Indonesia's Gen Z Uprising Won't Stay Bought Off With a Rolled-Back Allowance

Indonesia's protest movement has now run for over a year and a half — not because the state failed to notice, but because its only answer has been to arrest more people, not fewer. What started in February 2025 as scattered anger over a blackout-themed "Indonesia Gelap" campaign against government austerity became, by August 2025, the country's largest unrest in years, after police killed a motorcycle taxi driver named Affan Kurniawan by driving an armoured vehicle into a crowd of demonstrators in Jakarta. He was one of at least a dozen people killed across both waves of protest. The government's response to that killing, and to everything that followed, was to escalate the crackdown rather than answer the demands.

The material grievances were never exotic: opposition to a monthly allowance hike for national legislators worth roughly ten times the minimum wage, anger over mass layoffs, a weakening rupiah, fuel and food price hikes, and a property tax increase — layered onto years of shrinking space for dissent under Prabowo Subianto, a former general credibly accused of human rights abuses during the Suharto dictatorship who was elected president in 2024. When students and gig workers took the streets over pocketbook issues, they found a state that had already spent a decade normalizing the idea that protest itself is a security threat, not a democratic right.

What makes this an antifascist story rather than a generic "unrest" story is the shape of the response. Prabowo did not simply deploy riot police — he publicly branded protesters as engaged in "treason and terrorism," the same rhetorical move autocrats everywhere use to convert a labor and housing grievance into a national-security emergency that justifies whatever comes next: tear gas fired into crowds, rubber bullets ordered against demonstrators who had breached a police compound, thousands detained, and, per Human Rights Watch's 2026 country report, a legislative push to expand the military's domestic role that long predates and outlasts this specific wave of protest. Indonesia's 2025 armed forces law revision — one of the protest movement's original targets — is exactly the kind of quiet institutional entrenchment that survives long after the news cameras move on.

The numbers tell the escalation plainly. Arrests in the first protest wave (February–June 2025) totaled roughly 2,610 people; by the second wave that August and September, that figure had more than doubled to over 6,100, even as the state kept insisting it was restoring calm. That is not a state running out of tolerance for chaos — it is a state that has learned mass detention is cheaper than addressing why a motorcycle taxi driver was killed by his own government's armored vehicle for being in the wrong crowd at the wrong time.

None of this is unique to Jakarta. It is the same playbook South Korea, Kenya, Peru, and a dozen other states we've covered this year have run: name the protester a terrorist, arrest the movement instead of answering its demands, and bet that international attention fades before the next round of impunity gets written into law. Solidarity with Indonesia's students and gig workers means naming that pattern every time it repeats — because the state's bet is that nobody outside the country is still counting.

Sources

Wikipedia: 2025–2026 Indonesian protests
Amnesty International: Indonesia must investigate deaths from crackdown
Human Rights Watch World Report 2026: Indonesia
Council on Foreign Relations: Prabowo's crackdown
Democracy Now: Indonesia protests coverage