February was a pretty good month for Southeast Asian politicians wanting to evade accountability.
On Feb. 18, Thailand’s controversial deposed former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra was released from a prison hospital where he was spending time on charges of corruption and abuse of power. Thaksin, who spent 17 years in self-imposed exile, only returned to Thailand last August after his Pheu Thai political party formed the new government, and one of his allies became prime minister. Many Thais angrily questioned why Thaksin received special treatment.
And in elections in Indonesia on Feb. 14, former army general and defense minister Prabowo Subianto easily won the presidency with more than 50 percent of the vote. His supporters were elated, but critics warned of a return to authoritarianism. Prabowo’s victory marks a stunning rehabilitation for the former army Special Forces commander who was sacked from the army for human rights abuses in the 1990s, including torture and the disappearances of student activists, some of whom are still missing. Prabowo was stripped of his command for trying to stage a coup and barred from entering the United States for two decades.
Those cases, in three nominal democracies, highlight a troubling but enduring aspect of this region’s elite politics: a widespread culture of impunity. Past misdeeds are often quickly forgotten. Politicians typically prefer to keep powerful rivals close and inside the tent. And though the law is often weaponized to jail and silence journalists, oppositionists and activists, tough punishment is rarely meted out to the wealthy and well-connected.
Co-opting political enemies has long been a common trait in the region. In the Philippines, where I was a correspondent in the late 1980s, former military coup plotters who served prison time for trying to overthrow elected presidents quickly received amnesty and some later reemerged as politicians and were elected to office — with the help of their political rivals. It would be the rough equivalent of President Biden in 2021 issuing a pardon to Donald Trump for the Jan. 6 insurrection, bringing Trump into the Cabinet and endorsing Trump as his eventual successor.
Southeast Asian leaders say they value national stability above the United States’ fractured politics. Co-opting erstwhile enemies is a way to find consensus. Perhaps. But it also stunts the region’s democratic development, makes a mockery of the rule of law, and leads to popular disillusionment with politics when elites are seen as primarily interested in protecting each other to maintain power.
Prabowo’s rehabilitation was helped when the widely popular incumbent president who twice defeated him, Joko Widodo, invited Prabowo into his cabinet. After two terms, Widodo — widely known as “Jokowi” — all but endorsed Prabowo as his successor, helped by the fact that Prabowo named Widodo’s sparsely qualified son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, as his running mate.
Prabowo may have borrowed a winning strategy from Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. who was elected in 2022 with an overwhelming 60 percent of the vote. He won despite being the son and namesake of the late Philippine dictator who presided over a dark period of martial law and human rights abuses, including detention of opposition figures, torture and extrajudicial killings in the 1970s and ‘80s. In the 2022 race, Marcos Jr. named as his running mate Sara Duterte-Carpio, daughter of the popular outgoing president Rodrigo Duterte, even though the Marcoses and Dutertes are feuding rival clans.
Prabowo may have also taken another page from the Marcos Jr. playbook: he largely bypassed traditional media and reinvented himself on TikTok. He presented himself as an avuncular dancing grandfather to an entirely new generation of Indonesians — voters had no living memory of the dark days of the old Suharto regime which Prabowo served. (Prabowo was even previously married to the late dictator’s daughter.)
In Malaysia, Najib’s sentence reduction helps the embattled Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim shore up his support among Najib’s base of ethnic Malay loyalists. And in Thailand, the ruling generals decided they would rather make a deal with Thaksin’s populist Pheu Thai Party they once deposed than turn over power to the more reformist Move Forward Party that won the last election while threatening to curtail both the military and the monarchy’s powers.
Ultimately, it’s respect for the rule of law that suffers when the powerful have impunity. In democracies, everyone should be held to account for past actions. Even when — or especially when — its inconvenient.
