February 26, 2024 • 58 mins
Jacqui Baker (@indobaker) of Murdoch University joins host Arif Rafiq to discuss Prabowo Subianto’s victory in Indonesia’s presidential elections, the legacy and political future of the popular outgoing president Joko Widodo, and the durability of the economic and political status quo in this rising Southeast Asian power.
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After Joko Widodo: What a Prabowo Presidency Means for Indonesia
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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You're listening to The Pivot brought to you by Globely News where we discuss the leaders,
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states, networks, ideologies and technologies that are reshaping the world order.
Visit our website at globely.news.
That's globe ly dot news.
Hi everyone, welcome to The Pivot.
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My name is Arif Rafiq and I'm your host.
On February 14, nearly 170 million Indonesians went to the polls to choose their next president.
The final vote count is not yet in, but the preliminary results show a clear winner.
Prabowo Subianto.
Prabowo, as he's known, will be the next president of this rising Southeast Asian country,
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an archipelago that stretches thousands of miles wide and is home to more than 270 million
people.
A former general with a troubling past, Prabowo has launched numerous failed bids for higher
office since 2009.
And this time around he's finally proved to be successful.
Using TikTok, this general who is once barred from the US for allegedly ordering the killing
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of pro-democracy protesters has rebranded himself as a cuddly grandpa who continued the policies
of his former rival, the popular outgoing president Joko Widodo.
Jokowi, as he's known, is barred by term limits for running for a third term, but he gave Prabowo
a tacit endorsement when one of his sons joined the ex-general as his running mate.
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Now these elections mark the end of Jokowi's formal rule over Indonesia, but there are indications
that he's now transitioning to another role in Indonesia's oligarchic, dynastic political
system, that of kingmaker.
Jokowi's transformation from a middle-class furniture maker to an unlikely president and
finally to one of Indonesia's many dynastic leaders raises questions over the health of
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this flawed and messy democracy, and who will wield power in this emerging Southeast Asian
economic giant?
To unpack all this, we're joined by Dr. Jacqui Baker, a lecturer at Australia's Murdoch
University and a long-time researcher on Indonesia's politics.
Dr. Baker, thanks for joining us.
It's an absolute pleasure, Arif.
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So with 77% of the results in at the time of our recording, Prabowo Subianto to his secured
59% of the vote, all but confirming that he'll be Indonesia's next president.
Now Prabowo has been seeking the presidency since 2004, and he's been part of three failed
presidential tickets since 2009.
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What was behind his success this time around?
Well, clearly it's the Jokowi factor, right?
So Jokowi president Jokowi Widodo was looking for a successor to shore up his legacy and found
that his own political party, with whom he had long-had, fractious relationships, that
party is known as the party of democratic struggle.
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And it's a dynastic party whose roots trace back to Sukarno and the period of Indonesia's
independence.
So it's a party of great entitlement and privilege and sees itself as the vanguard of democracy
whilst not acting very democratic.
And it's a head, Megawati Sukano Putri, daughter of Sukarno, she always made it clear that
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Jokowi was only ever in power because of her, she bestowed that upon her, him, and that
he was nothing but a mere member of the party and that he added really, very little to the
party's agenda.
And so he was just a figurehead of a president for the exercise of her power and her party's
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power.
And I think two terms of that kind of disparagement ultimately saw Jokui Dodo seek another air outside
of his nominated party.
This is what led him into the arms of Prabowo Subianto.
Now of course they had had a kind of reconciliation after the 2019 election wherein Prabowo Subianto
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joined the Jokowi cabinet.
So you think of two sort of enemies having these horrible bruising elections.
They seemed like an enemy, you know, a split of all of the ages within Indonesian democratic
politics.
And then suddenly Prabowo turns around and flips and enters the Jokowi Widodo cabinet as Minister
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of Defence.
This is a classic tactic from the president.
He likes to pacify by bringing people on board to his agenda by sharing out the spoils
of power.
So Jokowi Widodo and Prabowo Subianto had some kind of reconciliation starting 2019.
So when it came to 2022, 2023 and Jokowi Widodo was scouting around for an air, having exhausted
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all other possible alternatives for extending his own presidency, including mulling a very
illegal third term.
He found himself in the arms of Prabowo Subianto who had pitched that he would run with Jokowi
Widodo's own son, Gibran Raka Raka Bumin.
And I think the temptation of that plus the kind of push factors of his own party's
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truculance led him to make an alliance with Prabowo.
