Abstract
This article analyzes why, how and to what extent Indonesia’s once staunchly Islamist Prosperous Justice Party (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera; PKS) has become more moderate through its participation in democratic procedures. It also examines how this moderation process has affected the party’s electoral performance and the overall quality of democracy in Indonesia. It is argued that PKS has indeed become more moderate and that this moderation has, after initial electoral success, now posed some serious challenges to the party’s organizational coherence. The article concludes by highlighting that moderation is a process that is neither linear nor unreservedly positive for democratization.
Despite the fact that around 90 percent of Indonesia’s population are Muslims, the country’s Islamic parties have struggled to win broad popular support. The most recent election in 2009 produced particularly disappointing results as the combined vote share of all Islamic parties declined to under 30 percent and only four of them won seats in parliament. Even for the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera; PKS), which was the only of the bigger Islamic parties not to lose votes, the meager gains of less than 1 percent must have felt like a defeat as party strategists had hoped to double their astounding 2004 result of 7.3 percent. PKS may now be the strongest Islamic party in Indonesia, but its election result suggests that the party as well as political Islam in Indonesia on the whole have reached an important crossroads.
PKS has long been regarded as very different from the rest of Indonesia’s parties, including those with an Islamic outlook. With its ideological roots in a campus-based Islamist movement and a reputation for extraordinary organizational discipline, the party was concurrently feared and admired when it initially rose to prominence in the 2004 election. But following the success at the ballot box that year, both fear and admiration soon began to wane as PKS embarked on a controversial shift away from its Islamist origins toward a more moderate orientation. Over the past few years, this moderation was reflected in a number of political maneuvers including, among others, electoral alliances with non-Muslims in gubernatorial and district head elections, steadfast support for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s sometimes controversial economic policies in the run-up to the 2009 elections, and various symbolic gestures in support of pluralist democracy.
This article examines how this incremental moderation and the party’s wider participation in the political mainstream have affected its internal organizational dynamics. It also analyzes whether the moderation of PKS has affected its electoral performance and to what extent it has made a positive contribution to the overall process of democratic consolidation in Indonesia. Based on a thorough evaluation of recent election results, media articles, and scholarly literature on political Islam, the article argues that the moderation process has caused internal divisions and compromised the party’s credibility among its original constituencies while failing to convince potential new supporters. For the consolidation of Indonesia’s young democracy, the organizational development of PKS has had both positive and negative consequences at the same time. On one hand, the party’s transformation has enhanced the quality of political participation, but on the other hand it has also reduced PKS’s capacity to act as a genuine counterforce to Indonesia’s notoriously weak mainstream parties.
Following this introduction, the article begins with a brief recapitulation of the most important arguments of what the literature refers to as “the inclusion-moderation thesis.” It then turns to an in-depth analysis of the organizational and ideological development of PKS from its early days as a campus-based social movement to its arrival in contemporary mainstream politics. Different aspects of the party’s gradual moderation are highlighted and eventually evaluated in the context of broader trends in Indonesian politics.
Islamist Parties and the Inclusion-Moderation Thesis
Islamist parties have received enormous scholarly attention in recent years. Given the heterogeneity of political Islam across the globe, no academic consensus exists on what exactly constitutes an Islamist party, but in the broadest possible sense such parties can be defined as parties that strive for the implementation of Islamic law (sharia) in all aspects of political, economic, social, and cultural life. For many, though by no means for all Islamist parties, democracy is inherently incompatible with such a sharia-based worldview because sovereignty, in their view, rests with God, not with the people. Apart from this very fundamental issue, some Islamists also tend to espouse nondemocratic viewpoints in regard to questions of basic human rights such as freedom of speech, the role of women, and religious freedom. Nonetheless, many Islamist parties all over the world have at the very least embraced the procedural dimension of democracy and, if allowed, participated in competitive elections. Some even have taken over cabinet posts in democratically elected governments.
Against this background, the questions of whether Islamist parties will moderate over time as a result of this inclusion and to what extent they will ultimately make a positive contribution to, depending on political context, democratic transition or consolidation have been discussed extensively in the scholarly literature (Bayat 2007; Schwedler 2006; Clark and Schwedler 2003; Tezcür 2010a, 2010b; Wickham 2004). 1 Influenced by Kalyvas’s (1996) pioneering study about Christian Democratic parties in Europe, proponents of the so-called “inclusion-moderation thesis” usually argue that exposure to alternative political views and the institutional constraints of electoral competition help to moderate extremist parties. The needs to negotiate with other parties on one hand and to win votes at the ballot box on the other hand, so they argue, provide incentives for these parties to soften their ideological viewpoints and reach out to broader constituencies.
In essence then, inclusion is expected to lead to moderation mainly because of the power of institutions to shape strategic political behavior and because of the facilitation of political learning through contact with actors who have different worldviews. Inclusion is usually understood to simply mean permission to participate in elections, but elections are certainly not the only type of democratic procedure that can foster moderation. In this article, therefore, the definition of inclusion goes beyond participation in electoral competition and also incorporates involvement in government and, more generally, permission to partake in public debates. Both of these processes expose political actors to specific kinds of institutional constraints and opportunities for political learning that can be markedly different from electoral competition, yet can also lead to moderation. While the latter—permission to partake in public debates—may be more important in nondemocratic settings where public space is subject to arbitrary controls, the former—involvement in government—is of particular significance in democratic contexts, as the examples of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) and, as will be highlighted below, Indonesia’s PKS demonstrate.
