Indonesia’s unlikely activists: How white-collar workers are finding their voice

JAKARTA – A decade ago, someone like Mr Dzaky Putra, a 31-year-old public works contractor raised largely abroad and more comfortable in English than Indonesian, would have seemed an unlikely person to engage in politics.

But since 2020, he has been producing in his free time online political content, mostly in English, from memes to more serious explainers, after what he described as a “slow burn” of frustration with the state of the country.

He was approached by popular youth-oriented political site What Is Up Indonesia, which has more than 400,000 followers on Instagram, and became a regular content creator there.

One of his more serious posts, a recap of reactions to the controversial revision of the military law in March, received nearly 130,000 likes.

“Speaking up about injustice and speaking truth to power makes me feel better because it’s an outlet to express my frustration and despair,” Mr Dzaky, 31, told The Straits Times.

“Better out than in, as my therapist would say,” he added.

Communications professional Efraim Leonard, 28, had a similar political awakening, which came to a head in August 2024, when he participated in a protest against a proposed change to the regional elections law.

At the time, he was frustrated that many of his friends were apathetic about political issues, said Mr Efraim, who works for Jakarta-based public policy advocacy group Think Policy.

“But recently I’ve seen an increase (in political engagement),” he told ST. “Since the protests of the past year, my friends who are usually not engaged in political and policy issues are at least starting to ask, ‘What is happening?’”

The duo’s experiences highlight how Indonesia’s urban middle class – historically part of the politically inactive “floating mass” cultivated by former president Suharto’s authoritarian New Order regime – has become an increasingly prominent part of the country’s civil society.

New types of activism

University of Melbourne cultural studies lecturer Annisa Beta has been tracking the rise of “non-classic activism” since the

2019 #ReformasiDikorupsi (”#ReformCorrupted”) protests

, which were triggered by the passing of a controversial revision to the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) Law.

While there are no figures on the number of middle-class activists, many academic papers have been written on the rise in new types of activism in the last two or three years. Indonesian academics and civil society organisations have termed these types of activism as “gerakan rimpang”, or “rhizomatic movements”, borrowing a term coined by French philosophers and political activists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

In a 2025 article in the Journal Of Youth Studies, Dr Yatun Sastramidjaja of the University of Amsterdam described such movements as “shunning traditional youth and student organisations” and preferring smaller and more informal collectives to more established organisations, which signalled their aversion to “formality, hierarchy and exclusive membership”.

Dr Annisa said that for a long time, being politically active was something most ordinary Indonesians would consider dangerous, which meant activism was relegated to the realm of “outraged men who are ready to die”.

“That is the legacy of the New Order: if you are openly political, you will be wiped out,” she told ST.

But this has changed since the fall of Suharto in 1998 and accelerated with the widening of internet access among Indonesians since the late 2010s.

“Since 2019, there has been a marked demographic shift in the types of people who are engaged civically or politically. So this has been a long journey, over six years in the making,” Dr Annisa said.

She added that the increasingly prominent role that middle- to upper-class activists have played in recent years could be attributed to the change in government leadership. Former president Joko Widodo, who was in office from 2014 to 2024, was seen as more “tolerable”.

“There were many elements (of Mr Widodo’s administration) that many middle-class people found admirable,” she said. “With (current president) Prabowo, it is harder to argue that he is doing well.”

Indeed, since Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s inauguration in October 2024, there have already been two major protest movements in which young white-collar workers were a significant component:

the Indonesia Gelap (Dark Indonesia) protests

in February 2025, triggered by the Prabowo administration’s spending cuts; and

the Reset Indonesia protests

in August and September of the same year, which were initially triggered by a proposal to raise housing allowances for lawmakers.

One white-collar worker caught up in those protests was 27-year-old Ms Laras Faizati.

She posted several Instagram stories expressing anger over the death of 21-year-old ride-hailing motorcycle driver Affan Kurniawan, who was run over by a police vehicle on Aug 28 after a protest in Jakarta.

