Prabowo the continuity candidate will be far from a proxy president
Prabowo Subianto has finally breezed into power in his predecessor’s slipstream. But he will push through his own agenda with an unpredictable style as Indonesian president.
When I had lunch with Prabowo Subianto in 2013, a year before his first attempt to be elected president of Indonesia, he was still honing his fiery nationalist pitch, promising to shake up the country and prevent it becoming a failed state.
Eleven years later, the 72-year-old former general finally seems to have secured the presidency by reinventing himself as a continuity candidate, forming an unlikely alliance with the popular outgoing President Joko Widodo.
Loading...
Ben Bland is the Director of the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House and the author of Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and Struggle to Remake Indonesia.
