Why did well over half the 200-plus million Indonesian registered electors choose disgraced general Prabowo Subianto as their next President? Duncan Graham has some answers.
Authority – and fun. The former cashiered general banned from the US and Australia in a previous life has on early counts won almost 60 per cent of the popular vote. Locally he’s considered certain to be the Republic’s eighth president in October when sworn-in. He’s even been congratulated by PM Anthony Albanese on X.
He got to the top by portraying himself dishonestly. He purported to be a softie, a good guy when in reality he’s an army thug who allegedly did evil things in Java and East Timor.
Prabowo’s earlier campaigns (he tried three times and lost the lot) had him as a strutting dictator much like Mussolini the pro-Hitler leader of Italy in the 1930s, complete with a prancing stallion and ranks of guards.
His 2024 appeal was not as a fascist but a jolly oldie, a try-hard who deserved the chance to run the world’s fourth largest nation with 280 million just like the present popular president Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo.
The division is stark, the “gap between the richest and the rest in Indonesia (is growing) faster than in any other country in Southeast Asia”, according to Oxfam International.
“It is now the sixth country of greatest wealth inequality in the world. Today, the four richest men in Indonesia have more wealth than the combined total of the poorest 100 million people.”
Prabowo and his brother Hashim Djojohadikusumo, 69, are among the mega-rich. Unlike Jokowi who came from a riverside shack and could relate to the downtrodden, Prabowo has always been up there with the elite and has no personal knowledge of poverty.
The vast sums spent on getting him elected created an atmosphere of must-win, will-win.
In the 2019 election where Jokowi beat Prabowo by 11 points, religion was considered so important that the winner had an aged Islamic scholar as his sidekick. This time faith was barely an issue; though Gibran Rakabuming, his Dad and Prabowo are all Muslims they’re not known for their piety.
Hashim, Prabowo’s brother and co-founder of their Gerindra Party, is a Christian. So was their late mother Dora Maria Sigar. But the family’s beliefs didn’t become a factor in this year’s campaign in a nation where religion dominates all, from food to clothing to lifestyle.
Prabowo was seen as a leader with authority who wouldn’t bother electors with boring issues like the economy, corruption, debt to China and foreign relations. Leave that to the minority eggheads. The people wanted cheaper foods and a tough guy who’ll take them back to the imagined glorious days of his late one-time father-in-law Soeharto.
The second president handled everything, including the killing of anyone that got in his way. His administration called itself Orde Baru (New Order). Soeharto was a ruthless military dictator who neutered opposition by orchestrating the genocide of an estimated half-million ‘Communists’.
The US and Australia approved. The late PM Harold Holt was quoted as telling the New York Times: “With 500,000 to 1 million Communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.”
Prabowo comes from the same hate factory. Most volunteers who join the military in any country are women and men who like killing people and fixing problems with force. They tend to be doers, not debaters. They thrive on discipline.
It’s a condemnation of Indonesian schooling that the present generation is tragically too ill-educated to inquire and research, to discover for themselves the candidates asking for their backing.
Other factors in Prabowo’s win include Jokowi being insulted by his party head and fifth president Megawati Soekarnoputri – daughter of first president Soekarno. The public thought this morally wrong.
There’s been an abundance of comments and what it means for the democratic future of the nation; much has been the moaning of losers. An exception has been the Harvard-educated Islamic scholar Ulil Abshar Abdalla, one of the country’s progressive intellectuals.
In the country’s leading broadsheet Kompas he wrote that “Prabowo’s win reflects the popular desire for continuity rather than change.
“Like it or not, we have to listen carefully to this popular wisdom. Is the narrative of democratic decline really a concern for the wider public, or, on the contrary, only a concern for the middle-class educated group? The people may have different priorities than the issue of democratic decline.”
Bothering the “educated groups” has been the nepotism that allowed the courts to give Gibran 36, the right to run as Prabowo’s vice-presidential candidate when the law says the minimal age is 40. Having an uncle as a judge helped the young fellow’s case.
So what? Graft is widespread and long accepted – except by the ethical thinkers and they’re in the minority. What the majority know is that Gibran’s Dad is a good guy so his offspring must be the same.
The reasoning runs that Jokowi, 62, (who Constitutionally can’t stand for a third term) will be on hand to jerk the strings of his puppet son and through him the new president.
Blessing the union and having the new president continue his predecessor’s policies (adding free lunch boxes and milk for schoolkids) is all that the majority of voters want to know.
That thinking is flawed; unpredictable and egotistical Prabowo won’t be told how to govern.
His opponents are reportedly looking at “possible fraud” alleging his camp resorted to “legal manipulation, various forms of coercion, and abuse of state resources to gain an advantage in the contest.”
Their inquiries will go nowhere.
Having the time and energy to debate the subtleties is a privilege only for the oligarchs and their political and media mates. The wee folk, known as wong cilik have little interest in world affairs or that their nation’s economy now ranks 16th in the world, and is moving higher.
Prabowo spoke to them with slogans, not statistics. His rivals, Dr Anies Baswedan and Ganjar Pranowo – candidates with strong administrative experience as governors – were hampered by treating the electorate seriously and releasing policy statements.
Both men were interviewed by Western journalists and replied in English to Human Rights Watch inquiries. Prabowo, who was educated in the UK and US, refused media requests including from this correspondent.
His tactic was to relate to the electorate by shouting flim-flam promises and basking in the glory of having Jokowi’s son as a “cool” partner – as the first-time voters said. It paid off.
Now we wait to see if his critics will be cowed into submission by Prabowo’s Orde Baru Versi Dua. (Version Two) with opponents jailed like the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Perhaps Prabowo as president will turn out to be a reformer embracing dissidents. Maybe wombats will find airspace.
Duncan Graham has been a journalist for more than 40 years in print, radio and TV. He is the author of People Next Door (UWA Press). He is now writing for the English language media in Indonesia from within Indonesia.
Duncan Graham has an MPhil degree, a Walkley Award, two Human Rights Commission awards and other prizes for his radio, TV and print journalism in Australia. He lives in East Java.
Contributions to Pearls and Irritations
Your contribution will fund quality independent comment and analysis in Pearls and Irritations
Contribute
