AUTOCRATIC LEGALISM DAN KEMUNDURAN DEMOKRASI: INDONESIA DALAM LANSKAP ASIA TENGGARA

Denny Ferdiyantoro

Authors

Denny Ferdiyantoro Kementerian Hak Asasi Manusia Republik Indonesia

Keywords:

Abusive Constitutionalism, Southeast Asia, Autocratic Legalism, Constitutional Resilience, Democratic Regression

Abstract

This study aims to evaluate the mechanisms of democratic regression through the lens of autocratic legalism within the constitutional frameworks of Southeast Asia, with a comparative focus on Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Unlike previous studies dominated by deterministic political science approaches, the academic novelty of this research lies in the prescriptive formulation of institutional engineering that elaborates on the rigid limitations of judicial authority through the concept of militant democracy to build constitutional resilience. Using normative legal research methods, this study integrates statute, conceptual, and comparative legal approaches. The comparative analysis relies on a functionalist method to dissect how different legal structures respond to identical socio-political pathologies. This research finds that the decline of democracy in the Southeast Asian region is driven by procedural democracy being used to erode the substance of constitutionalism. In Indonesia, this manifests through the institutional hijacking of legislative functions via fast-track procedures, such as in the revision of the KPK Law, the enactment of the Job Creation Law through the Omnibus Law, and the revision of the TNI Law, which reduce meaningful public participation. Comparatively, although the Philippines manipulates the judiciary through populist law and order narratives and Thailand implements an exclusionary design via the 2017 Constitution, all three demonstrate a convergence in the form of the collapse of checks and balances due to the expansion of executive power, exacerbated by the permissiveness of the regional ASEAN Way doctrine. Amid this onslaught, the Constitutional Court displays acute ambivalence, potentially serving as a guardian of democracy yet vulnerable to becoming entangled in abusive constitutionalism when acting freely as a positive legislature. To save constitutional democracy, it is urgent to codify rigid indicators of substantive public participation, reform the recruitment of independent judges, limit the discretion of judicial positive legislation, and institutionalize a citizen constitutional watchdog movement as a sociological counterbalance.

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