Prabowo's own massive success in winning this election comes in large part because Jokui
Widodo was able to give him the sort of blessings of a highly favored president whose own popularity
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ratings were up in the 80% or something, giving the president a kind of cache of voters who
were looking for his endorsement.
And Prabowo Subianto won that endorsement.
Right.
So we have a mix of factors that explain Prabowo's victory.
You've talked about the Jokowi Widodo factor and will unpack that a bit more later.
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But there's also an element of rebranding of Prabowo.
He has a military background, has been implicated in crimes against civilians in terms of targeting
democratic protesters, minorities in regions like East Timor, but he's rebranded himself as
more of affable grandfatherly figure.
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And what I found interesting was that according to exit polls, there's one exit poll by
Compos and Indonesian newspaper.
Prabowo won nearly 66% of the Gen Z vote.
And this is an older man with a pretty horrible human rights record and he performed best
among younger voters.
And that belies the thinking about, you know, younger voters tend to be more idealistic
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and change oriented.
So what explains all this?
There's talk of TikTok playing a role in terms of the rebranding of Prabowo is the story
that, you know, there's just a bunch of kids who are tricked into voting for him using TikTok
or is there much more to this?
And you've kind of hinted at this with the Joko Widodo factor.
Well, certainly, you know, Prabowo Subianto was the prime candidate across all age categories.
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So he was winning across all, you know, the various categories of age amongst the voting cohort.
However, as the cohort got older, so, you know, 50 to 60, 60 to 70, his margin of success
became lower and lower.
So it was a kind of absolute inverse with Gen Z, where he was the absolute highest.
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And as you said, 67%, some people put that up in the previous polls prior to the election,
some people put that up to 70 plus percent that he sort, that he received favor from the Gen Z cohort.
I think, you know, is there something fairly wrong with the Gen Zs of Indonesia?
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I mean, no, I think that we still do see a very idealistic group of Gen Zs.
It's worth noting that Gen Zs across the campuses made an incredibly hard push throughout
the Joko Widodo presidency for democracy, arguing that Reformasi or the social democratic revolution
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that had happened in 1998, it was collapsing and then it had been betrayed.
So there were enormous efforts to stime the voices of Gen Z, who were largely arguably elite voices,
voices from the campuses, people who were able to study, which are still a very small percentage
of Gen Z.
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But Gen Zs still, you know, the backbone of, I guess, activist movements,
but those groups were crushed by the Joko Widodo administration and broken up.
And the universities were very complicit in silencing those voices.
Nonetheless, in the days before the election, again, the campuses erupted this time in partnership
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with the lecturers trying to push for an anti-Prabowo vote, sort of anyone but probole,
reminding people that democracy was a central win of the 1998 revolution
and that it deserved to be protected.
So I guess, you know, while Gen Z did certainly plump before this rebranded,
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cuddly uncle Prabowo, there are certainly elements of Gen Z that were incredibly hostile to his
re-election.
I mean, a lot of people put the large numbers of Gen Z voting for Prabowo to an absence of knowledge
about democracy.
I think that's probably a little glib.
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I think more likely is that you have very large numbers of Gen Z, who probably don't
see great prospects, who are undereducated, who don't see where they fit into the wider economy.
And in that context of a large floating unemployed, low-skilled cohort of individuals,
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you know, strongmen can really appeal, especially strongmen who have been endorsed by a president
that they largely see as having driven a very successful economic development of Indonesia.
So I guess it's a mixed picture.
And the short-hand answer is that a lot of people, probably, a lot of young people probably
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didn't care, or a lot of young people were more concerned about showing up their futures
and saw that future with a strong man like Prabowo Subianto.
Yeah, maybe I should be less dismissive of this Gen Z tiktok voter demographic.
Now, as you had said, Probole was to a large extent, riding the co-tales of Joko Widodo,
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and also a signaling continuity of his developmentalist agenda.
So one of Prabowo's signature programs, a free school lunch and milk program, which could
cost at least $7 billion or close to $8 billion in its first year, roughly two percent
of GDP, signals that for a large number of voters, especially the young, these kind of social
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welfare spending, along with ensuring jobs for new entrants into the labor market are pretty
important.
And do you feel that this points towards a kind of precarity or economic security among
Indonesia's middle and lower middle classes?
Because, you know, we hear a lot about rapid growth at top level, but this is also a very
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unequal society, and in terms of the spoils of this growth, it's not really distributed fairly.
So underlying all this is their economic insecurity that is a major political force, not just
in this election, but in Indonesian politics in general.
Absolutely.
