Indonesian elections: the making of a dynasty and unmaking of democracy?

Indonesian politics are played hard. Corruption is a given, but a devious ploy to keep the president Jokowi wielding power has backfired with wholesale anger against a gross display of law-bending and nepotism. Duncan Graham reports.

In a move akin to Anthony Albanese endorsing Peter Dutton for the next election, outgoing President Jokowi is endorsing his son to be on his former rival Prabowo Subianto’s Presidential ticket for the upcoming election in February 2024. To do so required assent by the Constitutional Court, where Jokowi’s brother-in-law is one of five judges.

Last week, after two previous unsuccessful attempts, the Court made an unprecedented exception to a rule that said to run for President and Vice President, candidates had to be over 40 years old. Jokowi’s eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, is 36. The Australian-educated Gibran was formerly mayor of a small Central Java town, a position previously held by his father.

In one sly move, President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo, 62, has lost the backing of the moderate mainstream led by the Republic’s leading public intellectual, Goenawan Mohamad.

The writer, poet and campaigner against despots was not a friend, but an open supporter and organiser for Jokowi in the 2014 and 2019 elections.

Past endorsements by Goenawan, 82, have helped sustain the President’s Mr Clean image at home and overseas in a country rotten with graft. When first elected, he was seen as an ‘avatar of reform’.

Jokowi had no links to the military, political Islam, big business or regal families yet got to the top as a darling because he was a competent, humble, small-town man of the people. He’s been dazzlingly popular with big business and the wee folk. His approval ranking is above 80% according to a May 2023 poll by Tempo, an influential magazine that covers Indonesian politics and news.

Then, to widespread dismay, came a push to extend his constitutionally limited two terms in power. When this failed, he turned to family to remain as a dahlang – puppet master – which involved approving the nomination of his eldest son and petitioning the Constitutional Court to pave the way.

This was altogether too much for Goenawan and many more of Jokowi’s erstwhile supporters.

Nepotism at work

“Jokowi should have retired in dignity,” the veteran press freedom activist and founder-editor of Tempo magazine told Michael West Media. “He did much that was good; we have free healthcare, better infrastructure and much more. The country is safe, and the economy is growing.”

He once had my respect. No longer. I do not support politics being practised without values.

Prabowo Subianto, a former bitter rival to Jokowi in previous elections and head of the right-wing Gerindra (Great Indonesia Movement) party, is the third and final presidential hopeful who have declared their candidacy.

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Posters promoting Prabowo featuring Jokowi and Gibran are already on the streets, some confusingly captioned ‘Jokowi Party’.

In an open letter to the President and published this month, Goenawan wrote: ‘The sense of justice is violated, the agreed rules are betrayed … because the person we trusted turns out to be deceitful.

“In 2022, I said Jokowi was the best president in Indonesian history until now. But in 2023, I am reminded of the classic wisdom, that a leader who is admired and praised is a man who is tempted.”

Power and praise are evil for the person on the throne, and addictive.

Will Prabowo benefit?

Prabowo expected that recruiting Gibran would rocket him to the front. But Goenawan’s surprise attack on Jokowi and public dismay at the fall of their idol and what appears to be judicial activism could well shoot down Prabowo’s chances.

In Indonesian affairs, there’s rarely a separation of faith and politics. Candidates’ personalities, families and quirks carry more clout than policy.

The three main contestants are all male, Muslim, and from Java. They want to rule a nation of close to 278 million (of course half are women) from 1300 ethnic groups spread across the world’s largest archipelagic state of 6000 inhabited islands.

The campaign is revving hard and the people next door are being chased down with promises of El Dorado and sometimes hard cash for their 14 February 2024 vote. The world’s largest single-day election for 20,000 national and local parliament seats is held once every five years.

Voting isn’t compulsory but in 2019, the turnout of 83 percent from 191 million registered voters suggests Indonesians like democracy (or a mid-week holiday), though the toll was awful; 456 election officers, 91 supervisory agents and 22 police officers died, mainly from stress and exhaustion. Seven million worked on the poll.

