Prabowo Subianto was once one of the most feared men in all Indonesia and for a time was banned from entering the US.
Now he is on the cusp of becoming Indonesia’s president, in one of the great exercises in peaceful democratic electioneering in the world, and he’s doing so as the avuncular, Tik-Tok dancing, cuddly continuity candidate for the retiring reformist President Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi.
As of Wednesday night, the so-called quick counts (similar to exit polls) showed Prabowo capturing between 55 and 60 per cent of the vote.
A lot of senior Australians know Prabowo very well. He has been Indonesia’s Defence Minister for the past four years and, with Australia’s Richard Marles, has overseen a growing range and tempo of defence co-operation with Canberra.
Twenty-five years ago, Prabowo was one of the most powerful military figures in Indonesia. He commanded the country’s famous special forces. Kopassus, then later the army’s powerful strategic reserve, Kostrad.
He has always denied wrongdoing but was accused of kidnapping student protesters at the end of the Suharto dictatorship, and before that of human rights abuses in East Timor and elsewhere. There is also a famous story, which Prabowo has always denied, of a fiery confrontation he had with president BJ Habibie, when Habibie succeeded Suharto as president, in which a gun-toting Prabowo allegedly demanded to be made armed forces chief.
In 2014 and 2019 Prabowo ran against Jokowi for the presidency and lost. In those days he said a lot of worrying things: that Indonesia’s democracy was not working, that the country should revert to its original 1945 constitution, which lacked human rights protections and gave enormous power to the president.
In 2019 Prabowo claimed, Trump-like, the election was stolen. Bloody demonstrations ensued. Though formally a broadly secular nationalist in the tradition of the Indonesian military, he placed himself at the head of an Islamist protest movement, denouncing foreign influence.
But the man who beat him, Jokowi, apparently understood Prabowo’s mercurial personality pretty well. Instead of trying to crush Prabowo, Jokowi offered him the defence portfolio. Prabowo abandoned the Islamists, abandoned his old truculence, and joined forces with Jokowi’s modernising project. Prabowo completely remade his public image.
With a small group, I had dinner with Prabowo a few years ago in Jakarta and found him entertaining, cosmopolitan, willing to say every reassuring thing an Australian might like to hear, from Islamic moderation to the stress on economic development. Yet there were unmistakeable traces of the old Prabowo, especially in the tones in which he dealt with senior aides and in some of his jokes.
Jokowi as President represented generational change, the first Indonesian leader not involved in Suharto’s New Order politics.
Prabowo is a decade older than Jokowi and is most assuredly a central New Order figure. But he didn’t run as a New Order restorationist. Instead, these days he speaks as a big coalition man, seeking and seducing allies, and promises a stress on infrastructure, economic development, poverty reduction and a non-confrontational foreign policy.
These past few years, we’ve seen a kinder, gentler Prabowo, Prabowo on his best behaviour. The question is: does the old Prabowo lurk just beneath the surface, likely to re-emerge once he consolidates presidential power?
Maybe not. Jokowi has shown you can do Indonesian politics very effectively by less confrontational methods. Jokowi’s son, Gibran, was Prabowo’s running mate. So Jokowi may continue to have political power even after he has left office. The possibility of conflict between Prabowo and Jokowi’s family must be real.
Less than 30 years from dictatorship, and one of the most diverse of nations sprawling across an archipelago of 5000 islands, Indonesia could have gone much worse. Economic growth of 5 per cent a year under Jokowi has also been solid. But the story has its downside too. It needs growth like China once had, and India has had, of 7 or 8 per cent, to really cut poverty. But it’s infinitely better than it might have been. Now there’s an old broom to sweep in another new order (lower case this time), in a development of the highest importance for Australia.
More Coverage
Hole that gives Japan that sinking feeling
For a week, Japan has been engrossed by the strenuous, desperate and so far unsuccessful effort to save a man who disappeared into a sinkhole.
Neighbours in dispute: Canadians grapple with sense of betrayal
One of the world’s most durable and amicable alliances – born of geography, heritage and centuries of common interests – is broken.