A familiar trope in the analysis of Southeast Asian politics is that development is a more urgent concern than democratisation. Popular pressures to increase democratic inclusion and protect democratic institutions may periodically arise. But the more fundamental and constant worry of Southeast Asia’s governments and citizens is thought to be making development—not democracy—work.
This was certainly true for the authoritarian regimes that dominated Southeast Asia throughout the Cold War period. Overcoming the historical hindrances and humiliations of colonialism meant that catching up with ‘the West’ or ‘the global North’ became the prime postcolonial imperative in anti-communist authoritarian regimes like Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. They all dreamt of following in Japan’s development footsteps. It eventually became true in the reformed communist regimes of Vietnam and Cambodia as well. They sought to accompany China on its path from Second World to First.
Yet in the quarter-century roughly following the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–98, concerns about democracy came to loom much larger. A ‘regime cleavage’ within the elite and electorate alike thus came to characterise political competition in Southeast Asia’s wealthiest capitalist societies by the early 21st century.
This was especially true in Indonesia, where an exceedingly punishing economic downturn undid Suharto’s personalistic dictatorship and ushered in a competitive multiparty democracy. Malaysia experienced a vicious crackdown on reformist forces in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis, but reformist forces refused to fade. Thailand was no stranger to mass democratic protest—popular will prevailed over military rule in 1973 and 1992, with big assists from the widely beloved King Bhumipol Adulyadej. But the Asian Financial Crisis prompted constitutional reforms aimed at enhancing the electoral connection between voters and politicians.
After the wildly popular—and wildly unpopular—Thaksin Shinawatra was toppled in a 2006 coup, Thai politics fractured along the ‘yellow’ side of militarist, monarchist oligarchy and the ‘red’ side of inclusive and energetic populism. Malaysia saw questions of democratic reform rise in relevance with the launching of the Bersih movement for electoral integrity in that same year.
Indonesia’s 2014 and 2019 elections seemed to hold democracy’s survival in the balance, with Joko Widodo the final rampart against strongman Prabowo Subianto’s ascendance to the presidency. Even in Singapore, the historically weak opposition to the ruling People’s Action Party gained headway in the 2010s largely by promising to constitute a solid procedural opposition in the city-state’s pseudo-democratic institutions.
It would be a stretch to say that democracy had displaced development in the driver’s seat by the 2010s. Still, the fate of democracy certainly loomed larger in election campaigns in the first two decades of the 21st century than the final two decades of the 20th.
But now, democracy is firmly back in the back seat. This is of course not merely a regional story. Donald Trump’s second, far more aggressively authoritarian presidency in the United States starting in early 2025 has taken democracy promotion entirely off the global agenda.
This marks a definitive end to a global era. If democratic concerns are to play any meaningful role in any country’s politics, it can only be through domestic dynamics, not geopolitical pressure or transnational diffusion. The ‘democracy versus autocracy’ framing of world politics so favoured by US administrations from Bush to Biden is dead and buried.
Development is again sidelining democracy in Southeast Asia. The United States’ retreat from global leadership means that Southeast Asian nations will now maximise their economic ties to China, Europe and other Asian economies with less geopolitical hesitation. US tariffs on China will likely divert more lucrative investment projects to the region. As China begins transitioning from its unsustainable export-dependent economy to a domestic demand-driven growth model, Southeast Asian exporters will be first in line to feed the world’s most massive market.
Indonesia and Malaysia are currently the most vivid examples of what happens when development sidelines democracy in national politics. Indonesia’s 2024 presidential election saw questions of democracy become almost entirely irrelevant. Prabowo’s nice-guy makeover allowed him to ride on Jokowi’s long coattails—lengthened by Indonesia’s strong economy—to a comfortable victory. In Malaysia, the opposition’s fight to displace the long-ruling Barisan Nasional coalition has produced a government which acts like it has no latitude to pursue deeper democratising reforms. At times it seems as if cost of living is the only political issue that matters in Malaysia, much like in neighbouring Singapore.
The fascinating exception to this trend is Thailand. Among Southeast Asia’s upper-middle-income countries, Thailand is at once the least democratic and the one where democracy still matters the most. Young voters in particular remain deeply committed to replacing the military–monarchy alliance with a far more democratic and inclusive political arrangement. In current times when external pressures for democratisation have evaporated, Thailand is the only Southeast Asian middle-income country where homegrown forces are pressing hard enough for a democratic breakthrough to threaten authoritarian elites’ entrenched interests.
The lesson is an ironic one. When authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia stonewall on democratic reforms, they keep democracy at the forefront of the political agenda. When they concede even partial democratic reforms, politics is largely reduced to the quotidian demands of cost-of-living politics, which does not threaten political or economic elites in the slightest. The overall picture appears to be a ‘middle-democracy trap’ to accompany the ‘middle-income trap’.
Dan Slater is the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan.
Source: East Asia Forum
