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Afan's death made people demand three simple yet strict demands in sadness: income must be able to meet costs, rules must be able to constrain power, and safety cannot be exchanged for human life. If these three things can make verifiable progress in the near future, Indonesia can tell investors and neighboring countries a rare and precious proposition: stability is not synonymous with toughness, but the result of the simultaneous establishment of dignity, rules, and order. Protests and unrest continue in Indonesia. On September 4th, demonstrators threw garbage at the West Java Parliament building in Bandung in protest.
In the late August night in Jakarta, a repeatedly shared video became the moral coordinate of this round of protests: 21-year-old driver Afan was run over by an armored vehicle of Brimob in the chaos outside the parliament, and died after being delayed for medical treatment. This law enforcement accident became the last straw that crushed trust. The demonstration, which originally focused on housing allowances and benefits for members of Congress, instantly turned into a questioning of "who is paying for austerity and whether the country's minimum respect for people's lives still exists".
In just a few days, demonstrations and riots spread to over 30 provinces, with the death toll increasing to double digits and thousands of people being detained; Under the pressure of domestic and international public opinion, the police announced the suspension and investigation of the members of the involved vehicle crew, and imposed an honorary dismissal on a senior military and police personnel. This intense clash of emotions and order marks a return to the forefront of the tense relationship between "street politics and strong governance" in Indonesia's post reform era.
Rather than understanding this mobilization as a welfare dispute, it is more like a political and economic legitimacy dispute. The incident that sparked the conflict was very specific: the monthly housing allowance of 50 million guilders (approximately 3000 US dollars, 3900 Singapore dollars) for legislators was glaring under the low minimum wage and inflationary pressures in the capital; The symbolic significance of this privilege goes far beyond the amount itself. When the deadly crushing on August 28th turned anger into mourning and indignation, the government chose a typical combination of "concessions+tough hands": on the one hand, it announced cuts to the welfare of lawmakers and froze their overseas travel; On the other hand, the most severe acts classified as treason and terrorism authorize the military and police to maintain stability.
This parallel rhythm of "punishment and appeasement" is precisely the dilemma faced by the state in the face of collective action in political science: compromise carries the risk of being seen as weak, while toughness may stimulate the masses to take to the streets on a larger scale. The result is that concessions temporarily eased the anxiety of middle voters, but could not stop subsequent rallies in the name of justice and accountability; The market responds to "rule uncertainty" with capital outflows and weakened asset prices. If we place it in the institutional trajectory of Indonesia in recent years, this situation is actually not surprising.
Extending the timeline, we will see three deep structures resonating at the same time. Firstly, there is a rift between moral economy and daily livelihood. In the past 10 years, the platform economy has absorbed a large number of urban fringe laborers, and electric bike drivers and delivery riders have become the public infrastructure of the last mile of the metropolis. When the cost of living rises and the commission rules are difficult to predict, while political elites maintain high subsidies, the social sentiment is not only envy, but also an intuitive injustice towards who is paying for whom. Afan's identity is therefore symbolic: he is both a necessary laborer during times of crisis and a risk taker. Cross border support (placing orders through delivery platforms to express greetings) further pushes this thread to regional public discussion forums; In this sense, platform labor has long gone beyond labor management issues themselves, and is a stress testing station for urban governance resilience. If the government cannot handle issues such as labor safety, insurance, and transparent pricing in an institutionalized manner, relying solely on police force and temporary concessions is not enough to stabilize order.