I think that's what's underlying the current Joko Widodo government, and that will underlie
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the dynamics of future governments.
Is the fact that their Indonesia's economic growth is very poorly distributed.
In fact, some people argue that most of, you know, something 90% of Indonesia's wealth lies
in the hands of 1% of its population.
And that may be, that may have changed somewhat over the last few years, but there is nonetheless
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a very large group of Indonesians, somewhere up to 40%, who live with a constant feeling
of precarity.
So Indonesia has been, is the kind of success story of Southeast Asia in terms of its ability
to drive down poverty.
And Indonesia has almost eradicated, in fact, extreme poverty.
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But with that comes new political challenges and new political realities, which is that
you have brought on enormous numbers of people with you in your government on the promise
that they too can be middle class.
But often, you know, the nature of neoliberal economic growth means that you have to have a
level of flexibility within the workplace and deregulation within the workplace that
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makes those secure, stable, middle class jobs very, very difficult to achieve.
On top of the fact that there are also major issues with Indonesian education system, where
quality of education is quite low. It has been a system that has been focused on rolling
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out schools as opposed to providing quality education.
And that's also at the tertiary level.
So what you have are people of a kind of lower middle class or precarious middle class is
the word I like to use, investing in low quality education that doesn't actually translate into
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stable jobs for their young people, right, for their children.
And this is a point of absolute frustration and it's well recognised, I think, by parents.
And I think in politics, there's nothing so dangerous as a dashed aspiration, as a promise
of something better that never, never appears, you know?
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And I often see this precarious working class within Indonesia as feeling like they're
on the way to middle class, but never really getting there.
They're on a hamster wheel of precarious short term contract jobs.
And that's been amplified by the rise in services like Godzek, which is kind of a ride share
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program, ride share application and other types of low paid career work, which seems to
absorb a lot of Indonesia's working poor, particularly in the cities, for instance.
And so I think you've got very large heaving cities within Indonesia, with large levels,
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large numbers up to 40 to 50% of people who are watching the city grow around them, watching
the trappings of wealth amplify around them and are being shut out of that promise.
And they can feel it themselves as rents go up, as in at the cost of education goes up, as
they become more and more vulnerable to kind of scams being offered at the lower middle
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class and in the middle class, offering them, again, this will be the way to become rich.
And this will be the way to shore up your child's education and they don't really provide
or they tend to be very low quality services.
And so I think this is a real problem for many middle income countries who are, who have
promised their populations, a middle class, a developed world economy.
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And yet only some people are using the kind of the ideology of that economy and the method
and the strategies for developing that economy towards a developed economy.
That means that a lot of people's hopes are going to be dashed along the way.
It's worth remembering that a middle class, a safe middle, secure middle class is the backbone
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of democracy.
And often that's come about through labor rights and in Indonesia, labor rights are very,
very precarious and unions have a very mixed record in terms of delivering for workers.
Right.
And the COVID pandemic itself was a reminder to many in Indonesia, India and many other emerging
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markets or middle income countries of how precarious much of their populations are that
there are many people, millions, hundreds of millions of people who exist just above the poverty
line.
And all it takes is a pandemic or a sharp economic downturn for them to re-experience the
poverty that they had experienced in their lifetimes or maybe their ancestors had.
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And so for a lot of these countries, there is not just the potential for the middle income
trap, but also for the regression for some in the event of a deep-seated economic crisis.
And that's why we see politicians like Modi in India who've seen a center right economically
actually deploy social welfare spending as a big part of his economic agenda and it's had
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tremendous benefits in terms of the electoral politics as well.
That's a good point.
That said, in Indonesia, the social welfare spending has not been aimed towards the middle
and middle and sort of lower the working poor.
Primarily, the social welfare spending is for the poorest of the poor, which is still somewhere
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in the vicinity of 10%.
So I think what the working poor and the lower middle class need in order to stabilize and
get see their prospects increase is better education and health.
And these are areas that are incredibly difficult to transform, that are riddled with vested
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interests and that in themselves are very nutty policy problems.
And I'm sure I think Jokowi has been right to emphasise education and health in his previous
two terms, but he has had to make political compromises that has meant that both of those
sectors have not reformed in a way that is fast enough or that will bring about change for
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those demographics.
So yes, so I think that managing this vast, the aspirations of a lower working class who
believe fervorantly that they will make it to middle class is vital.
And then we saw during the pandemic, we saw many of that working poor, that sort of the
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striving class, the aspirational class actually spend up all of their savings in order to keep
a float.