The inclusion-moderation thesis is not without its critics though. Skeptics assert that there is no automatism between participation in democratic procedures, however broadly defined, and moderation. At the very least, moderation is often a highly complex and multidimensional process, as, for example, Schwedler and Clark (2003) have stressed in their study of women’s participation in Islamist parties in Jordan and Yemen. Moreover, moderation can be a double-edged sword as its effects on democracy can be both positive and negative (Tezcür 2010a). Last but not least, critics also point to the risk of superficiality in the alleged moderation process. According to this counterargument, extremist parties use democratic procedures merely as an instrument, either to polarize the population along communal cleavages (e.g., ethnic parties) or, in the case of what Gunther and Diamond (2003) have called “proto-hegemonic parties” (e.g., Leninist, ultranationalist, and religious fundamentalist parties), to simply obtain power and then dismantle democracy altogether. Parties with such antidemocratic agendas should therefore rather be excluded from participation in democratic elections to prevent election-related violence and, in the worst-case scenario, a repeat of the events that unfolded in post-Weimar Germany (Berman 2003; Bermeo 2003).
The notion of superficiality is not easy to resolve, especially because few detailed case studies exist that provide systematic explanations of what exactly moderation entails and how it occurs. In an attempt to overcome this problem, Schwedler (2006) proposes to look beyond a party’s strategic behavior and focus on various dimensions of ideational change. For her, moderation is the “movement from a relatively closed and rigid worldview to one more open and tolerant of alternative perspectives” (Schwedler 2006, 3). To trace this movement empirically, she seeks to identify shifts in what she calls “boundaries of justifiable action,” defined as “distinctions made by political actors about what is possible, who are friends and adversaries, and which of the available options are justifiable in terms of one’s worldview” (Schwedler 2006, 151). The concept is a useful starting point to analyze discourses and debates within the leadership of a particular party, but it takes a highly elitist and strictly hierarchical view of political parties, neglecting the possibility that boundaries that were shifted at the top might cause discontent at the grassroots and might in fact not be followed by lower-ranking party officials and ordinary party members. 2 Furthermore, it is not clear why ideational shifts should be any less susceptible to claims of superficiality or quick reversal than behavioral change.
More generally, focusing too strongly on ideational developments runs the risk of missing important instances of behavioral change within a party that come after the initial decision to join elections. For moderation to be truly empirically traceable, words need to be complemented by deeds, and vice versa. Ideational change in itself may count for little and could in fact be easily dismissed as superficial lip service if it is not followed by clearly discernible behavioral moderation that goes beyond merely accepting the electoral rules of the game. It is therefore crucial to analyze both—ideas and actions—in tandem, rather than prioritize one over the other.
One definition that attempts to capture these two dimensions was coined by Wickham (2004) in her article on political learning in Egypt’s Wasat Party. While still predominantly concerned with the ideational dimension of moderation, especially in regard to individual party elites, her description of moderation as “the abandonment, postponement, or revision of radical goals that enable a movement to accommodate itself to the give and take of ‘normal’ competitive politics” (Wickham 2004, 206) implies that ideational change may in fact be seen as a kind of precondition for genuine behavioral change. Tezcür (2010a, 73) has advanced a similar argument in his conceptualization of moderation.
Apart from their comprehensive approach to moderation, the works of Wickham and Tezcür are insightful for another reason. Like Schwedler and Clark (2003) before them, the two both stress that moderation is neither irreversible nor necessarily a linear process. Instead, the extent of moderation can differ dependant on the issue at stake as parties may, as Wickham (2004, 206) put it, “espouse moderate positions on some issues and radical positions on others and may undergo uneven moderation (or radicalization) over time.”
Building on the abovementioned approaches, this article adopts a broadly conceptualized definition of moderation as a multidimensional, issue-dependant process of ideational and behavioral adjustments, which is reflected in a party’s gradually emerging readiness to abandon or denounce radical goals and strategies and not only accept the institutional rules of democracy but also embrace its political norms and values. Radical goals and strategies in this context are all those ideas and actions that run counter to the basic pillars of a democratic constitutional framework, for example, the endorsement of violence; the discrimination and denial of political rights to certain segments of the population based on religion, ethnicity, or gender; and the rejection of the concept of popular sovereignty. Based on this conceptual framework, the remainder of this article proceeds to analyze the organizational and ideological development of the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), a party whose degree of radicalism certainly pales in comparison with most Middle Eastern Islamist parties but which in the context of contemporary Indonesian politics, with its long tradition of what Hefner (2000) once called “civil Islam,” nevertheless constitutes a highly controversial type of party.
PKS represents an interesting case study for a number of reasons. First, Indonesia is one of only a few Muslim-majority countries that fulfill the most basic characteristics of an electoral democracy (Freedom House 2010). In contrast to Islamist parties in the Arab world, PKS therefore operates in a political environment that is shaped and constrained by genuinely democratic procedures. Second, PKS is a new type of party in Indonesia that is unusually well institutionalized. Especially in the party’s early days, its orthodox interpretation of Islam as a comprehensive value system for all aspects of social, political, and economic life provided a strong ideological glue that has helped keep the party solid and coherent. Thus, it differs from all other Islamic parties in Indonesia who tend to regard Islam merely as a symbol rather than an essential source of inspiration. Third, as Table 1 shows, PKS is now the strongest of all Islamic parties in Indonesia. In the 2009 parliamentary election it finished in fourth spot on the voting tally, behind three secular parties but ahead of all other Islamic parties (Mietzner 2009a). All these factors make PKS an intriguing party to study.
