—Muhammad Yoppy Adhi Hernawan, Constitutional Law Lecturer, Faculty of Law, Universitas Padjadjaran, Indonesia
Indonesian democracy has not needed a coup to slide backwards. Civilian control can be thinned out through ordinary governance tools: parliament can revise core statutes, the executive can issue executive regulations and orders, while the public can still vote according to schedule. The risk sits in what happens between elections, and in Indonesia, soldiers have become routine managers of civilian authority.
In historical perspective, during the 32 years of Suharto’s New Order authoritarian regime (1966-1998), the armed forces held an institutionalised “social-political” role, with officers embedded in the civilian administration and political life. This role was also evident in the armed forces having reserved seats in the national and regional legislatures and exercising extensive influence across the civilian bureaucracy. Scholars and policy studies document that the military held 75 of 500 seats in the national legislature. Then Suharto resigned in May 1998 after mass protests and a broader political crisis, and Indonesia entered the Reformasi (Reform Era). The reform era aimed to reverse that settlement by pushing the military back to professional defence and removing formal political roles, including the military’s appointed seats in national politics.
Recent developments point to a renewed path back: political leaders have expanded the military’s legal mandate by amending, the 2004 Indonesian Armed Forces Act (Law No. 34/2004), deploying soldiers to run civilian programmes, and pushing domestic security tasks toward a military model. This post examines how Indonesian President Prabowo and the military can benefit one another. Prabowo is a retired general, and he frames “effective” government in terms of discipline and a command-style approach, including by placing civilian governing elites in explicitly military settings. He also retains unusually direct access to military networks through trusted confidants, including serving officers in senior staff roles close to the presidency, which can convert military proximity into political and electoral advantage rather than limiting it to defence administration.
The armed forces gain in return: the administration relies on them to deliver flagship programmes and to occupy sensitive civilian posts, thereby expanding the military’s mandate, resources, and everyday presence within the state. Prabowo’s family ties to former Indonesian President Suharto, as a former son-in-law, also matter politically, as they help keep New Order-era state capacity and military-led governance within reach of contemporary democratic institutions.
The legal pathway: widening the statutory door
On 20 March 2025, parliament amended the 2004 Indonesian Armed Forces Act amid street protests and civil society warnings of a drift back toward New Order patterns. The vote matters less as a symbolic “military bill” and more as an enabling instrument: this act helps decide whether civilian officeholding stays exceptional, tightly bounded, and reviewable, or becomes normal.
Two details illustrate the direction of development. First, the revisions expand the range of civilian posts that active-duty officers can hold. Second, the revisions address who must resign and when. The government claimed that military officers must resign before taking most civilian posts, while also highlighting exceptions, including for the office of the Attorney General’s Office.
Such legal changes rewire accountability in practice. When civilian posts remain closed to active officers, the executive must rely on civilian bureaucracies operating under public law constraints, audit expectations, and political responsibility. When the law widens access, the executive gains a parallel pipeline with a different institutional culture, a chain of command that does not mirror civilian transparency norms, and a strong informal coercive presence even in “non-security” policy domains.
The protests around the amendment signalled that many Indonesians recognise that causal chain. Students and activists rallied outside parliament, carrying signs such as “New Order Strikes Back,” while security forces called in military personnel to assist police at the parliamentary complex.
The Administrative Pathway: appointments that reshape the state’s centre of gravity
Statutes enable; appointments operationalise. Even without sweeping legal revision, militarisation advances when presidents treat soldiers as general-purpose administrators for policy areas that implicate money, logistics, and compliance. A clear example came in February 2025, when the government appointed an active-duty major general to lead Bulog, the state-owned food procurement and logistics agency, marking the first time since the Suharto era that an active-duty general held that post, and prompting criticism that the appointment threatened democratic norms and transparency.
That appointment matters because food procurement and price stabilisation sit at the intersection of fiscal discretion, market access, and political legitimacy. Bulog’s decisions influence import policy, stock management, and distribution, which makes it structurally sensitive in any democracy. When a serving officer runs such an institution, the issue is not simply “a general in an office.” The deeper concern is institutional substitution: a civilian accountability ecosystem gives way to a command-oriented governance model that can discourage internal dissent and compress disclosure.
