Peasants and Politics: Achievements and Limits of Popular Agency in Batang, Central Java

This article presents an analysis of popular political agency in Indonesian electoral politics by way of a close study of the district of Batang in Central Java. While many analyses suggest that local democratic government in Indonesia is unconsolidated and dominated by oligarchs, the experience of Batang shows that civil society groups representing poor and disenfranchised Indonesians can also play an important role in local politics. In 2011 a well-organized local peasant-based social movement, Omah Tani, supported a charismatic former military man who won an election as bupati, or district head, and subsequently delivered on promises to improve local governance and resolve land disputes in favour of farmers. It is argued that this was not an unqualified victory for social movement politics but rather a hybrid form of politics involving a cross-class coalition and reflected in the partial nature of delivery of programmatic gains, continued purchase of clientelistic patterns, and, above all, the movement’s disorientation when the district head decided not to recontest in 2017 and the movement was unable to put forward a successor candidate. Even so, the Batang experience points to the potential of “democratic political blocs” in Indonesian local politics.