Anger on the streets can bring positive change
Riswanda
Affan Kurniawan was an online motorbike taxi driver in Jakarta. On the evening of 28 August 2025, trying to make a delivery, he was negotiating a big crowd protesting against the government not far from Parliament House. A Brimob (Korps Brigade Mobil) paramilitary police tactical vehicle ran him down and killed him. He was just 21 years old.
Video of the tragedy spread quickly and sent shockwaves throughout Indonesia. While officials played it down as an ‘operational accident’, a national weekly described it as ‘hard slap in the face of Indonesian democracy’. It starkly exposed a dilemma at the heart of a regime that claims to be democratic: how to enforce public order while upholding human rights?
Indonesia’s Reformasi-era laws guarantee freedom of public expression and the right to protest. Law No. 9 of 1998 expressly mandates security forces to protect demonstrators and the public from chaos. Yet in Affan’s case, the very agents of order became a source of tragedy. His fate has forced a painful reflection: democracy cannot thrive merely in the streets; it must permeate the institutions of the state itself.
System fragility
Why did Affan’s death trigger such outrage? It ignited anger because the underlying democratic institutions were already fraying. Indonesia’s democratic backsliding is evident in hard data. The official Indonesian statistics bureau BPS maintains a national Indonesian Democracy Index (IDI). This showed steady or improving scores after 2009, but then stagnation and decline in recent years. Political freedoms have narrowed. The IDI’s ‘freedom’ aspect dropped by over 7 points in the 2010s, and by 2023 stood at only 74.11 on a 100-point scale. Space for dissent and activism has shrunk. The national index for press freedom plummeted from 75.92 to 61.95 – a nearly 14-point crash. The Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) recorded 2023 as ‘the darkest year in a decade’ for Indonesian reporters, amid a spike in violence against the press. These numbers mirror the lived reality of critical voices being muzzled and civil society increasingly anxious.
Once hailed as a model democratic transition in Southeast Asia, Indonesia now finds its democracy under strain. The protests that filled city centres in 2025 were ostensibly over lawmakers awarding themselves hefty allowances, and about generally unresponsive governance. At a more fundamental level they were the ‘loud alarm’ of a democracy in distress, an emergency valve for public frustration with unfulfilled promises.
The gulf between citizens and their representatives has widened. This fed anger on the streets. Signs of this disconnect are everywhere. Parliamentary seats at national and regional levels are too often won by celebrities, well-connected dynasts or big spenders, rather than by policy-focused reformers. One commentator said bitterly, ‘Seats are filled more by stage-names and giant billboards than by the quality of policy reasoning’.
Lawmaking and oversight suffer as a result. The late-August demonstrations in Jakarta and other cities were triggered by revelations of legislators’ generous perks, despite their lacklustre performance. Elected officials are seen as self-serving and out of touch. This representation gap erodes public trust. Citizens increasingly feel their only recourse is direct action on the streets.
Yet street democracy alone is not a sustainable fix. Woodrow Wilson was an early scholar of public administration, who became US President in 1913. He warned long ago that ‘it is getting to be harder to run a constitution than to frame one’. In other words, writing democratic rules is easier than actually governing democratically day-to-day. Indonesia’s experience in 2025 painfully proves this point. Formal rights to vote and protest exist, but the machinery of the state – the police, the bureaucracy, the legislatures – often fails to translate principles into practice. Affan Kurniawan lost his life not because Indonesia lacks laws or institutions, but because they did not function democratically when it mattered most.
From protest to policy
If there is a silver lining, it is that recent events have spurred calls to ‘democratise’ Indonesia’s state apparatus itself. People want to make governance more accountable, ethical, and responsive between elections. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the contrasting lessons from Jakarta and Banten.
In Banten province, just to the West of Jakarta and around the same time as the Jakarta riots, large crowds also took to the streets. The same grievances fuelled these protests in Serang and other cities. But whereas the Jakarta protests tended towards violence, those in Banten have been completely peaceful. Some observers spoke of ‘anger that educates’. The outpouring of discontent remained nonviolent and even constructive. Community leaders stepped forward to mediate. Respected ulama cooled tempers with calming words. Local strongmen known as jawara held back their men. Volunteer medics set up makeshift health posts offering free teargas masks and eye drops to protesters. Banten police, for their part, exercised restraint and engaged in dialogue.
The result was striking. The streets became a true democratic forum rather than a battlefield. As one report noted: anger was managed, the state listened, and ‘the streets became a democratic space without new victims’.
Banten’s activists understood that democracy cannot stop at the asphalt. ‘Banten is not Jakarta,’ one observer wrote, ‘its rhythm is different, its tone lower. But the feeling driving people to the streets is the same – the gap between promises and everyday reality’. The shared challenge is to bridge that gap through institutions. Protest energy must be channelled into policy change.
Demonstrators in Banten didn’t just disband and go home. They pushed their local parliament to take action. They insisted that the demands voiced on the streets be ‘written into the minutes, changed in the regulations, and felt in people’s wallets and sense of security’. In other words, they sought to carry the democratic momentum from the street into the halls of power.
