The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis struck Indonesia hard. In a country in which 60% of the population do not have access to clean, piped water and some 70 million have no electricity, the margin between subsistence and starvation can be a very flimsy one. The crisis also brought out the endemic racism against the ethnic Chinese Indonesians, thousands of whom were violently assaulted despite their many centuries of peaceful life in the country. Reuniting the country and bringing about refurbishment of the devastated manufacturing sector would be a difficult and perhaps highly contested process.
Indonesia is an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, with its hundreds of millions of citizens dispersed across an enormous range of different ethnic and social contexts. Although throughout history there has been a tendency for the island of Java to be the central part of the state .to dominate politics and governance, this has been rather more difficult to achieve in the era of democracy. Politicians from other islands and regions have little incentive to join political movements which will benefit Java and Javanese interests without receiving something in return. Those politicians who put their own constituents first have become able to deliver votes to a coalition government prepared to dole out the spoils of political victory. Voters themselves perceived voting for such regional powers as being the most rational choice. Possessed of little education and in the absence of an overarching political ideology to inspire them, people tend to vote for narrow self-interest. Outside of Java, appealing to nationalism as a dominant philosophy makes little sense and, although the vast majority of the population is Muslim, so far it has not been possible for religious leaders to mobilize a broad-based unified political party based on religious lines – probably just as well. Instead, politics has been dominated by regional power bases and by the powerful family business groups who are able to hand out resources to gain support among the population as a whole. The only political ideology that might ever have united the majority of the Indonesian people was Communism. However, Communist thought was relentlessly and ruthlessly suppressed throughout the whole region to the extent that it is now all but impossible to find someone who is prepared to stand up and admit to being a supporter.
The result of this political system – which is found elsewhere in Southeast Asia, of course – is the election of a series of coalition governments with weak overall support and only able to govern by distributing rewards to coalition members. Little internal consistency exists among the different coalitions and governments were characterized by internal divisions, constant infighting and very weak ability to put policies into practice.
