off from the larger Kapuas district in 1999. Like many of Central Kalimantan’s districts, it was heavily logged in the past, and now hosts a variety of industries, prominent among them palm oil and mining. It was ruled between 2003 and 2013 by bupati Achmad Amur, a former bureaucrat who harboured high ambitions for himself and his family. He came to power benefiting from local roots, outside experience and family wealth. Of mixed Dayak, Banjar and Bakumpai heritage he was the son of a wealthy local timber exporter, with the family also owning large land holdings, notably coconut plantations, in the Bahaur region of the district. Achmad Amur, like several in his family, received tertiary education in his youth (still rare in this part of Kalimantan at that time) and worked outside the region in bureaucracy, preparing him for his successful pitch for office in 2003.
Over the next 10 years, Achmad Amur succeeded in installing family members in political positions and significantly increasing their wealth. By the end of his second term, his family had experienced considerable horizontal spread, but mostly confined to political institutions within Pulang Pisau district itself. In a 25-member DPRD elected in 2009, eight legislators were close family members of the bupati, including two brothers, a sister, his wife, as well as more distant relatives. They included the speaker and deputy speaker, and were spread across four parties: Golkar, PKB (National Awakening Party), PAN (National Mandate Party) and PPP (Development Unity Party). Thus, the family spread itself through several different parties in an attempt to dominate a legislature where (like many in regional Indonesia) party representation was highly fragmented. This spread made this political family distinctive from those that concentrate on a single party (the Narang family, for example, is entirely focused on PDI-P).
It became an open secret in the district that the Amur family was using its political dominance to enrich itself. Locals regale visitors with stories about how the family acquired large landholdings during Achmad’s tenure. One senior district official claimed DPRD decisions totalling 52 billion rupiah in value directed infrastructure projects towards the family. Such rumours, plus a host of other issues, such as disputes that arose as a result of expropriation of private land for government projects, and the frequent failure of the DPRD to reach quorum given that many members of the family lived in Banjarmasin, the capital of neighbouring South Kalimantan province, contributed to growing local disillusionment with the family.
In fact, Amur’s story is also one of failure, with him failing both to win the governorship of the province in 2010 and to engineer dynastic succession in 2013. In 2010, befitting an ambitious bupati, he tried to run for the governorship. Not only did he believe he was supported by his Golkar party, he was also backed by all seven Muslim bupati in the province who agreed that they would not run against each other, in order to unify the Muslim vote against incumbent Teras Narang who was, unusually, a Christian governor in a majority-Muslim province. This agreement broke down when Yuliansyah, the bupati of North Barito, decided he also wanted to stand for election, and did so with the endorsement of the Golkar party. Predictably, the Muslim vote split and Teras Narang was victorious.
When Amur’s second term expired in early 2013, he put forward his brother Idham, the DPRD deputy speaker, as his successor. This decision was made over the objections of Abdurrahman, the older brother and DPRD speaker who also wanted the nomination. Idham was favoured partly because Amur believed him to have better political skills, but partly because he was more cashed up, being very successful in business, notably as a construction contractor and barge operator (barges being an important means of transportation for coal and other products along Kalimiantan’s rivers). Idham was nominated by an array of mostly Islamic parties. Since the dispute around the gubernatorial election, meanwhile, the leadership of Golkar in the district had passed from the Amur family to Amur’s deputy bupati, Edy Pratowo, who then, in a pattern that is common in Indonesia, emerged as the successful challenger. Edy, a former journalist, was relatively young and charismatic, and was able to use his Javanese ethnicity to appeal to the many Javanese migrants in the district. He also benefited from the support of the Narang family and, therefore, of PDI-P. Continuing the inter-family rivalry from the gubernatorial election of 2010, the sister of Teras and Atu Narang, Rustaty Narang, was Idham’s running mate as deputy bupati. Edy and Rustaty won the election convincingly, in what one local bureaucrat characterised as a victory of ‘charisma over money’ (confidential interview, 20 June 2013). Many other informants pointed to a widespread ‘weariness’ or ‘boredom’ (kejenuhan) with the Amur family and their dominance, and celebrated the outcome as the defeat of a powerful dynasty. Idham won only in a few places, including Bahaur, where his family was based and where community leaders benefited from the family’s munificence in the awarding of projects. Despite this defeat, the family retains strong roots in district business and politics, and Achmad Amur won a seat in the provincial legislature in 2014. Though he failed to compete for the governorship the following year, it is widely expected another family member will try to retake the bupati position in the next local election.
