Indonesia has been a latecomer to democracy during the historic ‘third wave’ of global democratisation. It was not until a quarter-century into this wave—in 1999—that Indonesia became an electoral democracy. By then the third wave of democracy had already crested, though levels of freedom in the world continued to improve for some years thereafter. The democratic transformation of East Asia had already largely occurred. The Philippine transition took place in 1986, South Korea' in 1987 and Taiwan' during the period from 1987 to 1996. Mongolia also became a democracy in the early 1990s after the collapse of communism. By 1995, three-fifths of all the states in the world were electoral democracies—in the sense that they could choose and replace their leaders in free, fair and meaningful (multi-party) elections (see Table 2.1). The wave of democracy that began in the 1970s in southern Europe and then spread to Latin America had by the mid-1990s gone well beyond East Asia to incorporate most of Central and Eastern Europe, some of the former Soviet Union and, surprisingly, much of sub-Saharan Africa—by the count of Freedom House, fully half of the 48 states in that region. At that moment in the mid-1990s when the third wave essentially crested, Indonesia seemed as stably authoritarian as it had ever been during the three-decade period of Suharto' authoritarian ‘New Order’.

Observers did not realise it at the time (and many still do not), but the scope of democratic expansion in the world essentially came to a halt in the latter half of the 1990s. Since 1995, the extent of democracies (both in number and as a proportion of all the world' states) has been in an equilibrium. Some transitions to democracy have occurred in the decade-plus since then, but they have largely been offset by transitions away from democracy, back to authoritarian rule, in other countries. As a result, there has been only very modest oscillation in the overall number of democracies, and since 2006 the number of democracies has been steadily (albeit modestly) in decline.

Oddly, it has been in this period that Indonesia has emerged and developed as a democracy. As the remainder of this chapter shows, Indonesia in this period—its first full decade of democracy—has become in many ways a surprising political success story.