Indonesia’s election: a curious outcome

Gwynne Dyer

Opinion

Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo concluded his second five-year term on Tuesday with a national election in which his chosen successors won a convincing victory. “Jokowi”, as everybody calls him, still enjoys 70 percent public approval and he has every right to be proud of his past.

The national economy has grown 43 percent under his rule, and democracy has become normal in a country where dictatorship was once the norm. People are living better, the coups and massacres are long past, and Indonesia is growing into its status as a major player internationally (4th in population, 16th in economy).

But something weird has just happened. Prabowo Subianto has been elected president.

Former general Prabowo Subianto is a living symbol of the bad old days. His father came from a wealthy family and served as a cabinet minister under both Indonesia’s founding dictator, Sukarno, and the brutal general who ruled for 30 years after him, Suharto.

Prabowo married Suharto’s daughter in 1983, and served as a special forces commander fighting resistance fighters in Indonesian-occupied East Timor and separatists in West Irian (New Guinea). In both conflicts he was accused of human rights abuses.

The accusations that just won’t go away, however, concern the kidnapping, torture and murder of pro-democracy protesters during the non-violent campaign to oust Suharto in 1998. “It was my superiors who told me what to do,” Prabowo insisted 10 years ago, but that is not much of a defence in law.

Prabowo was dishonorably discharged from the military and the United States banned him from entering because of human rights violations. (The ban was only lifted by Donald Trump in 2020.)

But he returned from exile in 2009 and founded a right-wing ultra-nationalist party. With limitless funds available from his billionaire brother Hashim Djojohadikusomo, he ran for president in 2014 and 2019 — but even with the backing of other tycoons who control the Indonesian media, he was trounced by Jokowi both times.

Prabowo’s political style then was somewhere between Juan Peron and Benito Mussolini, belligerently anti-foreign and over-the-top dramatic: he sometimes arrived at rallies riding a thoroughbred horse. But he’s getting better political advice these days, and prefers to play a benevolent grandfather dancing badly on TikTok.

That change of face wouldn’t have been enough to win him the presidency, however, without the help of Jokowi himself — who made him defence minister in 2019. This greatly puzzled people who admired Jokowi, but gradually the plot became clear.

Nepotism has always been a curse in Indonesian politics, and it turns out that Jokowi was not immune. Maybe he justified his actions by telling himself that otherwise somebody like Prabowo would ruin his legacy after he was gone (the constitution says two terms is the limit), but in any case he made a secret deal with his erstwhile rival.

Obviously nobody is going to admit that publicly, but actions speak louder than words. The deal was that having made Prabowo minister of defence, he would make Jokowi’s eldest son Gibran Rakabuming his running mate as vice-president in the 2024 election.

It worked: Indonesian voters were left with limited choices once the “good guy” and the “bad guy” had made a deal.

There’s a coalition of parties behind this deal, of course, but it’s hard to believe that Jokowi’s 36-year-old son, a political novice, will be a match for the ruthless Prabowo, a 72-year-old veteran of both political wars and the real killing zones of the past.

The current deal is unlikely to work, and Jokowi’s ability to control the course of the new government (through his son Gibran) will be a lot less than he supposes.

■  Gwynne Dyer’s latest book is The Shortest History of War.