This pattern also appears beyond food. In May 2025, the finance minister appointed a retired lieutenant general as head of customs and excise, prompting rights groups to point to a broader pattern of placing military figures in sensitive civilian posts. The underlying point is that once the executive treats “security credentials” as a default qualification for civilian authority, the boundary between state administration and coercive institutions blurs across portfolios.
The programme pathway: welfare and development delivery through military infrastructure
Militarisation also advances through delivery, not law. A presidency can shift governance habits by assigning soldiers to run large-scale civilian programmes, especially when those programmes require nationwide logistics and command discipline. Prabowo’s flagship free meals initiative provides a concrete case of the armed forces’ involvement in implementing the programme, which caused the programme to stamble. From the early rollout onward, the programme faced repeated food-poisoning incidents and criticism that weak supervision and overstretched kitchen capacity undermined basic quality control. The controversy also sharpened governance concerns because of the delivery ecosystem to military and police involvement in kitchens and distribution.
The scale of the policy amplifies the governance effect, which, once a welfare programme becomes one of the state’s largest logistical undertakings, the actor who controls delivery gains leverage over budgets, procurement chains, subnational coordination, and public narratives of performance. The disputes that follow implementation failures therefore become more than operational problems and they become an accountability test for the state. When the state routes delivery through military-linked structures, capacity becomes a vehicle for militarisation. It normalises soldier-led management in a civilian policy domain and shifts accountability from civilian administrative chains to command-style coordination.
A similar logic appears in “national resilience” projects that expand military involvement in agriculture. In August 2025, Indonesia expanded the use of military “food security battalions” and military-linked agricultural initiatives after earlier food security missteps. These initiatives tie territorial command structures to land, supply chains, and local governance. They create a durable template for military presence in everyday administration, even without any formal suspension of democratic procedures.
The security gateway: counterterrorism as a route back into domestic governance
The most direct bridge to democratic rights runs through domestic enforcement and counterterrorism design. In January 2026, a draft presidential regulation that would expand or formalise the military’s role in counterterrorism operations drew criticism from civil society groups concerned about reform-era boundaries and civil liberties.
Counterterrorism often operates as the executive’s “necessity” domain. Leaders claim urgency, secrecy, and exceptional risk. That makes it a recurring entry point for widening security discretion. The democratic risk is practical and cumulative: once the state normalises military-led counterterrorism, it becomes easier to repurpose the same institutional tools for protest control, surveillance, and political policing, especially when the legal categories for “operations other than war” remain elastic.
Why this matters: militarisation as an electoral governance strategy
The militarisation in Indonesia is not a response to “security needs.” It more closely resembles a strategy of political consolidation because leaders expand military roles through statutory change, appointments, and programme delivery, thereby strengthening executive control through the military and yielding electoral advantage. That advantage can arise from the executive’s access to a disciplined nationwide organisational network, and from the fact that Indonesia’s territorial command and military-linked networks can, in practice, be mobilised to shape electoral environments, even if informally and indirectly. This dynamic builds a governance machine that can outlast an electoral cycle by embedding military networks into procurement, welfare delivery, territorial programmes, and domestic security frameworks. Each additional domain increases dependence on military capacity, while shrinking the space for civilian resistance inside the state.
The Suharto regime’s (new order era) legacy raises the stakes because it left a practical template for governing through the armed forces. That template treated the military as a manager of civilian administration, a gatekeeper in domestic order, and a nationwide territorial network that could discipline bureaucrats and shape local politics. Suharto’s system rested on everyday military presence in governance, plus impunity and repression.
Contemporary Indonesia does not replicate that architecture overnight. It rebuilds the enabling conditions: legal access to civilian posts, administrative habit of soldier-led management, and security rationales that shift domestic enforcement toward military logic. Elections can remain regular under that model, but civilian supremacy thins out because the state increasingly routes authority, resources, and accountability through an institution built for command rather than civilian transparency.”
That is why militarisation “without tanks” should worry democrats more than it reassures them. The outward form of elections can remain intact, while the state’s inner wiring changes in ways that make accountability thinner, dissent riskier, and civilian supremacy more nominal than real.
Suggested citation: Muhammad Yoppy Adhi Hernawan, The Return of Militarisation Without Tanks on the Street: Democratic Backsliding in Indonesia, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Jan. 28. 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/the-return-of-militarisation-without-tanks-on-the-street-democratic-backsliding-in-indonesia/