Results of the 2009 Parliamentary Elections in Indonesia
Note: DPR = Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat (House of Representatives), the Indonesian parliament
Arguably one of the most fascinating trends in the political development of PKS is its recent attempt to alter its image from that of a puritanical Islamist party to that of a more open and pluralistic party. This shift away from the party’s radical origins toward a more pragmatic orientation has not always been linear and continues to be the subject of controversial discussions both within the party and among domestic and foreign observers (Buehler 2011; Hwang 2010; Shihab and Nugroho 2009). In the following paragraphs, this article seeks to enrich this discussion by examining the nexus between moderation on one hand and democratic consolidation on the other hand. First of all, however, it is imperative to briefly reconstruct the “genetic model” (Panebianco 1988) of PKS to contextualize the party’s current status within its broader historical trajectory.
The Creation of an Indonesian Dakwah Party
Even though PKS is a fairly young party that in its current form has existed for only less than ten years, its origins reach back to the late 1970s and early 1980s when the authoritarian New Order regime of former president Suharto was at its peak (Machmudi 2005). During this time, political activity was heavily restricted, and Islamic parties, once powerful agents of sociopolitical mobilization in Indonesia, 3 had been tamed into a largely compliant force under the organizational banner of the United Development Party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, PPP; Effendy 2003; Mietzner 2009b, 80). It was in this repressive political climate that young Muslim activists first began to disseminate the ideas of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. 4 From the 1980s onward these dakwah (literally call, preaching; Islamic outreach) activities took a more systematic form, especially on the campuses of some of Indonesia’s most prestigious elite universities. The movement soon became known as Jemaah Tarbiyah (Education Movement), and by the 1990s it was well organized in numerous small, mostly campus-based cells (usrah; Bubalo and Fealy 2005).
When President Suharto resigned in 1998, tarbiyah leaders formed a political party and called it the Justice Party (Partai Keadilan; PK). True to its original inspiration, PK was organizationally and ideologically modeled on the Muslim Brotherhood: it was structured as a hierarchical cadre party based on small cells and it defined dakwah as its fundamental raison d’être (Shihab and Nugroho 2009). Furthermore, the party was committed to the promotion of sharia law, if not through formal means, then at least through the process of dakwah which according to PK strategists would ultimately lead to the gradual adoption of sharia principles in the legislation process in Indonesia. To repeat, compared to other Islamist parties in the Middle East, PK was, even in its early days, not particularly radical, but in the context of Indonesian party politics the mere ambition to replace the country’s seemingly untouchable state philosophy Pancasila (five pillars) 5 with a sharia-based system was a “radical” departure from the political mainstream.
With its emphasis on ideological commitment and organizational discipline, PK differed markedly from the rest of the new parties that were formed in the aftermath of the fall of Suharto. While most other parties relied on charismatic leaders and/or established organizational infrastructures inherited from New Order institutions or religious mass organizations, PK leaders created a completely new party that quickly earned a reputation for remarkable levels of internal (though not external) transparency and accountability, strict recruitment guidelines for new cadre, and strong sociopolitical values based on a fairly orthodox interpretation of Islam (Hasan 2009; Heilmann 2007). Nevertheless, the first election of the post-Suharto era in June 1999 ended in disappointment for PK. The result of 1.4 percent was insufficient to clear the electoral threshold that would have allowed the party to contest the next election in 2004.
PK leaders were not to be deterred though. In 2003, they changed the party’s name to PKS to be able to contest the 2004 election. The new party’s platform was less explicit about religious issues than its predecessor’s, and in the 2004 election campaign PKS focused almost exclusively on neutral themes such as poverty alleviation, social justice, the fight against corruption, and so on (Bubalo and Fealy 2005, 71). This strategy worked well, not least because it tapped into growing public discontent with the established big parties that had won the 1999 election but had, in the eyes of many Indonesians, failed to deliver positive change. PKS was able to exploit this sentiment and managed to quintuple its share of the vote, winning 7.3 percent of the vote and forty-five seats in the new parliament. Soon after, it reaped more rewards when it was given three cabinet posts in President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s first cabinet.
The Transition from PK to PKS: The Beginning of a Moderation Process?
The toning down of the religious rhetoric in both the PKS platform and the 2004 election campaign was interpreted by many observers as a sign that participation in electoral politics had already helped moderate the Islamist ideologues in PKS. Shihab and Nugroho (2009), for example, are among those who argue that the transformation from PK to PKS was much more than just a cosmetic name change. Others, however, are more skeptical. Heilmann (2007), for instance, points to the use of internal training manuals for new members that even after the 2004 election continued to frame the political world of PKS in fairly extremist terms (Prayitno 2005a, 2005b).