Seruyan and East Kotawaringin: Darwan Ali and son
Unlike most dynasts discussed in this article, Darwan Ali came from relatively modest beginnings. Born in Sembuluh in present day Seruyan district (until the formation of that district in 2002, Sembuluh was part of East Kotawiringin), he was, according to one of his business partners from his early years, the son of an ‘ordinary farmer’ who tried to make it in the world of contracting in the early 1990s, but struggled to succeed (confidential interview, 24 June 2013). He tried his luck for a while in Banjarmasin (the major commercial centre in southern Kalimantan), where he made valuable business connections, especially in the palm oil industry that was then beginning its long boom. Until the end of the Suharto years, however, he was still struggling to establish himself in official life (for instance, failing to become the leader of the local branch of the contractors’ association, when the regional secretary vetoed his appointment). His big breakthroughs came in the early 2000s, through two avenues: politics and palm oil.
Politically, like most contractors and other businesspeople who tried to live off construction projects, land deals and similar rent-intensive parts of the economy, he was aligned with Golkar during the New Order. After democratisation, he switched to the PDI-P and sought the endorsement of Atu Narang, then ascendant in Central Kalimantan. A man who, in the words of one relative, ‘liked organisational life’, Darwan secured the chair of the PDI-P branch first in East Kotawaringin and then Seruyan, where he had been one of the leading figures promoting the formation of this new district. He secured the backing of a wealthy ethnic Chinese businessman and contractor who, according to some of Darwan’s former associates, provided him with the funds needed to buy enough votes in the Seruyan DPRD to be elected as bupati by that body in 2003.
Meanwhile, by the late 1990s, Darwan had already begun to prosper in business, as, in the words of a relative, ‘the first person to bring the science of oil palm from South Kalimantan to East Kotawaringin’ (confidential interview, 24 June 2013). The same relative observed: He was the first person to bring big palm oil investors, like Agro Indo Mas and Mestika Sembuluh, to Sampit … his role was to free up the land and bring in the investors; he was really a kind of land agent.
Consolidating his personal power, Darwan Ali endeavoured to broaden his family’s political control, both horizontally into legislative institutions and to the neighbouring district, with it being widely believed that he was also aiming at a future gubernatorial nomination. Taking a leaf out of the Narang book, he focused exclusively on the PDI-P as the family vehicle. A daughter, Iswanti, was elected to the provincial parliament and Iswanti’s husband, H Supian Hadi, was elected to the East Kotawaringin parliament in 2009, heading the party which, having the largest representation, secured his appointment as DPRD speaker. Then, in 2010, with major financial support from his father-in-law, Supian Hadi was elected as bupati of East Kotawaringin. We count this as one of our two cases of dynastic succession, though it might also be viewed as an example of horizontal spread of a dynasty from one district to another.
Eventually, in 2013, Darwan Ali tried to engineer a dynastic succession in Seruyan itself, in what must count as one of Indonesia’s more unusual direct elections of local government heads. Such elections are usually multi-candidate affairs, but in Seruyan all 12 parties represented in the district legislature nominated Darwan’s son, Achmad Riswandi H Darwan Ali (usually known as Haji Iwan) in what was a transparent attempt to block the emergence of viable challengers. It was an open secret that this outcome was obtained by the payment of large sums to party leaders in Palangkaraya (DPRD members we interviewed detailed the sums paid). Such payments are the norm in local elections in Indonesia, but there was a widespread sense that Darwan had over-reached. As one of his own relatives explained, ‘He overdid it, taking all of the parties to nominate his son. He could have just bought seven parties, and given the rest of the money to the voters’ (confidential interview, 17 April 2013). This move also inadvertently reinforced growing local perceptions that Darwan Ali had become ‘arrogant’ (a sin of the first order in local politics in Indonesia), with growing discontent about his expanding family riches, land and other disputes surrounding the oil palm industry he had so assiduously promoted, and about the alleged slow pace of infrastructure development – especially road building – in outlying parts of the district. Even the laudatory local media coverage began to backfire: ‘The reporting of the incumbent bupati and his son really made you want to vomit, it was so over the top and so beautiful’ (confidential interview, local journalist, 16 April 2013).
