Indonesia's House of Representatives is rewriting the law that governs how the world's third-largest democracy runs elections — and the rewrite is being built almost entirely backward-looking.
Commission II of the DPR has spent since late 2024 compiling source material for a revision of Law No. 7 of 2017 on General Elections (UU Pemilu). By July 2026 that process had produced a formal Daftar Inventarisasi Masalah (DIM) — a problem inventory list — running to 28 points, built primarily from 22 Constitutional Court (Mahkamah Konstitusi) rulings, according to Commission II chair Rifqinizamy Karsayuda (CNN Indonesia). The DIM was compiled as a workaround while the commission awaited formal sign-off from DPR leadership to convene a working committee (Panja) — sign-off that, as of the CNN Indonesia report, still had not arrived. Karsayuda's own account of the holdup is candid: "Bagi kami politisi kalau belum ada green light dari ketua umum kami tidak bergerak" — without a green light from party leadership, politicians don't move. Indonesia's Election Supervisory Body (Bawaslu) has characterized the effort as deliberately narrow: a terbatas dan kontekstual revision meant to implement court rulings and tighten administration, not to touch the presidential election system (Bawaslu Purworejo). The target is passage by the end of 2026, with formal discussion slated to begin in July–August (Rumah Pemilu).
The Steelman: Court Compliance Is a Real Constitutional Obligation
There is a legitimate case for the DPR's approach. Indonesia's Constitutional Court rulings are binding, and a legislature that ignores 22 of them for years accumulates exactly the kind of norm conflicts and administrative confusion that produced disputes over the presidential threshold (addressed in MK Decision No. 62/PUU-XXII/2024, which struck down the prior candidacy threshold) and the sequencing of national and regional elections (MK Decision No. 135/PUU-XXII/2024). Reconciling statute with binding constitutional interpretation is not bureaucratic housekeeping — it is the minimum condition for the 2029 election to run on a legally coherent footing. A commission juggling 179 registered petitions down to 22 controlling rulings, while also fielding input from KPU, Bawaslu, DKPP, and the interior ministry, has a genuinely full plate. Scope discipline is not automatically a failure.
What the Discipline Leaves Out
But scope discipline has a cost when the thing being excluded is the fastest-moving vector of electoral harm in the world's largest social-media-per-capita democracy. Verdy Firmantoro, a political communication observer at Universitas Brawijaya, has been making this case publicly and specifically since May 2026: "Regulasi kampanye digital harus diperjelas dan diperkuat karena pemilu ke depan sangat ditentukan narasi di media sosial" — digital campaign rules must be clarified and strengthened because future elections will be decided by social media narrative (Koran Jakarta). His recommended scope: rules for the use of public data in targeting, campaign-finance transparency for digital spend, disclosure requirements for political advertising on platforms, and — the item with no current statutory analogue at all — a disinformation mitigation framework built around AI-generated content and coordinated buzzer networks. By late May, Firmantoro sharpened the warning further, telling reporters that AI-generated disinformation is "a crucial issue" for the 2029 election and that, absent early-detection systems and systematic mapping of anonymous and buzzer accounts, the contest risks becoming less an ideological race than "a battle to control public attention in digital spaces" (Antara Jatim).
The gap is concrete, not theoretical. Existing KPU regulation already requires campaign participants to register official social media accounts before use — only registered accounts may carry campaign content, an attempt to keep anonymous or fake accounts out of the picture — and requires disclosure when campaigns work with influencers, content creators, or digital marketing agencies (KPU Kabupaten Pegunungan Bintang). That framework was adequate to the 2019 and 2024 elections. It has no answer for synthetic video, AI-cloned candidate voices, or the kind of professionally coordinated buzzer operations that a 2024-election study published in KPU's own Electoral Governance journal found capable of pushing public discourse past a "polarization tipping point" — a threshold beyond which disinformation intensity causes fragmentation that outlasts the election itself and degrades trust in the result (KPU Electoral Governance Journal). That same research concluded existing rules were already insufficient in 2024. Nothing in the 28-point DIM, as reported, proposes to close that gap for 2029.
The Case for Doing Both — Carefully
The instinct here should not be to demand Indonesia import Europe's Digital Services Act wholesale, nor to wait for a moral panic to write platform law in a hurry. Ad-transparency and provenance-labeling rules for AI-generated political content are achievable without touching editorial discretion or requiring platforms to adjudicate truth — disclosure obligations, not takedown mandates, are the proportionate instrument, and they preserve the open contestation of ideas that Indonesia's own reformasi-era press freedoms were built to protect. The DPR does not need to reopen its entire legislative calendar to add this; a Panja already forming to implement 22 court rulings could absorb a narrowly scoped digital-campaign chapter — transparency of paid political ads, disclosure of AI-generated content, and a reporting channel for coordinated inauthentic accounts — without threatening the limited, court-compliance character Bawaslu says the revision is meant to have. Leaving it for a future amendment after 2029 means legislating the last war. The 22 rulings tell Indonesia what went wrong with its old election law. Firmantoro's warning tells it what's about to go wrong with the next one.