Controlling the Narrative, Consolidating Power:COVID-19 and Indonesia's Deepening Democratic Crisis

Abstract

In mid-2022, Indonesia looked back at two and a half years of managing the COVID-19 pandemic. In retrospect, there were two major, and very different, periods in Indonesia’s approach to COVID-19. The first period, from early 2020 to mid-2021, was marked by the initial denial of the pandemic’s existence in Indonesia (Mietzner, 2020); the reluctance of the government to impose stringent public health measures (Jaffrey, 2020; Aspinall, 2021); and the systematic ignoring of warnings by epidemiologists and economists that the government’s prioritization of the economy was neither protecting the public nor the economy (Sulaiman, 2020). After a massive spike of the Delta variant in mid-2021, which cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives and for which the government’s approach was primarily responsible, Indonesia’s leadership changed course. Obviously shocked by the carnage, the government tightened regulations, and it accelerated the acquisition of vaccines (Jaffrey, 2021). As a result of natural protection caused by the mid-2021 wave and the new government measures (including a successful vaccination drive), COVID-19 fatality numbers remained relatively low for the last quarter of 2021 and much of 2022. Show more