Unsurprisingly, Indonesians have chosen 72-year-old Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto as their new president. By topping the 50% threshold – according to the latest results, he won 58% of the vote – the former general achieved a clear and decisive victory in the first round. Some 204 million Indonesians turned out to vote. His closest rival, Anies Baswedan, came in at around 25%.
On Wednesday, February 14, the small polling station on Jaksa Street in central Jakarta was the scene of a nearly archaic voting process: three polling booths and four ballot boxes – the ballot included presidential, parliamentary, senatorial and local elections – were arranged under a canopy on a muddy vacant lot where ducks were quacking. A sonorous "Allahu akbar" from the nearby mosque filled the air. Purbanto, a slender technician in his fifties, hastened to tell us that he had voted for the number two ticket, Prabowo and Gibran Rakabuning Raka, son of the current head of state. Why? "I like him." Besides, "he is aligned with Jokowi'" – the nickname of the outgoing president.
Initially, there was nothing obvious about this alliance. In the 2014 and 2019 elections, Prabowo was Widodo's only opponent. A sore loser, he claimed "massive cheating" against him and drove his supporters into the streets. Coming from the New Order era under Suharto's dictatorship (1965-1998), where he perpetrated certain dirty deeds as commander of the special forces, he represented to many the man who had to be brought down.
By inviting him to join his government as defense minister at the start of his second term in 2019, the president has not only neutralized him but also made him his successor utilizing a cobbled-together pact involving the appointment of his son, Gibran Rakabuning Raka, 36, as vice-president. All this included turning his back on his own party, the PDI-P, the largest group in Parliament. Jokowi had governed at the head of a broad coalition that had swallowed up the opposition.
"Indonesians say they don't want dynasties. But they vote for dynasties!" Disheartened by the Prabowo tidal wave, this was the response of Usman Hamid, director of Amnesty International in Indonesia, on a panel organized by the daily Jakarta Post on the evening of the results. Seen in this way, Prabowo's victory would be a proxy win for his former rival Jokowi, who unsuccessfully attempted to obtain a third mandate, beyond the constitutional limit, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Widodo has remained an ordinary man in the eyes of many Indonesians. A former furniture manufacturer who rose to become the governor of Jakarta, he doesn't come from established power circles such as the New Order, prominent oligarch families or the pro-democracy circles that brought down the dictatorship.
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