Indonesia’s macho new leader is no “cuddly grandpa”

Wearing a blue tunic, Prabowo Subianto waved from a gleaming white jeep on his way to the presidential palace after becoming Indonesia’s eighth president on October 20th. Sun-baked crowds waved back. For the retired general, it was the triumphant final leg of a quarter-century journey back to the centre of power from disgrace and exile. It is also the first time in a decade that there has been a major shift in Indonesian politics.

Mr Prabowo won the presidency in February’s general election on his third attempt. The first two times, in elections in 2014 and 2019, Joko Widodo defeated Mr Prabowo in close contests. On the third, the pair teamed up. Mr Prabowo drafted Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the elder son of Jokowi, as the outgoing president is known, to join his ticket as vice-president. And having long played the part of a blood-and-guts military man, Mr Prabowo rebranded himself as a cuddly grandfather.

Now, one big question looms: how different will the former general be from his predecessor? Mr Prabowo’s first cabinet includes many Jokowi loyalists in important roles. He also promised to continue Jokowi’s “down-streaming” agenda, by which Indonesia has sought to move from being a producer of raw minerals like nickel to an exporter of intermediate goods needed for the green transition, like lithium-ion batteries. But for all the notes of continuity, Mr Prabowo’s presidency will look different from Jokowi’s in several serious ways. To understand why, it helps to take a look at Prabowo’s long history in the national spotlight.

By any measure, he will be Indonesia’s most worldly president. Hailing from a legendary political family, his grandfather founded Indonesia’s first national bank. When his father backed the wrong side in a rebellion in the 1950s, the family moved overseas, where Mr Prabowo learned to speak English, French and German. Returning to Indonesia after Suharto, the strongman dictator who ruled from 1967 to 1998, came to power, his father became a minister, while Mr Prabowo chose a military career and married Suharto’s daughter. In the army he rose rapidly through the ranks. In 1995 he was named commander of Indonesia’s special forces.

By 1998, however, Suharto’s rule had come unstuck amid the Asian financial crisis and resulting protests. Then Mr Prabowo ordered a special-forces team to kidnap pro-democracy activists. He says that he returned nine victims unharmed. But around a dozen were never heard from again. The day after his father-in-law stepped down in May 1998, his successor relieved Mr Prabowo of his command. He spent the months and years that followed in the wilderness. An army board dismissed him. America banned him from entering the country. He spent three years in self-exile in Jordan.

When he returned to Indonesia several years later, his brother Hashim Djojohadikusumo bankrolled a new political party, the Greater Indonesia Movement (Gerindra). In speeches delivered to uniformed cadres across the archipelago, Mr Prabowo argued that democracy had not delivered for Indonesians, that foreign investors were merely exploiting the country’s natural resources, and that Gerindra would give them a more disciplined politics. Many of Mr Prabowo’s relatives are Christian, but in his campaigns in 2014 and 2019 he attracted the support of Islamist parties as Jokowi ran on a more tolerant platform.

The undertones of sectarianism had polarised the country. So Indonesians were surprised when Jokowi asked Mr Prabowo to join his administration as defence minister in 2019. Jokowi and Mr Prabowo had come to share at least one belief about politics: that it works better when all parties split the spoils of victory, rather than compete in winner-takes-all contests. In his second term, Jokowi built a broad coalition, including in his administration not only Gerindra but all but one of the parties with seats in the legislature.

Let the boy run

Jokowi also adopted some of Mr Prabowo’s authoritarian tendencies. Under Jokowi, the police and other previously impartial state institutions, such as the General Elections Commission and the Corruption Eradication Commission, increasingly ruled in favour of Jokowi and his allies. In an example that critics cite as particularly egregious, the constitutional court in October 2023 reinterpreted the constitution to allow Jokowi’s son to join Mr Prabowo’s ticket as his running-mate. This was despite the fact that he had not yet reached the minimum age for the job.

Mr Prabowo’s coalition looks even broader than his predecessor’s. There are few ideological differences among Indonesian parties, so most party leaders are happy to sign up to join the government if given a cabinet role. Mr Prabowo realises this; his will be Indonesia’s largest cabinet since democracy returned in 1998 (see chart). All but one party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), led by a former president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, have joined his coalition. But there is something even for her. In the cabinet line-up that Mr Prabowo announced on October 20th, he appointed her former aide-de-camp to be the co-ordinating minister for politics and security, and the brother of another former aide-de-camp to be the attorney-general. These appointments look as if they are intended to keep PDI-P, the largest party in the legislature, on side.

Co-opting his coalition partners and Ms Megawati through these appointments should help Mr Prabowo to achieve what he called in his inaugural address “a democracy appropriate to our nation, based upon our history and culture”. In August Mr Prabowo implied that having a political opposition was disruptive, saying that “the West loves opposition, fighting, refusing to co-operate”. (It did not seem to be something that he regarded as a problem when in opposition from 2009 to 2019.)

The risk of such a large cabinet is that it has devalued the currency of a ministerial appointment. If that is the case, then Mr Prabowo has other means of distributing patronage at his disposal. Jokowi preferred to offer seats on the boards of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to loyalists. Mr Prabowo, who has retained Erick Thohir as the minister for SOEs, will surely do the same.

While Jokowi sought to build a new $32bn capital city in the jungles of Borneo, Mr Prabowo told guests at his inauguration that he plans to quietly abandon the project. Instead his signature policy is a free-school-lunch programme that would cost $28bn per year. He has billed it as a response to childhood stunting. But it is just as likely to be used to deliver contracts to favoured supporters. It is expected to add debt equivalent to 2.3% of GDP annually, raising concerns about macroeconomic governance. In an effort to assuage such concerns, Mr Prabowo has reappointed Sri Mulyani Indrawati, the long-serving finance minister. She will act as a tripwire; if she resigns, investors will worry that spending is out of control.

Mr Prabowo will also exercise great influence on foreign and defence policy. He has appointed a close aide as Indonesia’s foreign minister, a post usually reserved for a career diplomat. While Mr Prabowo is unlikely to depart from Indonesia’s longstanding policy of non-alignment between America and China, he has strong views on many international issues and may episodically pursue them. Last year, as defence minister, he proposed a peace plan for Ukraine which would have involved holding referendums in occupied territories. His Ukrainian counterpart responded that it looked “like a Russian plan”. Such gadfly antics look likely to continue. ■