Sure A Not

JAKARTA – President Prabowo Subianto? It has a ring to it these days and the sound is only getting louder as the defense minister and Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra) chairman maintains his lead in the polls seven months out from next year’s February 14 presidential election.

For most analysts, that’s because rival Indonesian Democrat Party for Struggle (PDI-P) candidate Ganjar Pranowo is struggling to gain traction in the shadow of overbearing matriarch Megawati Sukarnoputri and a family legacy she is determined to protect and preserve.

Aides say it is Megawati who will decide the Central Java governor’s running mate while acknowledging Pranowo might be consulted. It is rumored she will also select his Cabinet. Certainly, she promises to be omnipresent in any Pranowo administration. 

Many of Indonesia’s 192.8 million voters may already be asking themselves whether they will be getting Pranowo or Megawati, judging by the way he shelters behind the façade he has built around himself as a social media star.

So far, at least, he has failed to assert himself as a leader in his own right. Still bowing to authority figures and with little of substance to show for his decade-long governorship, he has only said he is committed to following in President Joko Widodo’s policy footsteps.

Shining isn’t encouraged in PDI-P with Megawati and her daughter, Parliament Speaker Puan Maharani, at the helm. One legislator who quit the party says she couldn’t do the job she was elected to do because she had to stay below the radar.  

Prabowo, for his part, is sitting back and enjoying the ride, happy in his role as defense minister and seemingly comfortable in the knowledge that if the hugely popular Widodo is not openly supporting him, he is not opposing him either, despite being a nominal PDI-P member. 

Several groups of volunteers who played a key role in Widodo’s two election victories are openly backing Prabowo. Among them is a group led by Gibran Rukabuming, 35, the president’s eldest son and the mayor of Solo in Central Java.

All this explains why the Golkar and National Mandate (PAN) parties are gravitating toward Gerindra and its coalition partner, the National Awakening Party (PKB), leaving PDI-P with only the tiny United Development Party (PPP) for company.

With PDI-P holding 128 seats in the House of Representatives, it doesn’t require a partner to clear the 20% threshold needed to nominate a presidential candidate. But that may be cold comfort.

A recent survey by Kompas, Indonesia’s leading newspaper, had Prabowo at 24.5%, ahead of Pranowo on 22.8% and opposition candidate Anies Baswedan adrift on 13.6% and struggling to make headway in what is firming as a three-horse race.

A subsequent survey by Indikator Politik, considered one of the country’s more reliable pollsters, also had Prabowo in the lead at 38%, with Pranowo on 34% and Baswedan on 19% – another indication of the minister’s staying power.

If Pranowo does lose to Prabowo, analysts foresee a rising tide of resistance to Megawati’s leadership from the ruling party’s younger cadre, giving Widodo a possible opening to a job that would extend his influence long after he steps down in October next year. 

Megawati’s recent effort to mend fences with former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his Democrat Party – a surprise move she notably left to her underlings to manage – showed she is already looking beyond the first round of voting.

Supporters of Baswedan’s coalition, comprising the Democrats, the Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS) and the National Democrat Party (Nasdem), would likely become a factor in a second-round showdown between Prabowo and Pranowo.

It is generally accepted that the Islamic conservatives who support PKS and represent a consistent 12-13% of the Indonesian electorate – grouped mostly in heavily populated West Java – will never vote for PDI-P, sitting as it is on the opposite side of the political spectrum.

Historians looking back on this period will marvel at how the influence of Megawati’s father, founding president Sukarno – and five words in the preamble to the 1945 Constitution –  may have been a turning point in the race.

That singular phrase, “all colonialism must be abolished,” served to justify Megawati’s opposition to Israel participating in last May’s FIFA Under-20 football tournament and the association’s subsequent action in canceling the event.

A former Dutch colony which won its independence following World War II, Indonesia’s foreign policy is dominated by one single, unsolvable issue – ending Israel’s occupation of Palestine. This is the first time it has been applied to sport, however.

“This is not an Islamic issue, it is a nationalist issue,” says one foreign policy expert, explaining why Indonesia’s Muslim majority did not join the move to exclude Israel. In fact, they have said very little.

