EN 
ID By Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih and Inaya Rakhmani
In August 2025, a dramatic wave of demonstrations swept multiple cities in Indonesia. Originating in Jakarta and its surrounding areas, it quickly spread to dozens of other cities across the archipelago. Throughout the month, social media was flooded with visuals of groups that rarely mobilized together; from university students in colored alma mater jackets, ride-hailing motorbike drivers, and mothers donning hijabs, clutching brooms and Indonesian flags. They joined forces in response to announcements made two weeks earlier about a housing allowance amounting to IDR 50 million (approximately USD 3,000) per month that members of parliament were set to receive. This figure is close to ten times Jakarta’s minimum wage of IDR 5.4 million (USD 320). The announcement came out at a time when people were questioning the government’s ability to create secure jobs and deliver basic services.
This commentary situates the late August 2025 grassroots mobilization as a continuation of a series of protests that erupted against democratic de-legitimacy and the deepening of inequalities in the past decades. We argue that as a whole, this series of protests represent a momentary coherent articulation of grassroot grievances where scattered, specific discontents among diverse groups were aligned through collective expressions that provided a shared framework for understanding systemic problems. Yet, as we will show, these articulations ‘from below’ have repeatedly been re-articulated by competing oligarchic factions to advance their own interests through strategies of co-optation, symbolic concessions, and the re-appropriation of movement languages that ended up fracturing the coherence of emerging cross-class coalitions.