Indeed, it seems likely that the absence of Islamist rhetoric in the run-up to the 2004 election was purely instrumental, driven by pragmatic opportunism with a view to increasing the party’s vote share. Internally, the party appeared to remain guided largely by exclusivist and intolerant attitudes. As the results demonstrated, the calculation worked out and PKS managed remarkable gains in the polls. Against this background, the party leadership then decided to take more concrete steps to reshape PKS as a moderate religious party. A key difference to the first rather superficial phase of moderation in the run-up to the 2004 election, however, was that this time the party was exposed to much more complex institutional opportunities and constraints. For example, with three ministers in cabinet, forty-five seats in the national parliament, and more than a thousand delegates in local parliaments, PKS was now deeply entrenched in exactly the kind of dealing and wheeling that the party had so vigorously criticized before 2004.
To some extent then, one may argue that inclusion had turned into co-optation as PKS quickly succumbed to a way of doing politics seemingly incompatible with the party’s original mission. However, this trend was still being offset to some degree by the party’s ongoing efforts to nurture its image of being different, for example through well-publicized gestures such as rejecting office cars and laptops for its legislators. But with the introduction in 2005 of direct elections for governors, mayors, and district heads, the need to negotiate and lobby other parties within the newly emerging power structures put renewed and ever-growing pressure on PKS politicians to adjust and play by the rules of the democratic game. At the same time, the prospect of getting involved in exactly these procedures also provided new incentives for aspiring PKS members to remain loyal to the party (Hamayotsu 2009).
Effects of Inclusion on PKS’s Policy Positions
While there may have been few signs of ideational moderation before the 2004 election, from about 2006 onward party leaders became increasingly determined to steer PKS toward the political center. Influential party figures began to publicly reject the label Islamism, claiming that PKS was now “religious-nationalist” in outlook. In February 2008, this paradigmatic shift toward what some observers have called “post-Islamism” (Bayat 2007; Bubalo, Fealy, and Mason 2008) culminated in a new program that was launched at a major party event in Bali. The location was carefully chosen. Bali is one of only a few Indonesian provinces where Muslims are a minority. In explaining the decision to hold the congress on the Hindu-dominated island, PKS’s deputy secretary general Fahri Hamzah maintained that the party wanted to make it clear to everyone that it acknowledges pluralism and the nation’s religious, ethnic, and cultural diversity. 6
With the adoption of the new party platform, PKS turned selected statements by individual party leaders into official party policy. What was particularly noteworthy about the new platform was its elaborate commitment to Indonesia’s state philosophy Pancasila. Invented in 1945 by Indonesia’s first president Sukarno, the Pancasila mentions “Belief in One God” as the first of Indonesia’s five guiding principles, but it does not specifically refer to Islam or sharia law, even though Islamic groups had demanded the inclusion of such a clause back in 1945 (Mietzner 2009b, 74). Ever since the rejection of this clause (the so-called Jakarta Charter), which would have made it obligatory for Muslims to adhere to sharia law, the Pancasila has served as a symbol of religious pluralism in Indonesia. Unsurprisingly, PKS had initially been reluctant to embrace the Pancasila and its underlying pluralistic values. In fact, the early PK program did not mention it at all. The 2004 program then contained at least some brief references, but it was not before 2008 that the party explicitly endorsed the state philosophy (Shihab and Nugroho 2009, 246).
Apart from the new commitment to the Pancasila, there were further changes in other policy positions as well in recent years. For example, PKS has abandoned its earlier opposition to women in leadership positions. It also no longer categorically rejects cooperation with non-Muslims. In fact, it has even nominated both women and non-Muslims for legislative and executive positions in local elections and has formed coalitions and joint caucuses in local parliaments with an openly Christian party, the Prosperous Peace Party (Partai Damai Sejahtera). 7 At the party’s second national congress in Jakarta in June 2010, PKS even went another step further when it moved to adjust its organizational statutes to allow for the inclusion of non-Muslims into executive positions within the party. Furthermore, the party has shifted its approach to foreign policy from its initially staunchly anti-Western positions to a more accommodative stance. This was epitomized at the 2010 congress in Jakarta where the party invited a number of ambassadors from Western countries including the United States to participate in a series of international seminars (Fealy 2010).
All these developments are clear signs of moderation effectuated by the party’s inclusion into democratic procedures such as elections, parliamentary negotiations, and lobbying. The election results of 1999 and 2004 had provided ample evidence that in contrast to ineffective Islamist dogmatism moralist populism had immense potential to appeal to wider segments of the population. Thus, the need to be competitive on the electoral market as well as the desire to be taken seriously by the international community as a potential future majority party played a huge role in shaping the direction of PKS’s moderation.
And yet, it is important to note that the moderation process that has occurred within PKS in recent years is not a linear process. On the contrary, despite increasingly frequent commitments to pluralism, PKS has also continued to pursue more exclusivist policies. Arguably the most prominent example is the 2008 antipornography law, which declared various morally questionable activities illegal and was actively pushed by PKS legislators in parliament (Allen 2009). But there were other instances as well. For example, in 2005–6 the party refused to support political action against the then growing spread of religiously inspired bylaws (perda sharia) that were issued by local governors and district heads in an effort to appeal to local Islamic constituencies (Buehler 2008; Bush 2008). 8 In 2008, PKS fuelled heated debates about religious freedom when it joined calls for the disbandment of the controversial Ahmadiyah sect, which many Muslim Indonesians view as deviant (Hasan 2009, 11). Furthermore, PKS ministers in cabinet have at times invited criticism from democracy and human rights activists for their exclusivist attitudes, especially the current communication minister Tifatul Sembiring, the driving force behind Indonesia’s recent move to censor sexually explicit Internet sites.
