Indonesia's Uprising Won't Stay in the Streets Where Jakarta Wants It

Indonesia has been in the streets since February 2025, and most of the world outside Jakarta only noticed once the death toll made headlines. It should have been paying attention from the start. What began as anger over a presidential instruction slashing ministry budgets — while parliament voted itself housing allowances nearly ten times the minimum wage — has become the broadest anti-government movement Indonesia has seen since the fall of Suharto. It has not stopped, and the state has not stopped killing to end it.

The spark that turned scattered anger into a nationwide uprising was mundane and obscene at once: Affan Kurniawan, a motorcycle-taxi driver, was run over and killed by a police tactical vehicle during an August 2025 demonstration in Jakarta. Within days, protests hit dozens of cities. The state's answer was not accountability — it was more police. By the government's own count, at least eight to nine people were dead within that single week of unrest, more than fifty injured, hundreds arrested. The pattern repeated into 2026: fresh waves of protest over fuel price hikes, a weakening rupiah, and continued crackdowns on LGBTQ Indonesians and activists, met each time with tear gas, live rounds, and mass detention.

This is what "stability" looks like when a former general linked to human-rights abuses under Suharto becomes president: not the absence of unrest, but its permanent suppression. Prabowo Subianto's government did not create every grievance driving people into the streets — mass layoffs, a gutted safety net, a food-poisoning scandal tied to his signature nutrition program, and the shadow of predecessor Joko Widodo's continued influence all predate him. But his response has been uniform and predictable: treat a hungry, angry, underemployed generation as a security problem to be managed with armored vehicles, not a political crisis to be answered.

Western governments and financial press keep describing Indonesia as an emerging-market success story, a nickel-and-EV supply chain darling, a G20 seat at the table. None of that requires asking who pays for the extraction and the export economy at street level, or why a government sitting on that kind of growth needs riot police to face down its own students and gig workers. The silence from Jakarta's trading partners isn't neutral — it's the same transaction that lets Gulf monarchies and Central Asian strongmen buy diplomatic cover with resource contracts. Indonesia's nickel goes into the batteries in electric cars sold in Berlin and Los Angeles; the bodies stay in Jakarta.

What makes this uprising different from earlier Indonesian unrest is its refusal to be satisfied by cosmetic concessions. Budget reversals and cabinet reshuffles have not stopped the marches, because the underlying complaint was never about one policy — it's about who the state exists to protect. Nineteen months of continuous, self-renewing protest against tear gas and live ammunition is not a movement running out of steam. It's a government running out of ways to pretend the consent of the governed still exists.

Sources

Wikipedia: 2025–2026 Indonesian protests
Amnesty International: Indonesia must investigate deaths following crackdown on protests
Reuters: Police killing sparks Indonesia unrest, first major test for Prabowo presidency
PBS NewsHour: What to know about Indonesia's deadly nationwide unrest over lawmakers' perks