Bambang Harymurti is the editor-in-chief of Tempo, Indonesia’s leading news magazine, and a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.
Indonesians came close to electing as their new president a populist challenger promising to restore the country’s predemocratic order. Democracy prevailed in the end, but its continued vulnerability was exposed.
Juan Linz’s 1990 critique of presidentialism in these pages was based largely on the Latin American experience. In the last few years, however, four new Asian democracies have encountered presidential…