Examples from other parts of the world show that it is by no means unusual for Islamist parties to moderate selectively. The maintenance of intolerant and at times radical policy positions can be interpreted as a kind of “reverse pragmatism,” equally conditioned by electoral participation as the opposite trend of moderation. Indeed, PKS acted strategically not only when it began to moderate some of its fundamentalist policy positions but also when it sought to reaffirm its Islamic credentials through the abovementioned conservative policies. While the former were aimed at making the party more attractive to liberal Muslims and non-Muslims, the latter were intended to prevent alienating its more puritanical supporters from the tarbiyah movement. In both cases, it was electoral competition with other political parties that provided the structural framework dictating the actions of PKS’s leadership.
As a matter of fact, PKS’s more conservative actions in the past few years have been much more of a reaction to other parties than self-initiated action. On one hand, the competition with other Islamic parties has made it imperative for PKS not to overstretch its moderation strategy. On the other hand, and perhaps more important in view of the declining electoral appeal of political Islam, the religious vote in Indonesia is no longer contested just by parties that call themselves Islamic. Partly in response to PKS’s success in 2004, Indonesia’s so-called secular parties like Partai Demokrat (PD), Golkar, and Partai Demokrasi Indonesia-Perjuangan (PDI-P) have all begun to try portraying themselves as more and more religious, too. PDI-P, for example, launched a new party-affiliated Islamic organization in 2007 in an obvious if somewhat halfhearted attempt to diffuse its image as a party of secularists and non-Muslims. 9 Given this new competition, PKS has apparently deemed it necessary to reaffirm its appeal to its original constituency by promoting some typical Islamic issues.
Effects of Inclusion on PKS’s Internal Coherence
There is no doubt that PKS’s attempt to please two different constituencies has left a deep mark on the party’s once famous organizational coherence. If in the early days factionalism was practically unheard of within PKS, the party is now confronted with a growing rift between supporters and opponents of the moderation course initiated by the top leadership. Apart from this horizontal dimension, the simmering unease over the future direction of the party also has a vertical dimension as the leadership is yet to convince large parts of the party’s grassroots members of the virtues of its push toward the political center.
Factional infighting has been a strain on many Indonesian parties since the beginning of the reform era and has been identified as one of the key reasons for their failure to properly represent the interests of their constituencies (Tomsa 2008). By contrast, PKS has long stood out as a remarkably solid and unified party. Hamayotsu (2009) attributes this organizational coherence to the structural setup of the party, which has been built on fair merit-based recruitment and promotion policies, transparent succession regulations, and the prioritization of collective over individual interests. All these institutional features provide party members with fair opportunities to achieve positions of influence within the party, while at the same time providing disincentives for patronage and collusion, which are so prevalent in Indonesia’s other major parties. As a result, serious factional divisions were not discernible in PKS for a long time.
Lately, however, cracks have appeared in the party’s untarnished image. First, signs of internal frictions became visible in mid-2004, when PKS leaders split over the question of which candidate to support in the presidential election that year. Grossly simplified, the debate divided the party into pragmatists and idealists, with the latter sometimes labeled purists or ideologues to emphasize their strict allegiance to PKS’s roots in Islamist ideology (Hwang 2010; Bubalo, Fealy, and Mason 2008). In recognition of Clark and Schwedler’s (2003) cautioning against simplistic dichotomies, the terms are used here with the caveat that they denote only very broadly conceived differences of opinion on how PKS should operate within the framework of electoral politics. In this understanding, pragmatists are those who are willing to cooperate with any other political actor as long as PKS can realistically expect to reap some absolute gains from this cooperation. Idealists, on the other hand, are unwilling to sacrifice the party’s Islamist and reformist principles purely for electoral gains.
In the debate about the 2004 presidential candidature, idealists favored veteran Muslim politician Amien Rais, the leader of the National Mandate Party with whom PK had formed a joint parliamentary caucus between 1999 and 2004. Pragmatists, meanwhile, saw the candidature of the former chairman of Indonesia’s second-largest Islamic organization as a lost cause and began floating the idea of supporting the controversial retired General Wiranto for the presidency. In the end, the party did unite behind Amien, who however, as expected, was ousted in the first round of the poll. In the run-up to the second round in October, tensions between pragmatists and idealists resurfaced again, this time over the question of whether PKS should remain neutral or officially endorse Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the candidate who was widely tipped to win the poll. This time the pragmatists won, and PKS was rewarded for its support of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono with three ministerial posts in the new cabinet (Fauzi and Fuller Collins 2005).
The 2004 split was the first incident of serious divisions in the top party layers, prompted by the desire by some influential elements in the party to prioritize access to power over idealist goals. This dividing line soon deepened as the central party leadership steered PKS firmly away from its Islamist origins in the aftermath of the 2004 elections. According to Bubalo, Fealy, and Mason (2008, 65-68), four issues in particular caused tensions within the party, thereby indirectly contributing to an intensification of the factional conflict. These four issues included the procedures regulating candidate selection during gubernatorial and district head elections, support for controversial government policies such as the reduction of fuel subsidies, the opening up of the party to non-Muslims, and the growing number of disciplinary transgressions of individual party members who had been elected into positions of power.
