Leadership and Culture in Indonesian Politics

Indonesia's New Order government has held power since 1966. What explains such extraordinary longevity? How much longer is it likely to last? This bok charts the origins and the recent course of the New Order. It firstly analyses the extraordinary leadership skills of President Suharto, who has managed for thirty years to accumulate and mobilise a winning combination of political resources of coercion, exchange, persuasion, and organisation. More specifically, Suharto's genius as a political entrepreneur, first in the mid 1960s and then in moments of crisis since, has been his ability to see that a political order based on military dominance, with himself at the head, could be built and maintained with resources acquired through market-oriented economic policies. If the effective leadership of Suharto-who was born in 1921-is the primary explanation for New Order longevity, will there be a change of regime after he leaves office? Is Indonesia likely to become more democratic, more authoritarian, or politically unstable? How will political change affect the market-oriented economic policies that have been responsible for a quarter century of growth? Several chapters examine th