On Aug 29, she posted a photo of herself pointing at the National Police Headquarters building with a caption saying, among other things: “Please burn this building down.”

On Jan 15, after a two-month long trial, the South Jakarta District Court found her guilty of “incitement”, but ordered that she be set free and placed under a one-year probation.

Ms Laras, a former communications officer at the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly, is among dozens of Indonesians who faced charges over social media posts they made related to protests linked to Mr Affan’s death. Her case has attracted widespread attention and support.

Amnesty International Indonesia campaigner Marguerite Afra Sapiie said the organisation collected more than 500 letters of support for Ms Laras from the public between October and December as part of its campaign of solidarity for those it claims were unjustly imprisoned after the protests.

“One letter said, ‘You are the bravest, strongest girl on the internet’,” she told ST.

Ms Afra said the letters showed that Ms Laras’ posts resonated with ordinary people because she expressed the anger and disquiet that many were feeling after Mr Affan’s death.

Speaking up at home and abroad

Ms Lia, 37, a private sector worker who asked to be referred to only by her first name due to concerns about being identified at her workplace, was one of those who shared Ms Laras’ outrage.

She wanted to join the protesters who took to the streets following Mr Affan’s death, but was worried that her asthma might make her more of a hindrance than a help. So she donated food and medicine instead.

“It was not much but it was the least I could do,” she told ST.

Ms Lia said she started becoming more vocal about political issues – both on social media and in everyday conversation – after a controversial Constitutional Court ruling in 2023 paved the way for former president Widodo’s eldest son Gibran Rakabuming Raka to run for the vice-presidency.

“I’ve noticed that recently, more and more of my friends who used to be quiet and choose not to comment much are speaking out,” she said.

This increased willingness to speak up extends to Indonesians living outside the country.

Since 2024, numerous diaspora groups have sprouted up across the globe – including in the US, Germany, Japan, Egypt and South Korea – in solidarity with protesters at home, one of the most prominent being Melbourne Bergerak (Melbourne Takes Action).

One of the main triggers for the groups’ formation was the same mooted change to the regional elections law that compelled Mr Efraim to take to the streets.

The change would have allowed then President Widodo’s younger son Kaesang Pangarep, 31 – who was then too young under the prevailing law – to run in the Jakarta gubernatorial elections.

Ms Pipin Jamson, a 38-year-old PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and one of Melbourne Bergerak’s initiators, said the group seeks to provide an outlet for the Indonesian community in Melbourne – including students, Indonesian civil servants and long-time immigrants – to voice their concerns about the socio-political situation in Indonesia.

“Our hope is that with this movement, we do not lose touch with our history and we do not lose touch with what is really going on in Indonesia,” she told ST.

Just ‘good at talking’?

Despite its growing numbers, some have questioned the real-world impact of this decentralised, disorganised form of middle-class activism.

President Prabowo, for one, has been dismissive.

“There are a lot of smart people who are good at talking and looking for faults,” he said in a speech at a Golkar Party event in December. “But they can’t build bridges, can’t create jobs, can’t guarantee there’s rice, can’t guarantee there’s LPG (liquefied petroleum gas), can’t guarantee there’s fuel, can’t guarantee anything.”

Criticism has also come from within civil society. In a controversial 2024 opinion piece titled Bourgeois Activism Emergency, academics Abdil Mughis Mudhoffir and Rafiqa Qurrata A’yun said that such activism often creates a false sense of achievement.

“Yet the world continues to run as usual; oligarchic factions continue to fight over the allocation and distribution of resources,” they wrote.

The University of Melbourne’s Dr Annisa, however, said that such comments reflect an “old-school perspective”.

“In a repressive system,” she said, “you have no other choice but to do the small things.”

For Ms Laras, those “small things” were four Instagram posts – which cost her her job, four months in detention, and a further one year of probation.

But in a statement after her verdict, she seemed undeterred.

“May today be a turning point for Indonesia to build a wider space for the voices of women and young people,” she said after her sentencing hearing on Jan 15.