For ideologues like Abu Ridho, Mashadi, or Daud Rasyid, all these issues were evidence that participation in electoral politics and particularly participation in cabinet merely leads to compromise and moral degradation. Pragmatists like secretary-general Anis Matta, Fachry Hamzah, or the powerful chairman of the party’s almighty Dewan Syuro, Hilmi Aminudin, on the other hand, argued that support for the government and greater flexibility in recruitment and nomination processes were necessary for the party to gain political experience and enhance its competitiveness in elections. Significantly, the pragmatists see no contradiction between these policies and PKS’s function as a dakwah party. For them, the ultimate goal is to make Indonesian society more Islamic, and to achieve this, so they argue, participation in the current political system is imperative. To counter the concerns of the ideologues, pragmatists therefore like to highlight the “successes” of the party in their endeavor of Islamizing Indonesia through engagement in democratic politics (e.g., through the antipornography law).
Ever since the split between ideologues and pragmatists became visible for the first time in 2004, it has shaped the internal dynamics within PKS. Given that electoral success in 2004 had been achieved largely because no overtly Islamic agenda had been pursued, the pragmatists have long had good arguments in the debate. Indeed, despite persistent criticism, they have won most of the internal battles in recent years. Perhaps surprisingly, even the stagnation in the 2009 election did not change the dynamics within the party significantly. Although some critics of the moderation course seemed to become more outspoken after the election, 10 pragmatists affirmed their current supremacy in the party during the 2010 National Congress. Not only were choice of the congress motto (“PKS for All”) and the selection of the location for the event highly symbolic—the congress was held in one of Jakarta’s most luxurious international hotels—but delegates at the event also endorsed the leadership team around Hilmi Aminudin and Anis Matta for another term.
The 2010 congress was orchestrated as a show of force and support for the moderation course, but party officials at both the national and the provincial and district levels acknowledge that there is substantial discontent at the grassroots. Many longtime members who joined the party for its religious zeal have not (yet) abandoned their exclusivist religious viewpoints and are yet to be convinced of the necessity and usefulness of the moderation process (Mietzner 2008a). For them, it is the spread of Islam not participation in power politics that should be the prime focus of PKS’s organizational activities, and it is they who do see a contradiction between the party’s overly pragmatic course and its dakwah mission. Party elites are well aware of the mood at the grassroots but seem confident that the current course will eventually be accepted by the skeptics.
The dilemma for PKS, however, is that it is not only the traditional supporters who are unhappy but also those party members who joined primarily not for religious reasons but because of PKS’s reformist image. With the party now increasingly enmeshed with old-established power structures in Jakarta and elsewhere, disillusionment has spread among reformists, especially after PKS-supported governors and district heads failed to bring about substantial change in their provinces and districts after being elected. It is this dissatisfaction at the grassroots that explains why in 2009 PKS yielded its most disappointing results in exactly those places where the party had actually done very well either in 2004 or in subsequent local elections (Mietzner 2009a, 14).
Effects of Inclusion on PKS’s Organizational Structures and Procedures
The split between pragmatists and ideologues as described in the previous section is one of a number of symptoms of organizational change within PKS. Another important change, which in many ways has been possible only because of the broader ideational moderation, has been the consistent process of opening the party toward non-Muslims and Muslims from a non-tarbiyah background. This practice began for purely instrumental reasons in the run-up to the 2004 election, with a view to broadening the party’s electoral appeal in regions with large non-Muslim populations. Following the success of the 2004 elections, however, the practice was not only continued but also institutionalized, resulting in two striking organizational developments.
First, party membership grew exponentially over the years. If in 1999 PKS’s predecessor PK had well fewer than 100,000 members, PKS’s pool of cadres in 2004 amounted to around 400,000. By the time of the 2009 election, this figure had probably at least doubled. 11 Thus, within the space of ten years, party membership had risen extraordinarily. For those who orchestrated PKS’s opening up, this is good news and vindication for their strategy. For opponents of the new direction, however, the growth in membership is a cause for concern rather than celebration as they fear that the influx of new members without adequate religious backgrounds will undermine the party’s organizational solidity and water down its ideological identity.
Second, it is important to note that non-Muslims and Muslims from outside the tarbiyah family were not simply invited to join the party but at times offered controversial fast-track appointments to positions as party candidates in legislative or direct elections for governor, mayor, or district head. Party leaders called this “political recruitment” to draw a line between these candidates and traditional party members who were recruited via the tarbiyah-inspired “educational path” (Hwang 2010, 670). In the 2004 legislative election, for example, PKS fielded several non-Muslim candidates in the Christian-dominated province of Papua. In the run-up to the 2009 election, too, PKS opened its candidate lists for non- Muslims, 12 but at the end of the day all successful candidates for the national parliament in that year were Muslims. 13 Furthermore, during direct local elections, which have been held in hundreds of provinces and districts since 2005, PKS also supported various candidates with dubious Islamic credentials. Often these candidates came from a background in business or the bureaucracy and received the nod for their candidature only after paying huge amounts of money to the party. In adopting this kind of nomination procedure, PKS basically emulated the practices of other parties that are widely known for effectively auctioning off nominations for these executive elections to the highest bidder (Mietzner 2008b; Tomsa 2009).