Police reform
What would it mean, in practical terms, to democratise the state in Indonesia? Part of the answer lies in reforming how security forces handle dissent. Indonesia’s police force has inherited both colonial and New Order legacies. It must transform its force-first mindset into a guardians-of-democracy mindset. Internal reform has been halting. SETARA is a non-government Institute for Democracy and Peace. Its 2024 study on the police found that a culture of violence and impunity remains deeply entrenched, blocking true reform.
There is no shortage of rules on paper. The National Police have regulations on the use of force and on human rights principles dating back to 2009. Indonesia subscribes to the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms. But standards of accountability and training are often ignored on the ground. To change this, human rights advocates propose several concrete steps.
One idea is to require police commanders to issue ‘Public Order Operation Statements’ ahead of any major protest or crowd-control operation. These would be essentially a public brief outlining the planned approach, crowd dispersal methods, and rules of engagement. They would affirm a commitment to avoid excessive force. Such transparency would allow civil oversight and clear benchmarks for accountability after the fact.
Complementing this is the proposal for a Standing Public Order Council. This would be a permanent committee including police officials, local government, community representatives, and human rights experts. It would review plans for managing large demonstrations. It would advise on de-escalation strategies, ensure compliance with laws like Law 9/1998, and investigate any lapses.
And when things do go wrong, Indonesia sorely needs a systematic post-riot accountability mechanism. Rather than let tragedies like Affan’s case fade into bureaucratic silence, there should be an automatic independent review after every protest-related violent incident. This should be a kind of public inquiry to examine what went awry, evaluate whether authorities followed procedures, and recommend sanctions or policy changes.
Taken together, these measures would embed a democratic ethos in the security sector. Transparency, oversight, and a learning culture that values citizens’ rights would be as important as order.
Parliamentarians and policy makers
Democratising the state also means fixing the institutions of representation and policymaking. It is here that Indonesia’s reformers have been most vocal with bold ideas.
Some have urged setting higher qualification standards for those who seek office. Commentators in Tempo magazine argued provocatively for a minimum education and public-policy literacy requirement for legislative candidates – even as high as a doctoral degree or equivalent in demonstrated policy expertise. The intent is not elitism, they argue, but to ensure a baseline of competence in drafting laws and budgets. While requiring every MP to have a PhD may be politically unrealistic, the principle strikes a chord. Parliament should not be a retirement home for celebrities or a playground for the unqualified.
At the very least, parties should be required to vet candidates for basic policy knowledge. Candidates could sit for a case-based test on legislation and budgets. Parties should also publicly share candidates’ track records, including any policy briefs or community problem-solving projects each candidate has worked on. Voters deserve to know not just who is popular, but who is capable.
Another innovative idea is to create a Legislative Performance Dashboard accessible to all citizens. This would function as a real-time report card for members of parliament and local councils. Key metrics might include each lawmaker’s bill sponsorships, the progress of those bills, attendance and voting records, the quality of their oversight inquiries, and even how often they draw on research or data in debates.
In 2025, a concept for such an index was floated under the name Indonesian Legislative Effectiveness Score (Skor Efektivitas Legislatif Indonesia, SEL-ID). The idea is that sunshine – transparency – can incentivise better performance. If every constituent can see, at a glance, that their representative hasn’t proposed any significant policy, or never shows up to hearings, then pressure will mount to shape up or be voted out. Civil society and media could play a role by publicising these scores; indeed, groups have talked about publishing ‘candidate quality indexes’ before elections. This would shift the focus from personality to competence.
To restore the link between lawmakers and the people, reformers also propose structural changes in political practice.
One proposal gaining traction is to institute mandatory ‘constituency service’ hours for legislators. For instance, each member of national or regional parliament might be required to hold monthly public forums with constituents. Each forum must last at least 8 hours and be properly documented. All outcomes – local grievances, suggestions – must be reported and integrated into the representative’s work.
Banten’s activists championed this idea. They envisioned regular town-hall meetings where farmers, factory workers, drivers, and students can present their two-page policy briefs on pressing issues to the officials. Doing this would normalise two-way communication. Citizens would get quality face time with those in power. They would also have to learn to condense their demands into focused, evidence-based proposals – a healthy exercise in participatory democracy.
The Swiss systems thinker Werner Ulrich has long been advocating this: moving from critical thinking for citizens to critical thinking by citizens. He argues that encouraging citizens to actively evaluate and contribute to policy ‘gives new meaning to the concept of citizenship’. It enables people to become more responsible, engaged participants in governance. In Indonesia, institutionalising forums and councils that include citizens in problem-solving would do that. Far from being token consultations, they would be a routine part of decision-making in local and national government.
Ethics
Finally, democratising the state entails bolstering ethics and accountability across the board. Indonesia has taken some steps here – such as requiring public officials to declare assets - but enforcement is weak. Experts suggest tightening these measures. They want to enforce strict pre-service ethical screenings for all high officials. All business interests should be disclosed, and any conflict of interest prohibited. No active contractors or oligarchs should be allowed to hold office without a proper cooling-off period. Strengthening watchdog bodies and protecting whistleblowers would help ensure that the rule of law applies as much to those in power as to ordinary citizens.
Indonesia stands at a crossroads. The true test of democracy is in its administration – in the everyday, behind-the-scenes work of governance.
Riswanda (riswanda@untirta.ac.id) teaches public administration at Universitas Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa in Serang, Banten. He is also a fellow at two Bandung universities: Parahyangan and Padjadaran.
