Suharto — 32 years of the New Order, undone by financial collapse

At nine o’clock on the morning of 21 May 1998, in a brief televised statement at the presidential palace in Jakarta, General Suharto announced that he was resigning the presidency of Indonesia. He had held it for thirty-two years, the second-longest rule in modern Asia, over the world’s fourth-most-populous nation. He left not to a coup or an invasion but to the collapse of his own economic legitimacy: a currency crisis that had wiped out the prosperity his “New Order” was built to deliver, mass student protests that ended with troops firing on demonstrators, days of deadly rioting in the capital, and the final desertion of the cabinet ministers and generals on whom his power rested.

Suharto, born in 1921 near Yogyakarta, was a career army officer who came to power in the bloodiest circumstances. After a murky coup attempt on the night of 30 September 1965, in which six senior generals were killed, he seized military control, blamed the Communist Party, and oversaw — together with the army and allied civilian groups — a campaign of mass killing in 1965–66 that took an estimated half a million to more than a million lives, with hundreds of thousands more imprisoned for years without trial. Out of that violence he displaced President Sukarno and, by 1967–68, made himself president. The killings were the foundation of the order he would call “New.”

For three decades that order delivered real and rapid development. Foreign investment, oil revenue, and technocratic management produced growth of around seven percent a year for much of his rule, and poverty fell sharply. The cost was authoritarian: opposition was tightly controlled, the press constrained, the dominant Golkar machine engineered repeated landslides, and the military was woven through politics. Abroad, Suharto’s army invaded East Timor in 1975 and occupied it for twenty-four years, a campaign whose famine, fighting, and repression killed an estimated 100,000 or more Timorese.

The New Order’s bargain — prosperity in exchange for political quiescence — broke when the prosperity did. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 sent the rupiah into freefall, banks and companies failed, and the corruption that had enriched Suharto’s family and cronies for decades suddenly looked intolerable. Re-elected to a seventh term in March 1998, he faced a wave of protest that the army’s killing of four students in May converted into a national crisis. As Jakarta burned and his own ministers refused to serve, the man who had ruled through fear for thirty-two years found he could no longer command it, and stepped down.

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali — 23 years of police rule, ended by a single act of despair

On the evening of 14 January 2011, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled Tunisia for twenty-three years, boarded a plane and fled the country he had governed as a personal police state. After weeks of nationwide protest that his security forces had answered with live ammunition, the army would no longer guarantee his survival, and the man whose face had stared down from billboards across Tunisia abandoned his presidential palace and flew, by way of Malta, into exile in Saudi Arabia. He never returned. His flight was the first fall of the Arab Spring — the moment that proved an entrenched Arab autocrat could be driven from power by his own people — and it set off uprisings from Cairo to Damascus.

The spark had come from a town few outside Tunisia had heard of. On 17 December 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, a 26-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, humiliated by a municipal official who confiscated his cart and produce, set himself on fire outside the local governor’s office. His act of desperation crystallized the grievances of a generation: unemployment, poverty, the petty tyranny of corrupt officials, and the suffocating repression of a regime that brooked no dissent. Bouazizi died of his burns on 4 January 2011. By then the protests his death ignited had spread across the country, and the regime’s bullets only swelled the crowds.

Ben Ali had seized power in a bloodless “medical coup” on 7 November 1987, deposing the aging founding president Habib Bourguiba on grounds of incapacity. He promised democratic opening and delivered the opposite: a one-party state under his Constitutional Democratic Rally, elections he won with margins as high as 99 percent, a pervasive security apparatus, censored media, and a ruling family — above all his wife Leïla and her Trabelsi relatives — whose greed became a national grievance in itself. For a time the regime was praised abroad as a model of stability and economic growth, but the growth masked deep inequality, regional neglect, and youth unemployment, and the stability rested on fear.

The fear broke in a month. As protests engulfed Tunisia, the army commander, General Rachid Ammar, reportedly refused to order his troops to fire on the demonstrators, and without the army’s loyalty the regime had nothing left to hold it up. Some 338 people were killed in the uprising. Ben Ali fled, was convicted in absentia of corruption and of complicity in the killing of protesters, and died in Saudi exile on 19 September 2019. The Tunisia he left became, for a time, the one genuine democratic success to emerge from the Arab Spring.