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Ben Bland

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.

Ben BlandSouth East Asia expert

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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.

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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.

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    Original URL: https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/prabowo-the-continuity-candidate-will-be-far-from-a-proxy-president-20240212-p5f456