And while it’s just one poll 10 months before the vote and conducted in the aftermath of PDI-P’s disastrous intervention in the U-20 FIFA football event in Bali, the trend has alarmed activists and progressives. A refusal to investigate or even revisit serious and credible allegations of human rights abuses is a feature of the political elite across Southeast Asia.
This has continued in Indonesia under the Joko Widodo, or Jokowi as he is commonly known as, presidency despite hopes in 2014 that his election win would bring answers, if not cases against perpetrators, for the families of victims of alleged state-backed violence.
APPARENT ABSOLUTION FROM PRESIDENT JOKOWI
Indeed, those unanswered allegations were a major aspect of the Jokowi campaign against Prabowo in both 2014 and 2019. That the president tapped his former challenger to join the Cabinet as defence minister shortly after winning his second term underscored criticism that Jokowi had abandoned many of his pre-2014 progressive promises and that the PDI-P had feigned concerns about human rights abuses.
Jokowi spent much of the first half of this year championing Prabowo’s 2024 candidacy with high-profile visits and social media posts. Whether that was to back his minister or to pressure PDI-P boss Megawati Sukarnoputri to name Ganjar is still debated.
PDI-P is still suffering from its bumbling youth football catastrophe, undermining faith in the party’s ability to read the will of the country, and with few other candidates and an apparent absolution from Jokowi, Prabowo has good reason to be feeling confident.
Erin Cook is a journalist covering Southeast Asia politics and curates the weekly Dari Mulut ke Mulut newsletter. This commentary first appeared on Lowy Institute’s blog, The Interpreter.