Building functional, democratic and autonomous politics in a situation of political distress, economic crisis and floundering social institutions, after decades of hegemonic authoritarian rule, is the daunting task on which Indonesia has embarked. So far it has been a painful and somewhat slow process – after four years of democratisation the nation still has not managed to decide on a comprehensive reform agenda for the renewal of the bureaucracy and public institutions. But by other measures the country has come a long way since the election in 1997 when the state party, Golkar, received 76 per cent of the national vote, allowing Soeharto to be unanimously re-elected as president the following year (only to be ousted two months later). Most astonishing perhaps is the radically revised relationship between the central and local governments, and the revival of local democracy and grassroots initiatives. Civil society actors around the country, who for decades have been left outside the public sphere, are demanding their rights. And local state bureaucracies are slowly opening up to consultation and public participation in ways that were unheard of five years ago.

But consolidating democracy will not be easy. As Vedi R. Hadiz argues in Chapter 8 of this book, authoritarian forces are still strong within the military, the economy, the bureaucracy, and even political parties. The present form of democracy in Indonesia – recently described by Törnquist (2002) as a ‘bad-guys democracy’ – benefits local bosses, thugs and corruptors. A weak state is just what the old forces and hardliners want. They have been innovative in capturing the new democratic spaces provided by the dismantling of the Soeharto empire and the centralised state. The bureaucracy remains dominated by people trained under the authoritarian regime, so riddled with corruption that it has grown incapable of serving the public interest. Many of the people who lived comfortably under the New Order are still in power today, albeit under new political arrangements, and often wearing different party shirts. They have been joined by a new class of ‘predatory interests’ (to use Hadiz's term) or preman politik, ‘political thugs’ (Suaedy and Simanjuntak 2000), people that haveemerged since the demise of Soeharto to cleverly capture the new democratic spoils.