Both of these developments are significant because they call into question the rigidity of PKS’s famous internal organizational principles. According to the party’s hierarchical structure, PKS members who enter via the educational path are divided into six categories. 14 New members normally start as an anggota pemula (beginner) and can rise to the next level only after passing through a party-internal examination procedure that tests the member’s commitment to the party and its objectives. Since the primary objective of PKS is dakwah, it should follow that it is basically impossible for a non-Muslim to pass this examination. In other words, even though the party statutes do not explicitly state that all members must be Muslims, in practice all members are normally expected to engage in Islamic activities. Moreover, to be nominated as a candidate for a legislative election, potential candidates, even if they are from outside the party structure, are usually expected to have proven not only their political capabilities but also their moral integrity according to Islamic law. However, many candidates who were recruited via this political path possessed neither political capabilities nor moral integrity. No wonder that critics of the party’s pragmatic course have found it difficult to comprehend how such candidates—especially if they were non-Muslims—secured their nominations. 15
In 2010, the PKS leadership responded to its critics by taking the moderation course to the next level and formally amending the party’s organizational statutes to accommodate non-Muslims into the party structure. Thus, from 2010 onward non-Muslims were invited to not only run for office on behalf of the party but also actually take up leadership positions within the party. 16 With these amendments, PKS has attempted to salvage what is left of its reputation as a party with strict organizational rules. As a matter of fact, when PKS was initially formed, its strict internal rules helped the party gain a significant institutional advantage over many of its electoral rivals. As Hamayotsu (2009) has demonstrated, PKS’s clear regulations provided incentives for many young and ambitious Muslims to join the party. With the opening up of the party to broader constituencies, however, these rules were repeatedly bended, much to the dismay of not only the conservative ideologues in the top party ranks but also the rank and file that constitutes the party’s human capital. Whether the official endorsement of a common but highly controversial practice such as the inclusion of non-Muslims will placate the critics remains to be seen.
Effects of PKS’s Moderation on the Quality of Indonesia’s Democracy
Seen from a purely procedural perspective in the way Schumpeter (1947) or Huntington (1991) have defined democracy, Indonesia is now widely regarded as a consolidated electoral democracy. All political parties that through their participation in elections have demonstrated their acceptance of democratic procedures have contributed to this consolidation process, and PKS is no exception in this regard. If, however, we conceptualize democracy more elaborately and take, for example, Diamond and Morlino’s (2004) eight dimensions of democracy as a benchmark, the picture becomes more differentiated. The dimensions, proposed as tools to actually measure the quality of democracy, include the rule of law, participation, competition, vertical and horizontal accountability, freedom, equality, and responsiveness. Space constraints prevent a detailed analysis (not to mention measurement) here, but even just a cursory look at how PKS’s moderation has affected some of these dimensions will illustrate that the party’s ideational and organizational development has both facilitated and jeopardized the consolidation of Indonesia’s democracy at the same time.
Take, for example, the dimension of participation. According to Diamond and Morlino (2004, 23-24), “[D]emocratic quality is high when we in fact observe extensive citizen participation not only through voting but in the life of political parties and civil society organizations, in the discussion of public policy issues, in communicating with and demanding accountability from elected representatives, in monitoring official conduct, and in direct engagement with public issues at the local level.” In regard to these issues there can be little doubt that no other political party in Indonesia has done more to raise the quality of democratic participation than PKS. It is the only party that operates actively outside election times (especially at the local level), whose members meet regularly to discuss public policy, and that takes its supervisory and monitoring functions as a political party reasonably seriously. 17
At the same time, however, there are also counter-examples that show that the moderation of PKS either has directly compromised the quality of Indonesia’s democracy or has simply not gone far enough to prevent negative effects of the party’s involvement in democratic procedures. With regard to the former, it is important to note that inclusion in mainstream politics and the party’s subsequent moderation have weakened PKS’s credibility as a clean, noncorruptible reform party. Several party members have been implicated in corruption scandals in recent years, and the party’s promotion of former dictator Suharto as a national hero in a dubious public relations campaign to attract conservative but secular voters in 2008 also did little to endear it to democracy activists (Tomsa 2010). Inconceivable in the early PK days, these developments were possible only after PKS had accepted inclusion in the formal political arena and softened its attitude toward Indonesia’s notoriously corrupt politics. Needless to say, they have undermined rather than strengthened PKS’s capacity to improve the quality of democracy, especially in the dimensions of rule of law and horizontal accountability. With regard to the latter, PKS’s continued support, either tacit or explicit, for selected Islamist policies such as the antipornography law or regional sharia bylaws indicates that the party is not yet fully committed to democratic pillars such as freedom and equality. Thus, as a result of PKS’s inclusion in democratic law-making processes, Indonesia now has laws that are regarded by many as inherently discriminatory against women. 18 Clearly, moderation has not gone far enough in these aspects to actually facilitate democratic consolidation.
PKS in the Footsteps of Turkey’s AKP?