With all the parties locked up behind Haji Iwan, the only option for would-be opponents was to stand as an independent candidate and Sudarsono, a PKS (Prosperous Justice Party) member of the provincial parliament, did just this. In what was described by his supporters as an ‘ant-versus-elephant’ contest (interview, H Wahudyi, 18 April 2013), Sudarsono campaigned strongly on the theme of ‘change’ and was able to rely on the active support of both disenchanted members of the local elite (including some party members who had been cut out of the deals to support Haji Iwan) and a formidable grassroots machinery. One member of the local political elite estimated that while Darwan spent around 50 billion rupiah (around US$5million) in trying to secure his son’s election, Sudarsono and his supporters expended only 3 billion (US$300,000). Nevertheless, Sudarsono won a remarkable victory.
The defeat in Seruyan was a significant blow to Darwan Hadi, who it was widely believed harboured future political ambitions, wishing either to one day become governor of Central Kalimantan or of a possible future province of Kotawaringin. All has not been plain sailing in East Kotawaringin either, with major problems within the family after it emerged that Supian Hadi had secretly married the winner of a television dangdut singing contest, without the knowledge of his first wife, Iswanti, and making a dowry payment of 5 billion rupiah (US$500,000) in the process ( Tribunnews, 2013). Such sexual scandals are themselves a familiar feature of local politics in contemporary Indonesia (Aspinall, 2014a).
North and South Barito: Achmad Yuliansyah and Baharuddin Lisa
We now turn to two districts where two-term bupati tried, but failed, to engineer succession by their wives. In North Barito, as with many district heads in Central Kalimantan, Achmad Yuliansyah had previously been a career civil servant, working his way up through the local bureaucracy, notably in the forestry department, where he built useful political and business connections, including with the wealthy South Kalimantan timber baron-cum-politician, Haji Leman (Morishita, 2011). With Haji Leman’s sponsorship, Yuliansyah was elected bupati of North Barito in 2003 and developed a formidable reputation as a patronage politician in subsequent years. During his two terms, North Barito experienced a mining boom, especially in coal, with the bupati issuing 300 mining licenses, a massive source of patronage funds. He was accused of a typical range of corrupt activities by local NGOs and rivals, including involvement in illegal logging (some of the accusations related to his previous career as a civil servant). There were also land conflicts around mining sites and plantations. Close family members came to occupy senior bureaucratic positions in the district, including as heads of the some of the government bureaus that were most ‘wet’ with patronage: education, public works, agriculture and health. This was a family that was developing considerable horizontal spread.
After his failed bid for the governorship in 2010 (see above), and with his second term expiring in 2013, Yuliansyah tried to secure the bupati position for his wife, Relawati. She stood as the candidate of Golkar, the largest party in the local legislature, but was defeated by a local businessman, Nadalsyah, who had a reputation for charitable works. Relawati’s running mate ascribed Relawati’s loss to complacency on her and her husband’s part: All the competitors played money politics by handing out money to voters, while Relawati waited and waited for the right time to give out cash. Her sympathisers became disappointed and turned to support the other candidates.… Pak Yuliansyah had promised there would be a ‘money boom’ but that boom just never exploded right up to voting day. (Interview with Purman Jaya, 16 July 2013)
The situation in South Barito was so similar that we can summarise it very briefly. Here, the two-term bupati (2001–2011) was Baharuddin Lisa, another former bureaucrat (his highest post before being elected as bupati was as regional secretary of East Kotawaringin). With the district another centre of coal mining, there was also extensive rent-seeking under his leadership, with Baharuddin becoming very wealthy and securing the provincial chairmanship of the Partai Demokrat (President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s party) and competing as deputy governor candidate alongside Achmad Amur in the 2010 gubernatorial election. When he exhausted his two terms in office, Baharuddin engineered the nomination of his wife, Wartiah Thalib, as his successor. However, there was considerable elite and popular resistance to a continuation of the family’s power motivated by similar concerns as in North Barito: frustrations with alleged nepotism within the bureaucracy (Baharuddin was accused of providing many members of his ‘big family’ with civil service positions) and lack of progress in infrastructure and other development policies. There was even also a similar conflict with the regional secretary, who also stood as bupati. These factors caused a coalescence of a large part of the local elite around a rival candidate, Farid Yusran, the candidate of the PDI-P (who also received considerable financial backing from other PDI-P notables in the province, including Willy Yoseph, bupati of neighbouring Murung Raya district). Accordingly, Farid roundly defeated Wartiah in the 2011 district election, but once in power, according to our informants, he began to replicate the pattern of patronage politics practiced by his predecessor.
