Indonesia elects a successor to President Joko Widodo. The favorite in the race is a man who is accused of serious human rights violations.
The general dances. On Instagram, TikTok, wherever he can reach young voters. Prabowo Subianto shakes a little stiffly to the beat, but for a 72-year-old, Indonesia's defense minister doesn't cut a bad figure. There are videos of the dancing minister that have been viewed more than 50 million times. The “Happy Dance” is Prabowo's trademark and is intended to pave the way for him to the presidential palace in Indonesia's capital Jakarta. And things are looking good for the general: Next Wednesday, around 205 million of the almost 280 million people in Muslim-majority Indonesia will be called to vote on a successor to President Joko Widodo, and all polls see Prabowo in the lead.
But the minister's dance videos are misleading. Critics see Prabowo Subianto as a “threat to democracy”. At least that's how Edbert Gani Suryahudaya, who researches the politics of the Southeast Asian country at the Indonesian Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), puts it. If Prabowo becomes president, freedom of speech and expression would be at risk, warns Gani. The human rights organization Human Rights Watch speaks of the “greatest pressure” that the young Indonesian democracy has been exposed to since the end of the dictatorship in 1998.
Indonesia: from brutal soldier to “cute grandfather”
Because Prabowo was not always the “cute grandfather” that he so successfully presented himself as on social media and in his election campaign appearances. As a soldier in an elite unit of the Indonesian military, he is said to have been involved in human rights violations in the then East Timor province in the 1980s; hundreds of people died under circumstances that are still not entirely clear. At the time, Indonesia was ruled by dictator Suharto, whose daughter Prabowo was married to for 15 years. In the late 1990s, as Suharto's dictatorship collapsed, Prabowo ordered the kidnapping of 20 democracy activists, 13 of whom remain missing to this day. In an interview with Al Jazeera television, Prabowo justified the kidnappings 10 years ago as “legal” but denied being involved in the activists' disappearances.
Political scientist Gani explains that someone like that now has the best chance of becoming Indonesia's president primarily because of the country's demographic structure – 55 percent of those eligible to vote are between 17 and 43 years old. “These people have no memory of Indonesia under Suharto,” says Gani. In addition, Prabowo successfully managed to give himself a new image. “People no longer see him as an army general, but as a man of the people.”
Prabowo achieved this by relying even more on social media than his competitors. Even Prabowo’s cat “Bobby” has tens of thousands of followers on Instagram. It is estimated that 167 million people in Indonesia are active on social media, including 125 million on TikTok alone. The general also apparently learned from his first two unsuccessful attempts to become president: instead of being the strong man who made nationalistic speeches and campaigned on horsebackhe now plays the likeable grandpa.
Indonesia's current President Widodo supports favorites for presidential election
Political scientist Gani names another factor for Prabowo's success: the support of current President Joko Widodo. “Jokowi”, as his supporters call him, is extremely popular; last December, according to a survey, the approval rating for the president was 76 percent – a value that could be attributed to Olaf Scholz or a Joe Biden can only dream. Under Widodo, who was elected to office in 2014 and is now not allowed to run again after two terms in office, the island state's economy grew by around five percent annually (interrupted only by the years of the corona pandemic), and he also invested a lot of money in gigantic infrastructure projects . Last year he put the country's first high-speed line into operation on the main island of Java, and in April Nusantara, Indonesia's future capital, which is currently being built on the island of Borneo at a cost of an estimated $35 billion, is scheduled to be inaugurated. Prabowo has announced that he will continue Widodo's prestige projects.
Prabowo secured the support of Widodo (to whom he lost two presidential elections in 2014 and 2019 before he finally made him his defense minister) with a clever move: he appointed Widodo's eldest son Gibran Rakabuming Raka as his candidate for vice president. So that the 36-year-old Gibran, who is actually too young for the office, could take office, the country's highest court changed the constitution – chaired by Widodo's brother-in-law. Critics fear that Widodo wants to exert influence on Indonesian politics through his son even after the end of his second and final term in office.
Indonesia faces a poss
ible runoff election
In addition to Prabowo, two other candidates are running for the office of Indonesian president: Ganjar Pranowo from the country's largest party and the independent candidate Anies Baswedan. In terms of content, there is not much that separates all three: they want to fight poverty in the country, take action against corruption, expand renewable energies and turning Indonesia, which is rich in raw materials, into a center for battery production for electric cars. For many voters, however, something else is crucial anyway: not the content, but the person.
Ganjar Pranowo and Anies Baswedan are also campaigning massively for votes on social media, but with significantly less success than Prabowo. A survey from the end of December puts Prabowo at 46.7 percent, while his two challengers have 24.5 and 21 percent respectively. If none of the three gets at least 50 percent of the vote, the top two will compete against each other in June. At that point at the latest, Prabowo Subianto, the dancing general with the dark past, is likely to become Indonesia's next president.
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