As a case study of an incremental yet uneven moderation process within the context of reasonably established democratic procedures, the development of PKS shows certain parallels to the Turkish AKP. Both parties were originally inspired by the ideals of the Muslim Brotherhood (Bubalo, Fealy, and Mason 2008) but have undergone significant if not necessarily teleological moderation as they positioned themselves as potent political actors in highly competitive party systems. In the process, both parties have sought to appease the political center without completely abandoning their Islamist origins. Another parallel can be seen in their eagerness to interact with non-Islamist parties and institutions from other countries. Where the AKP especially in its early days in power espoused a strongly pro-EU orientation (Tepe 2005), PKS has established working relations with, among others, the Australian Labor Party and has even sent delegates to China to engage with the Chinese Communist Party. That this results in political learning can be seen in individual PKS officials no longer objecting to a legalization of a communist party in Indonesia, a very significant if clearly not yet majority-supported shift in the boundaries of justifiable action. Finally, a third, if somewhat less auspicious parallel is the declining credibility of the two parties as forces of reform as patronage and corruption quickly began to affect the parties’ organizational procedures. While initially both parties were hailed for their intraparty democracy, they were soon subjected to increasing accusations of top-down decision making and lack of transparency (Fealy 2010; Heilmann 2007; Tepe 2005; Tezcür 2010a). 19
Yet, despite the parallels, it is important to note that the two parties are still products of very specific historical and political contexts that put certain limits on the basis for comparison. The AKP, for instance, operates under the extremely watchful eyes of a powerful military and a staunchly secular, interventionist Constitutional Court (Dagi 2008, 26). In Indonesia, a Constitutional Court was established only in 2004 and has only recently begun to make decisions that directly affect the nature of the political system (Mietzner 2010). At the same time, the veto power of the military in Indonesia has declined rapidly in the post-Suharto era, so that a party like PKS need not fear to be shut down by coercive means from the armed forces. Other differences are apparent in the nature of the political systems in Turkey and Indonesia and the roles the two parties play in these systems. Clearly, the AKP and the PKS occupy very different positions in very different institutional environments and are therefore exposed to very different opportunity structures and constraints. While the AKP is the biggest party in a parliamentary system that uses a closed-list proportional representation system with an extremely high electoral threshold (10 percent), PKS is still only a medium-sized party in a presidential multiparty system that has used different electoral systems with different thresholds in each election since 1999.
Concluding Remarks
Overall, the development of PKS from a small, staunchly Islamist antisystem party to a religious-nationalist yet still very conservative mainstream party demonstrates that inclusion can indeed lead to moderation. By changing the stance on the Pancasila, opening the party to non-Muslims, and engaging in processes of political learning not only from fellow Indonesian parties but also from foreign parties including overtly nonreligious ones such as the Chinese Communist Party, PKS leaders have shifted the boundaries of justifiable action quite substantially over the years. However, it has also been highlighted that there is also significant opposition to this moderation course, among both elites and the party faithful at the grassroots. Clearly, moderation is a multifaceted rather than a linear process and poses new challenges not only to the party itself but also to the broader process of democratic consolidation in Indonesia. PKS is now in a crucial phase of transition, and its ability to manage this transition will to a large degree determine the future of the party.
Effectively, PKS will need to reposition itself as an established party without being seen as part of the establishment, a task that many other formerly radical parties have struggled with. At this point, PKS’s main strength is still its relatively high level of institutionalization, especially its comparatively strict adherence to rule-based decision-making processes and the enduring appeal of Islam as ideological inspiration (Hamayotsu 2009). But the inclusion of not-so-pious Muslims and non-Muslims into the party as well as the party leadership’s somewhat halfhearted responses to allegations of corruption and misconduct from PKS cadres have negatively affected the party’s institutional solidity. Contradictory signals to the outside world during the 2010 congress—openness in engagement with the West on one hand but secrecy in regard to leadership elections and programmatic discussions on the other hand—have done little to convince the party’s critics (Fealy 2010).
With a view to the consolidation of Indonesia’s young democracy, the development of PKS provides risks and opportunities. Generally speaking, the party’s moderation should be conducive to the consolidation process because it reduces the potential for polarization in the party system. Indeed, throughout the past few years, PKS has demonstrated that it is willing and able to operate within the rules and regulations of a democratic political system. The more familiar the party became with the system, the more the party was shaped by the values and norms of this system. PKS leaders had to acknowledge that exclusivist policies are neither popular with the electorate nor helpful in interparty negotiations and lobbying.
However, not all the norms and values of Indonesia’s political systems and especially the party system are actually facilitating the process of democratic consolidation. Corruption, in particular, but also parliamentary inefficiency and party-internal factionalism have put consistent strains on Indonesia’s political development. In the early days, PKS set out to provide a counterbalance to these problems, but with moderation came a decline in determination to be that counterbalance. The party, it seems, is now at risk of being completely co-opted into Indonesia’s traditional power politics, a prospect that will serve neither the party nor Indonesia’s democratic consolidation. If, however, PKS manages to fully transform itself into a moderate Islamic yet still reform-oriented party, it could play a vital role in improving transparency and accountability in the broader political system and thus make a major contribution to the consolidation of Indonesia’s young democracy.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Mirjam Künkler and Manfred Brocker for inviting him to the initial workshop on moderation and inclusion at Princeton University. Furthermore, he would like to thank the two conveners and all participants at the workshop as well as Michael Buehler and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared that they had no conflicts of interests with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.