Hello friends!
This week I was so excited to give away a handful of six-month memberships for readers who also subscribe to Frontier Myanmar and Myanmar Now. Help me scratch that dopamine itch and subscribe to them and forward your receipts!
All Asean and Timorese nationals under-30 (and all Burmese nationals of any age!) are always welcome to a free sub, so get in touch if that’s you.
See you next week,
Erin Cook
Climate change pain is already here
Monday’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report has no good news for anyone, but it’s especially bad for Asia. “There are relatively few places on Earth that are simply too hot to live now. But it’s beginning to look like in Asia, there may be more of those in the future and we need to think really hard about the implications of that,” Stanford University environmental scientist Chris Field told the Associated Press.
The report comes as thousands of residents in Malaysia are forced to evacuate due to flooding, the Indonesian weather agency warns the effects of climate change are being felt across the archipelago and the Mekong drought continues to dry out mainland Southeast Asia.
🇮🇩 An extended-term?
Do it or don’t, just let us know. That’s the message from democracy activists and pundits as rumours continue to swirl that electoral delays could extend President Joko Widodo’s second and final term. While the President has kept mum, recent comments from party leaders in the governing coalition have breathed new life in a theory that first gained traction as the pandemic began to unfold in 2020.
"If we look at the pattern, it is quite systematic. First, it was conveyed by a minister. The resistance was quite strong because it did not have sufficient political power. But the second one was carried out simultaneously by political parties, leaders of political parties,” Ahmad Khoirul Umam, executive director of the Institute for Democracy and Strategic Affairs, told the Jakarta Post.
The Jakarta Post also points to some polling which shows that while 58 percent of respondents agree or strongly agree that sticking to the five-year fixed term is for the best, over a third agree or strongly agree that, given the pandemic, an extension focusing on recovery is a fair cop.
A bit of editorialising here: I think this is very interesting. It certainly plays alongside the democratic slide argument of recent years, as well as the criticism that Jokowi is prioritising legacy projects over sustainable governance. We saw similar moves in the Philippines (which, when democracy instability is talked about, appears to move in concert with Indonesia) with the pre-pandemic constitutional change conversation and rumours President Rodrigo Duterte would attempt to outstay in six-year term limit.
The appetite was lost in the Philippines when more pressing (and less mind-numbingly pedantic) issues came to the fore, but with a sliver under two years until the election and the worst of the pandemic seemingly behind us (let’s hope!) Indonesia could be a different story.
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