So it doesn't even take economic downturn to rock these people, right?
It takes a cancer diagnosis or an ill parent or the loss of a bond on a rental property
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and they are thrust back into poverty.
So it's worth noting that the precarity has really increased after the pandemic as people's
now the little assets that they had were sold in order to keep families of float during
the pandemic.
Right, and skills development are key to greater productivity and rising towards being an
upper income economy and that transition really requires deep seated reforms to the education
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system.
And this is a big country, 270 billion people, so to do that at scale is a phenomenal task.
Now getting back to Prabowo, he's been alleged to have been involved in massacres and he's
T-more going back to at least the 1980s, the abduction of pro-democracy activists in 1998
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and the murder and sexual violence targeting Chinese communities in that year as well.
And when I read about Prabowo, the image that comes to mind is an Indonesian deterte.
Maybe that's a force analogy on my part, but there is a profile of him on the investigative
news website, the interest of the author recalls an interview with him in from 2001 in which
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Prabowo says Indonesia is not ready for democracy.
The country needs a benign authoritarian regime.
So is Prabowo really a changed man?
That's the million dollar question, Arif.
It's a great question and that's the question everyone's asking.
I think there's sort of two schools of thought.
On one side you've got people who speak to Prabowo Subianto's character and he is a blue
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blood who made his way to the absolute tip of the spear in terms of the military under the
new order, was incredibly close to the new order family, Suharto married into the family
itself, Marititi Suharto, although they eventually divorced.
He's a man who has long had the ambition of being president.
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He's a man who believes he knows what's best for the country, particularly in terms of foreign
policy and defense strategy.
And he's also a man with whose temperament is well known.
He tends to be very aggressive when challenged.
He loses his temper very easily.
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It's worth noting that some of his previous running mates say Sandiega Uno has refused to
work with him again on this in this current presidential campaign.
So he makes enemies and some people feel that he has betrayed them or sold them out.
Nonetheless, so some people argue that you can't sort of, a tiger can't change his stripes
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or you can't sort of change the fundamental character of a person.
It's worth noting, however, that Prabowo has found success as a centrist and he has rebranded
himself as cuddly uncle who has very central, centralist, moderate sort of center-right economic
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ideas.
That's what he puts on the his sort of core policy platform.
However, when confronted or when provoked on the, on the hustings, you know, out in the
campaign, we certainly see old Prabowo kind of sticking his head through and hear discussion
around or sort of angry thumping around, you know, our sovereignty and foreigners are taking
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our land and what have you.
So there's kind of a Prabowo, there is certainly an internal Prabowo who may be busting to get
out and a Prabowo that is deeply authoritarian, a Prabowo that truly, I agree with you, does
not believe that democracy is appropriate in a country like Indonesia.
He's also shorted up by his party, Gerindra or the Greater National Indonesia party.
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And that party has long held in its manifesto that it should wind back democratic elections
at the, at the local level.
So at the city, mayoral, regency and provincial levels where Indonesians get to elect their direct,
directly elect to their governors and what have you.
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And Prabowo believes and is, is increasingly turning the political elite to his position
that those forms of democracy are messy, corrupt and they should be wound back.
There's also been some discussion and it included during the campaign that Indonesia shouldn't
really be directly electing its presidential candidates.
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So winding back the direct elections for the president, which is one of the core wins
of the Reformation movement has been something that's been discussed and promoted by his allies.
They would prefer a system that returns to the new order wherein a kind of expanded legislature.
What we might think of the second chamber of the legislature would nominate a president.
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And that's what happened under Suharto, which led to one of the longest dictatorships in
Southeast Asian history.
Right.
And we'll talk a bit more later about the state of Indonesian democracy and its, and its
resilience.
But it seems like, in at least in terms of the near term future, Prabowo represents a challenge
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to the devolution of power and federalism and direct democracy in Indonesia as opposed
to the entire democratic system itself.
Now Prabowo himself is quite wealthy and his brother Hashim is also a very wealthy man.
Their net worth is somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
His brother is his former wealthier.
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And they've used their own money to bankroll Prabowo's election campaigns.
And this points towards a contradiction in Prabowo's public image.
He's has an aristocratic lineage.
He's an oligarch.
And he's also a populist and forgive me for another potentially forced analogy, but it reminds
me of Trump.
But I like you to talk to us about the connection between money and power in Indonesia because
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it is one of the more unequal societies in Southeast Asia and it seems like there is a bit of a void
in terms of the country's politics.
There is a demand for responsive politics and material sense, but the agents for delivery
are politicians who are oligarchs or tools of oligarchs.
