When the old man finally left the stage, people in the hundreds of thousands turned out in jubilation on the streets and public spaces around the capital. Strangers cried and hugged one another in disbelief that President Ferdinand Marcos was finally out of their lives. This was Manila on 25 February 1986, the day Corazon Aquino took her oath of office as the Philippines’ eleventh president and put a definite end to the authoritarian Marcos government. Months before, she had predicted, “When I become president, there will be dancing in the streets.” The Philippines was back on a path of democracy.
In 1998, another old man also left the stage in Jakarta. President Suharto resigned after 32 years at the helm of Indonesia. A jubilant scene similarly broke out on the grounds of the Indonesian legislature and other locations around the country where activists had camped and demanded that Indonesia reform itself politically, economically, and socially. The ensuing ‘reformasi’ in Indonesia reintroduced democracy to the country and led to the military’s return to the barracks, a flowering of civil society, and devolution of political power to previously marginalized local governments.
Indonesia’s reformasi movement served as an inspiration for reformists in Malaysia, although it took another two decades for them to prevail over the Barisan Nasional, a Malaysian government coalition that has maintained power practically since independence. It is a much-commented irony that 92-year-old Mahathir Mohamad, the prime minister that held the fort in the late 1990s, toppled the Barisan Nasional in Malaysia’s 14th general election in May. In the jubilant days since he took over as prime minister again, Mahathir has promised a clean, meritocratic government puts the interests of Malaysians above those of specific ethnicities and religions.
Malaysia’s political rupture, which came decades after the popular uprisings in the Philippines and Indonesia, was surprising. It goes against a narrative on Southeast Asian politics that has evolved in recent years: a wave of strengthening authoritarianism is threatening to wash away the democratic gains the region has seen in recent decades. However, this narrative is an overgeneralization of political trends, structures, and contexts that exist in different countries around Southeast Asia. What works in, say, Thailand is not necessarily what will work in, say, Vietnam. What, say, Singapore needs is not necessarily what, say, Cambodia needs.
Nevertheless, it is important to analyze what happened in Malaysia and what its impacts might be for the prospects of authoritarian regimes elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In this, the first Spotlight article by Professor Thitinan Pongsudhirak, which first appeared in the Nikkei Asia Review, is an excellent comparative overview to what lead to the fall of Barisan Nasional and how entrenched regimes elsewhere in the region may respond. In addition, Pongsudhirak also explores briefly the nexus between social media and political opposition in Southeast Asia.
Meanwhile, our second Spotlight article by Dr. Siauw Tiong Djin, a board member of the Herb Feith Foundation, looks back at what Indonesia, for one, has achieved in the two decades that have passed since reformasi began in May 1998. While Indonesians can point to real achievements and changes for the better in their society—after all, Indonesia now has a free press and a relatively strong civil society—much of the power structure that came to be under President Suharto remains. Worse, what is left over from the New Order continues to be politically important in contemporary Indonesia. Even the issue of Chinese Indonesians, a topic on which the Jakarta Post article homes in, remains relevant today.
In the end, all the handwringing about the persistentence of authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia ignores the local contexts important to each country’s political trajectory. However, as the Philippines and Indonesia have shown, kicking an autocrat out is just the first step in the long path of political maturation. As such, reforming Malaysia and what other countries that will follow in its path is a process that only has specific waystations but never a definite ending.
