After last week’s eventful elections in Pakistan, another giant of the Muslim world, Indonesia, goes to the polls today. It is the most complex electoral logistics of all that are resolved in a single day, in a country with 280 million inhabitants spread over more than seven thousand islands. Some of these islands, such as Sumatra, with impossible orography and more extensive than all of Japan. In order to take the ballots to the most remote places, in each call more than five hundred civil servants, called “martyrs of democracy”, lose their lives.
This year Indonesians face a paradoxical decision. The ex-general who, in 2014 and 2019, took part in a bitter fight with Joko Widodo, and who in both cases refused to accept his defeat, is running again for the presidency in a candidacy in which he runs for vice-presidency on favorite son of Jokowi (as everyone knows him), Gibran Rakabuming Raka.
In fact, former general Prabowo Subianto was Jokowi’s Minister of Defense during the last legislature. For some, Jokowi’s decisions demonstrate a refined realism. For others, it shows that General Suharto’s New Order Indonesia – which buried Sukarno’s non-aligned Indonesia – is not yet dead, and Indonesian democracy is not finished.
But even his detractors recognize the country’s leap forward during his two non-extendable ten-year mandates. Jokowi’s recipe for trying to preserve his influence once removed from power is not entirely new. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte placed his daughter as vice president, in the candidacy that has returned the presidency in Manila to the Marcos clan, in the person of Ferdinand Marcos, son of the homonymous dictator.
For some, the pact with the reality of Jokowi’s Indonesia tastes like resignation. For others, someone outside the oligarchy had no other way to carry out their program and survive the loss of power. Already in the previous elections, Jokowi surprised by giving the position of vice president to the cleric who led the largest Islamic association in Indonesia and also in the world. Renaissance of the Ulemas, in any case, advocates for the tolerant and syncretic Islam of the archipelago. He thus blocked the way for the hard-line Islamists who, refugees in Saudi Arabia, characterized Jokowi as a crypto-Christian, who supported Prabowo, always tempted by the iron fist.
The probable presidency of Prabowo, even in his septuagenarian, gives human rights organizations goosebumps. His military career, promoted by his influential family, accelerated after he married the daughter of the dictator Suharto. He was the head of the special operations division, armed arm of political repression in East Timor and West Papua.
But what forced his replacement were student strikes, many of whom were tortured and killed. Thirteen of them disappeared forever, but the ex-general only recognizes their arrests, without further explanation. His inaction, in the most pious explanation, banned his entry into the US for many years.
However, today’s students, who were not even born then, laugh thanks to the former general, who has sweetened his image on the networks and has transformed into a funny grandfather. If Facebook was decisive in giving victory to Marcos in the Philippines, TikTok could give it in Indonesia to Prabowo and Jokowi’s even more meme-savvy son.
Jokowi, known as the Obama of Asia, came to overcome the oligarchy, but now he sees how he is accused of nepotism. Not surprisingly, his son was five years away from turning 40, the mandatory age in Indonesia to run for president or vice president. The obstacle was removed when his brother-in-law, whom he had promoted as president of the Constitutional Court, sponsored the doctrine that having held a public office – Gibran is mayor of Surakarta – exempted him from this requirement.
For the first time in fifteen years, the election is not a showdown between two, but there are three candidates in contention, although they barely exceed 20% of voting intention. The doubt is whether Prabowo will get more than 50% of the votes and finally become president in the first or if he will need a second round in a few months.
One of the candidates, Ganjar Pranowo, former governor of Central Java, paradoxically, is part of the same party as Widodo, whose president is the former head of government, Megawati Sukarnoputri. Both this candidate and Sukarno’s daughter are considered betrayed by Jokowi, despite the fact that he does not publicly support his son, although he does not need to either. On the other hand, Sukarnoputri has also given no sign that his party should stop being a family feud, pseudo-dynastic, like in so many other Asian countries.
The other candidate, who represents Islamic conservatism, Anies Baswedan, is increasing his vote intention. He is a former governor of Jakarta, with a teaching profile.
In any case, the holding of elections in Indonesia, in a stable framework – with the exception of West Papua – represents hope in this part of the world.