Murung Raya: The Yoseph brothers
Our only pure case of successful (intragenerational) dynastic succession in Central Kalimantan is in the district of Murung Raya, a relatively remote, interior district that was created out of North Barito in 2002. Between 2003 and 2013 the district was led by bupati Willy Yoseph, one of 11 children of Midel Yoseph, a prominent local public servant and several times during the New Order a DPRD member representing Golkar. The family was already one of the most prominent, wealthiest and best educated in the area when the district was formed. Willy, a forestry graduate, was involved in the timber industry towards the end of its boom years and, like many ambitious politicians in Central Kalimantan, he aligned himself with PDI-P early in reformasi. After the new district was formed he was elected by the DPRD as bupati, and ruled it for a decade during which the rapid expansion of mining, especially coal, in the district became a major new source of revenue – and patronage. By the end of his second term, family members were significant players in the legislature and bureaucracy: one brother, Hendy, was DPRD speaker, another (Likon) headed the Education Bureau. However, Willy’s children were too young to succeed him as bupati when he reached his term limit. Instead, it was his brother Perdie, a public servant who had twice served as a subdistrict head in distant Lamandau district, who did so.
Perdie won convincingly in the first round in a direct election in 2013, running as a PDI-P candidate and campaigning on party policies promoting health insurance and social welfare. However, local informants were unanimous in ascribing Perdie’s victory to the successful record of his older brother. In other districts we visited, local informants often spoke of kejenuhan (weariness) with overreach by ruling families and incumbents’ poor policy performance. While nobody in Murung Raya claimed that patronage and personal enrichment were absent, and while the extent of the Yoseph family’s horizontal penetration of state institutions resembled that of the Amur family in Pulang Pisau or Achmad Yuliansyah in North Barito, Willy Yoseph had not neglected infrastructure and other development policy during his tenure. Most informants were impressed by the rapid improvement of facilities in the district capital, including the construction of grand government buildings and places of worship (often a point of local pride in rural districts). Accordingly, as one of our informants put it, many hoped that Perdie would be a ‘photocopy’ of his older brother. At the same time, Willy was a strong candidate in the gubernatorial elections, which he lost narrowly in January 2016.
Conclusion
These cases from Central Kalimantan confirm that political opportunity structure explanations of the type summarised at the start of this article must remain important in our attempts to understand political families in Indonesia, as elsewhere. At a basic level, the family stories summarised above present compelling evidence for McCoy’s contention that dynastic politics are likely to emerge when rents coexist with weak states. In each case, these families not only tried to entrench themselves in office, they also used their political power to access resource rents (notably in timber, mining and palm oil) and expand family wealth. They did so in conditions in which political institutions that might rival family power were relatively weak. Though most chose the PDI-P (the strongest party in Central Kalimantan) as their party vehicle, party affiliation had little effect on their wider political behaviour. Both Darwan Ali’s family and the Amur clan, for example, melded business and political power in similar ways, though the former was exclusively focused on the PDI-P and the latter spread itself through multiple parties.
As well as looking at state and party institutions, however, our analysis suggests it is also important to determine how political families fit into wider informal political alignments. In a recent analysis of why corrupt local officials fall from power in some districts of Indonesia, but elsewhere sustain themselves in office, Djani (2012; see also Tans, 2012) has argued that variations in local political configurations are what count. Where local elites are factionalised and inter-elite rivalry is high, and where local civil societies are relatively independent, possibilities emerge for broad anti-incumbent alliances that can force corrupt powerholders from office. This was what happened in North and South Barito and Pulang Pisau, where dynastic succession plans were scuppered by opposition among local bureaucrats and legislators. More broadly, these cases also suggest that in an era of direct elections of local government heads, mass preferences also matter. As Mietzner (2006) observed early in this era, there is plenty of evidence that Indonesian voters will use direct local elections to punish very poor performance, including excessive corruption, even if such elections do not significantly broaden the pool from which winning candidates are recruited. This is most clearly illustrated in the case of Seruyan where Darwan Ali was able to bully or buy support from local elites, including all the parties in the district legislature, to support the ascension of his son. Even so, popular disenchantment with him was such that a relatively under-resourced and marginal elite player defeated his son in the key succession election.