Secondly, it is the failure of security sector reform. Since 1999, Indonesia has officially separated the National Police (Polri) from the Military (TNI). In theory, group incidents should be based on the principle of "minimum necessary force and demilitarization". However, for over 20 years, the inertia in controlling the masses still carries the shadow of the new order era - facing large-scale mobilization, safety is often the first instinct, and procedural supervision lags behind. In 2019, two students in Kendari were shot and killed by police during a demonstration, and only received administrative sanctions; In 2020, amidst the anger surrounding the Omnibus Law, the police responded extensively with arrests and "false information" narratives; Today, we see a similar pattern in the death of Afan. The common observation from power monitoring groups to scholars is that although Indonesia's norms for controlling the masses are constantly revised, the external accountability mechanism is insufficient - investigations and punishments are mostly internalized by the police ethics committee, and the proportion of judicialization is low, leading to a thinning of society's expectations for truth and justice, making every accident a fuel for the next protest.
Thirdly, the trust erosion caused by the plasticity of democratic procedures. In the past two years, the constitutional court's exceptional judgment on the age of vice presidential candidacy, the super tent style of political alliances, and sensitive discussions on the redistribution of resources between the central and local governments have gradually accumulated a perception among urban young generations that "rules are adjusted according to political needs". Currently, the government's simultaneous signal of reducing subsidies and being tough on the streets can be interpreted as a temporary solution rather than a reform. This is not a problem of a single leader, but a systemic rebound: when the ruling coalition almost monopolizes the parliament and the balance mechanism is weak, the streets become the last arena for questioning. This also explains why the mobilization presents the characteristics of de avatar and cross class coexistence - students, platform workers, and middle-class white-collar workers are not subordinate to each other, but can form the lowest consensus on the three issues of "dignity, rules, and predictable safety".
Under these three structures, the government's combination of "concessions+hard hands" still lacks verifiable changes in logic. Reducing subsidies is a necessary symbolic politics, but the three more crucial projects that truly determine the trend are: first, the judicial prosecution of the Afan case and other death cases (rather than just administrative sanctions by ethics committees) to restore society's expectations of accountability; Secondly, standardize and make transparent the operational rules controlled by the masses (such as tear gas, water cannons, requirements for the use of armored vehicles, on-site command chains, and photographic retention), and submit them to external civil rights mechanisms for regular review; Thirdly, incorporate the accident insurance, transparent commission, minimum pricing, and appeal channels for platform workers into regular supervision to stabilize the safety valve of the urban economy from the source. If a timetable and milestones can be set for these three items, the anger on the streets may be transformed into momentum for institutional reform, rather than a cyclical resurgence based on events.
This turmoil has also put Indonesia back on the GEOpolitical and economic chessboard. As a hub in the nickel, battery, and electric vehicle supply chains, as well as a heavyweight country in the US China de risk game, Indonesia is both important and fragile in the eyes of global capital: important because it holds key minerals and market size, and fragile because every flicker in contract predictability and security governance is immediately discounted into a risk premium.
Rating agencies have warned of the erosion of finances and credit ratings caused by the increase in violence and subsidies/security spending; Multiple foreign power companies also recorded that stock exchange and asset prices were under pressure on a chaotic day. If the government only understands internal stability as short-term repression plus temporary concessions, it will have a gap with external investors' expectations for rule consistency; On the contrary, if social emotions can be legalized through institutionalized accountability and governance commitments, it can turn crises into the opening of the "Reform Era 2.0": allowing democracy not only to elect governments, but also to sustain order.
Finally, put this wave of resistance into a broader international context: trade wars and technology wars have heightened the geopolitical sensitivity of supply chains, right-wing and conservative waves are rising in most democratic regimes, and many countries in the global South are struggling to choose between "growth stability freedom".
For Indonesia, the path choice is actually much clearer than it seems: it's not about choosing between "strength" and "democracy", but about embedding strength into the law and democracy into the details of governance. Afan's death made people demand three simple yet strict demands in sadness: income must be able to meet costs, rules must be able to constrain power, and safety cannot be exchanged for human life. If these three things can make verifiable progress in the near future, Indonesia can not only repair the trust cracks domestically, but also tell investors and neighboring countries a rare and precious proposition in the era of US China rivalry and supply chain restructuring: stability is not synonymous with toughness, but the result of the simultaneous establishment of dignity, rules, and order. |