Neither did Prabowo, adhering to his strategy of staying away from controversy. Even his one real lapse, a strangely conceived plan to end the Russia-Ukraine war on Moscow’s terms, did nothing to dent his popularity at home.

More than disappointing millions of football-mad Indonesians, Pranowo’s outspoken support for PDI-P’s stand – at Megawati’s clear behest – painted him as a timorous functionary who will unquestioningly do her bidding.

That stands in strong contrast to Widodo. He has consistently refused to accept a situation where, as a two-term president, he is expected to be subservient to a self-entitled party leader who has never won an election.

When Prabowo declared his candidacy last year, analysts thought his age – now 71 – and two previous losses to Widodo in 2014 and 2019 would be major drawbacks against a charismatic 54-year-old rival who represents a generational break with the past.

Instead, Prabowo has prospered, mostly due to PDI-P’s strategic miscalculations, which have dispelled all lingering talk of Prabowo signing on as Pranowo’s vice-presidential candidate in what would be an unbeatable ticket.

Indeed, the fact that Megawati was compelled to nominate Pranowo before she was ready, clearly to limit the fallout from the football fracas, reveals just how out of touch she is with public opinion.

It also shows where her priorities lie: maintaining her iron grip on PDI-P and keeping alive the name of her father, who died 53 years ago before two-thirds of Indonesia’s population was born.

While Prabowo acts cautiously, he has said enough to suggest he believes Indonesia needs another round of political reform after a decade of democratic neglect at the hands of the Jakarta elite. 

In one interview he noted “the cost of doing politics is too expensive and is incentivizing corruption,” asserting that “our political system isn’t making Indonesia a great, advanced and prosperous country, but could ruin it.”

He went on to call for political parties, social organizations and religious leaders to join together to fix the system, using a similar body to that formed in the dying days of Japan’s wartime occupation to prepare Indonesia for independence.

Pranowo isn’t alone in promising to continue what Widodo has started, including his controversial US$33 billion plan to move the national capital from Jakarta to East Kalimantan, a project that has barely broken ground.

Prabowo’s brother, businessman Hashim Djojohadikusumo, recently pledged to follow “99.99%” of Widodo’s programs, the strongest commitment the Prabowo camp has made so far to secure the president’s endorsement.

On the surface at least, today’s Prabowo is a very different version from the bellicose general accused of human rights abuses during the reign of Suharto, his then father-in-law, and his alleged attempt to take power when Suharto resigned in 1998.   

His weaknesses often shine through, however. Friends say he still allows his explosive temper to get the better of him in private and the off-the-cuff speech he made at the Shangri-La Dialogue underscores a penchant for doing his own thing.

Insiders say Prabowo did have a prepared speech he had worked on with a team of advisers, addressing the issues of Myanmar and the South China Sea, that had been cleared with the Foreign Ministry beforehand.

Instead, he scrapped it at the last minute and wrote his own 18-minute speech, widely seen as an effort to raise his domestic stature as an international statesman, rather than any serious proposal to end a conflict on the other side of the world.

Baswedan has also been calling for a political transformation, naming his team as the Coalition of Change. But that worries Indonesians still suspicious of the former education minister’s ties to the Sharia-based PKS, even if it has lately taken a more centrist stance.  

Analysts point to a recent op-ed in Kompas that set out the opposition’s mission statement by rejecting “blind obedience” toward any national leader and advocating for a strengthening of democracy and policies promoting economic equality.

These goals are perceived to be implicit criticisms of Widodo, who critics complain has presided over years of democratic decline while pursuing a single-minded search for foreign investment and building infrastructure projects that arguably have done little to help the poor.

Certainly, it belies the fact that Widodo remains Indonesia’s most popular-ever president, winning an extraordinary 82% approval rating in the latest survey carried out by the Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting (SMRC) last April.

Clearly, many voters don’t agree with Baswedan’s assessment and are prepared to support Widodo until the last day of his eventful presidency. That alone puts a value on his endorsement which may be difficult to measure but simply can’t be ignored ahead of next year’s presidential poll.

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