Australian interest

The election outcome will be critical for Australian trade and regional security, maybe even tourism, if a fundamentalist candidate wins and diplomatic relations are threatened by xenophobic politicians.

Indonesian politics don’t follow the Westminster model of government and opposition. Switches are rarely made on matters of principle. Minor parties get seduced into coalition with promises of access to ministries and the chance to reward donors, so opposition withers.

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Prabowo, human rights and democracy

Although Indonesia became a republic in 1945, Javanese oligarchs flaunt their connections to the Sultanates of colonial days. Prabowo adds aristocracy to his credentials for office.

Deleted from the CV are these facts: he was kicked out of the military in 1998 for disobeying orders and fled to exile in Jordan. For several years, his human rights record had him banned entry to the US where he’d studied the arts of killing at Fort Benning.

He was also booted from his 15-year marriage to Soeharto’s daughter Siti Hediati Hariyadi. Their only son Didit Hediprasetyo is a fashion designer in Germany and is widely whispered to be gay.

So what? Only that last year his homeland legislators made adult consensual same-sex conduct illegal, bucking the international trend.

Now 72, Prabowo seems nothing like a general, apart from the strut and arrogance. He’s plump and short and it shows when standing close to his slim, young recruit.

Hung with the albatrosses of disgrace, divorce, and ‘deviancy’ could have made Prabowo politically impotent. The shame of losing by ten percentage points to Jokowi in the 2019 contest was then followed by Trump-like tantrums with accusations, appeals, and riots. Eight people died and more than 600 were injured.

Then Jokowi made him Minister for Defence, following the Lyndon Johnson dictum that it’s “better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.” That gave Prabowo a platform and an equal chance, say pollsters. He’s a US dollar multi-billionaire backed by a tame media, keen to protect the nation from multiple imagined threats.

These include the claim that Australia plans to Balkanise the ‘Unity State’ to plunder its mineral riches, and treating a US sci-fi fantasy about a 2030 apocalypse as a fact.

As is always the case, the slur-throwers care only that some lies will stick to the blanket of indifference and confusion.

Prabowo changes his colours like the Pacific tree frog. One commentator put it succinctly: “He appeared as a patriotic soldier in his 2004 bid for the vice presidency (representing yet another party) … then as a rabble-rousing nationalist in the 2014 presidential race, before polarising the public as an aggrieved Islamist in 2019.”

Now he’s hunting the youth vote through social media and having Jokowi’s son as a subaltern.

Ganjar Pranowo

His main opponent is Ganjar Pranowo, 54. Logically (by Western standards) the former Central Java Provincial Governor should succeed Jokowi as both are in the mildly left populist Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) which has a majority (128 of 575) seats in the Legislative Assembly.

Their party boss is Megawati, daughter of founding president Soekarno.

Earlier this year she ordered Ganjar to reject Israel’s national team in the Under-20 World Cup football (soccer) tournament. Hosting rights were then lost to Argentina. Millions were angered by their sport being kicked by politicians. Seventeen to 39-year-olds make up half the voters.

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Anies Baswedan

Logically this cohort should back the thirds candidate, former Jakarta Governor Dr Anies Baswedan, who also appears to be the most acceptable candidate for Australia. He often visits so knows our views and values.

He’s running behind largely because he hasn’t been blessed by Jokowi. The two men fell out when the reformist and ambitious Anies was Minister for Education and seen as a threat.

The US-educated former rector of a liberal university has Arab ancestry, so pulls the Islamic vote. Indonesia is a secular state, but has the world’s largest population of Muslims.

Ganjar is deft at handling controversy. In a 2019 podcast, he admitted to watching porn, risky in an uptight nation that bans porn-sites in a clumsy and heavy-handed way that sometimes ensnares overseas web-sites without even the hint of naked butts.

He told an interviewer: “If I watch porn, what is wrong with that? I like it. I am an adult. I have a wife,” Ganjar played the story for laughs, suggesting it was a publicity stunt to tickle the lads.

The real sleazes are the power-crazed contenders raping democracy.

From now to Valentine’s Day there’ll be much hate and little love on the hustings.