What about family and dynasty as a strategy of power in the terms introduced earlier in this essay? Our fieldwork findings do not allow us to canvas all the possibilities: for instance, though many informants suggested that political leaders were engineering dynastic succession as a defensive strategy to hobble future corruption prosecutions, we lacked the resources to investigate such charges. One intriguing implication of our research, however, concerns the relationship between political families – the relatively narrow group who dominate political positions in a particular locale – and the wider clans they are part of. To what extent might we say that family politics are an extension of clan politics? As noted, clans are central to social structure in Central Kalimantan, and political candidates typically mobilise these kinship networks when competing in elections. However, virtually all candidates do this, not only those who are part of successful political families. Indeed, candidates we interviewed in Central Kalimantan who most emphasised their clans as a basis of mobilisation tended to be outsiders trying to challenge incumbents, perhaps because they lacked access to the bureaucracy and other resources that incumbents had at their disposal. Given that political families in Central Kalimantan have mostly been unsuccessful in extending themselves in office beyond the tenure of the family’s founder, an intriguing counter-intuitive possibility suggests itself, contrary to our speculations at the start of this article: perhaps dynastic politics are especially vulnerable in areas where clans are central to wider political mobilisation. Political elites who feel excluded by a dominant family will be able to engage in counter-mobilisation of their own clans to bring that family down. Indeed, if patronage rewards are distributed partly along clan lines (we have the strongest suggestion of this in Pulang Pisau), this could fuel widespread resentment in rival clans, contributing to the commonplace disenchantment with incumbent families we encountered. Clans could thus be a counterweight to family dominance.
Overall, and perhaps surprisingly, the most striking impression left by this summary of family politics in Central Kalimantan concerns its instability. The general tone of writing on political dynasties in Indonesia is negative and pessimistic. Major national news outlets frequently feature stories enumerating the corruption and deal making of dynastic politicians, and civil society campaigns have been organised to unseat them. Some of the most important dynastic politicians have been prosecuted in cases brought by the Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK, Corruption Eradication Commission), exposing massive accumulation of family wealth in the process – particularly noteworthy cases were the prosecutions of Ratu Atut Chosiyah, the governor of Banten, and of Fuad Amin Imron, the former bupati of Bangkalan in Madura. Such public exposure and the widespread condemnation it has elicited is the backdrop to the legislative change in 2014 that tried to prevent dynastic succession in local elections. Given that such a harsh light is typically shone on dynastic politics in regional Indonesia, it is significant that most of the families surveyed in this article encountered difficulties in making the transition from political families to political dynasties, by failing to secure dynastic succession. Dynastic politics is not as invulnerable as much of the national commentary suggests.
It is also significant that many of these family politicians were also relative newcomers to political leadership, rather than having deep family histories at the apex of local societies. To be sure, as has already been documented exhaustively in the literature on post-Suharto local politics, most elected government leaders have elite backgrounds, and most of the Central Kalimantan bupati surveyed here are no exception. With the exception of Darwan Ali, all came from families with significant bureaucratic and/or business experience; moreover, each family was already embedded in networks connecting political and economic power before the end of the New Order. Every family had timber or other natural resource industry connections. Even so, none was related to individuals who had held local government head positions – either as governor or bupati – in the Suharto years. Instead, they all came from a rung or two down the social and political hierarchy. They rose to the top of local politics at a time of great flux, and were the most adroit of their contemporaries in seizing the opportunities afforded by regime change. They are, in other words, parvenus. We thus cannot yet be confident that the brief period of spectacular predatory raids on the state and its resources by these families will give way to long-term and multi-generational dynasty building by them.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors thank the Australian Research Council for funding the research (grants DP 120103181, and FT120100742).