This article originally appeared on the Council for Foreign Relations website.
Over the past fifteen years, politics have stagnated and democracy has faltered [PDF] in Southeast Asia. And after fending off the pandemic in 2020, the region is now facing a massive COVID-19 outbreak. The new wave is decimating populations and causing massive economic damage while also sparking ferment against the political order.
Between the 1980s and the early 2000s, Southeast Asia was at the center of a global wave of democratization. Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand all became democracies. Timor-Leste also became a democracy after separating from Indonesia, which had controlled it. And Cambodia, Malaysia, and Myanmar launched political reforms.
But since the late 2000s, the region has regressed politically, part of a global wave of democratic backsliding that seems to be gathering pace.
Authoritarian populists have undermined freedoms in Cambodia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Military juntas have further crushed democracy in Thailand and, most notably, Myanmar. Seemingly promising reformers, such as Indonesian President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, have faltered in battles against corruption and once again empowered antidemocratic actors. The most repressive states in the region, such as Vietnam, have become more authoritarian. The main regional organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), has done little amid coups and other reversals of democracy. Today, Timor-Leste remains the only fully free democracy in Southeast Asia.
The pandemic further sped up this backsliding, as leaders used it to grab more executive power. In its 2021 report on freedom in the world, Freedom House* scored Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand, and the Philippines lower than in its 2020 report.
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