As Indonesians put together to solid their ballots for a brand new president on February 14, the query shouldn’t be whether or not Protection Minister Prabowo Sabianto will win, however how.
Prabowo and his working mate, President Joko Widodo’s (Jokowi) eldest son Gebran Rakaboming Raka, want greater than 50 % of the vote to keep away from a late-June runoff with the second-placed candidate. Polls put them simply above this threshold, or very near it.
Jokowi hopes to increase his household’s foothold within the system by supporting the Indonesian Solidarity Get together (PSI), which is in search of to enter parliament for the primary time below the management of his second son, Kasang Pangrip. PSI’s tv ads function an image of Kisang alongside his father, with the slogan ‘PSI is Jokowi’s occasion’.
This isn’t information to the Indonesian Democratic Get together of Wrestle (PDI-P), which till now counts Jokowi as a member. However a breakdown in president-party relations in 2023 prompted Jokowi to shift his help to Prabowo, appointing Gibran as his working mate. The PDI-P candidate, former Central Java governor Gunjar Pranu, has seen his help erode over the course of the three-month marketing campaign as Jokowi’s pro-Jokowi base has adopted his president’s lead and moved from him to Prebo.
The irony is that Jokowi’s betrayal of the PDI-P in favor of Prabowo and his son’s candidacy has labored nearly too nicely for the president’s personal good. Ganjar has been relegated to second place by former Jakarta governor Inis Baswidan, a authorities critic who maintains ties to conservative Islamist opposition teams, and who’s now attracting help from progressives who name him Prabowo. Widodo is seen as the very best candidate to problem the alliance. However polls present Prabowo main head-to-head with Ines, and the PDI-P, regardless of its resentment of Jokowi, is prone to again Prabowo in a second time period in alternate for a profitable deal on illustration in Prabowo’s cupboard.
Jokowi, nonetheless, is understandably reluctant to see out the four-month runoff marketing campaign that may supply Enz a platform to dial down criticism of his coverage legacy and his authorities’s erosion of democratic rules. Jokowi’s efforts to make use of state forces to get rid of help for Prabowo have turn into a serious level of rivalry within the media. Each Ganjar’s and Innis’ campaigns have reported behind-the-scenes threats to voters, donors and marketing campaign staff by police and different officers.
A extra top-board mode of presidency favoritism is clear. Throughout the marketing campaign, Jokowi dedicated near US$1.3 billion in money transfers and meals support, justified as an emergency response to El Niño-related meals safety. Nobody sees it as something greater than a well timed effort to increase goodwill to the administration — and, by extension, to Prabowo and Gibran.
Jokowi needs to attenuate the danger of an unexpectedly tight runoff to zero, however a gap for Prabowo shouldn’t be with out downsides if Prabowo enters workplace strongly with an electoral mandate behind him. No non-incumbent president has ever received a multiparty contest since direct presidential elections started in 2004.
There’s a sturdy probability for Prabowo to not solely rating an unprecedented first-round victory, however that his private car occasion, Garindra, might beat the PDI-P for first place within the legislative elections, too – in to assert strategic speakership by way of customized. Parliament, if every thing goes nicely on election day, Prabhu might turn into probably the most empowered subsequent president within the democratic period.
For Jokowi, such a landslide would solely hasten the purpose at which Prabowo would now not owe him something. One son within the vice presidency and the opposite as head of a small parliamentary group will supply Jokowi solely restricted choices to push again any efforts by Prabowo to sideline Widodo in asserting his authority over the political elite. .
Uncertainty stays on the ends of which may then be positioned. Prabowo’s 2024 marketing campaign has promised to proceed with the Jokowi period. His tv advertisements and marketing campaign speeches function Gibran, itemizing the most well-liked social packages that the Jokowi administration has created and promising to proceed and develop them. .
But Prabowo’s political profession has been marked by adjustments in his political persona and alliances to serve his presidential ambitions. In 1997-98 he made a bitter look for former President Suharto’s founding dictatorship, constructing ties with an rising Islamist civil society to succeed his then-father-in-law. Within the submit –enchancment Throughout this era he reinvented himself as a Sukarnoist ultranationalist, then got here throughout as a good friend of political Islam in his two failed presidential campaigns in opposition to Jokowi.
Greater than 20 years of trial and error have now led Prabowo to emulate Jokowi’s secular, technocratic populism, with very profitable outcomes. However nobody — together with Jokowi — can assume that this determine will maintain agency if, or when, he has the powers of a domineering presidency Jokowi has constructed at his fingertips, with the added bonus of a powerful electoral mandate. Helped him earn.
Prabowo has lately been boasting about how a lot he realized from Jokowi when he served as his protection minister from 2019 – and because the PDI-P is aware of all too nicely, none aside from Jokowi. There isn’t any higher trainer of the artwork of the double cross.
Liam Gammon is a analysis fellow on the East Asian Bureau of Financial Analysis, and a member of the East Asia Discussion board Editorial Board.