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So I'm wondering, has Indonesian politics been totally captured by oligarchs?
And is there space for civil society and grassroots forces?
That's absolutely the argument, I'd say the dominant academic argument in the field,
which is that Indonesia's politics have been captured by oligarchs or the Indonesian
politics resembles an oligarchy.
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And I think there's two ways of thinking about that oligarchy.
One is that actual oligarchs are within the political system who have, they have seen
that they are better off shoring up their wealth through the political process by bankrolling
political parties and running for elections and having their little parties engage in the
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transactional, collisional politics of Indonesian government.
And they've been able to show up their interests that way.
But another way of thinking about oligarchy is as a relationship between what has been a
very racialized economy in Indonesia, historically, in a incredibly racialized economy in which
a very small minority, an ethnic Chinese minority, dominate most of Indonesia's economic activity
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and top all of the sort of top 10 lists of Indonesia's most wealthiest.
And they are embedded in relationships with a, what's known as a pre-bume or an indigenous
political elite and that these kinds of relationships are what has dominated Indonesian politics
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throughout the new order.
I mean, the new order really better down this system of joint enterprises and backing
and protection between a sort of parasitic relationship between capital and politics.
I think that has loosened up somewhat in the last 20 years under Reformasi in which we see
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the pre-bume elite or the political elite themselves become very serious oligarchs.
And we're also seeing new sectors in which you see the rise of indigenous elites, for instance
in technology and other areas.
One while our ethnic Chinese oligarchs who have long sought to capture the political elites,
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they have found new markets abroad.
So we're seeing it's that traditional sense of oligarchy with this symbiotic relationship
between politics and capital.
While it is still very solid, I think, and it is still the dominant way in which politics
works, we're certainly seeing it get more complicated, I guess, in its picture.
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But that is not proving to bring about better democracy or better outcomes for ordinary
Indonesian people.
Really, what it is doing is expanding the pool and making, I think, the fights between elites
much more sharp and bitter.
And that in itself tends to close off the political sphere.
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As I guess, warring, economic and political elites utilize their whatever resources they
have against each other.
But I think what we see, I think, over the last, at least certainly over the last decade,
is the kind of closing off of the national political space for this pool of incestuous,
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warring, competitive and also very aligned political and economic elites in Indonesia.
And really, it does feel like a kind of, you know, a cartel effectively that runs the country.
And really, what you get in these coalitions that back up the president is just the same old
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figures backed by their own backers who also back everybody else.
And they just sort of play a bit of musical chairs.
And so certainly, I think the national level politics has been closed off to ordinary people,
political parties and new political parties really struggle.
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The political party system is fundamental in keeping out change and keeping out new faces.
And turning efforts to make change say the new solidarity, Indonesian solidarity party,
which was a real effort to reinvigorate reform and drawing them into the kind of corrupt
politics of this cartel.
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So that party is now very much aligned with the current and soon to be exiting president
Jokowi.org.
So I guess it's like you can't come into politics without playing the game of politics and therefore
being tainted by it.
And it's very, very difficult to see how national politics can change in this context when you
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have a party system and an oligarchy that polices this national space so fiercely.
Right.
And on that subject of initially transformative political forces being transformed by the
system itself, Jokowi Widodo initially came to power and was seen as an outsider, this
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non-elite politician, at least abroad.
He was described as Indonesia's Obama, but in that period, I think at least the US news media
was trying to look for other Obama's and other parts of the world.
It's self-absorbed nature of how the US media looks at the world.
And I'm wondering one to what extent was that mythical because there's indication Jokowi
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was actually funded by oligarchs even before becoming president.
And then since coming to power, he's been co-opted by or co-opted many of these elites at
least to survive in power and push forward as a agenda.
So what does that say about the possibilities of political change in Indonesia because
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with although it has this tremendous popularity somewhere close to 80% according to the latest
polls, but that star power and that public support hasn't really translated into a kind
of ability to implement his own agenda without being tainted by these establishment forces.
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I guess it is the absolute paradox that a political outsider like Jokowi who was, whose political
career was honed and trained through the decentralized democracy system.
So he was a mayor of solo and became governor of Jakarta before he became president.
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So he came through the kind of provincial ranks and this was seen as a way that the national
political system would get fresh talent and fresh blood.
And certainly Prabowo Subianto's competitors, Ganjar Pranowo, he is also a governor for Central
Java and Anis Buswiedan was the governor for Jakarta.
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So there is certainly a sense from the parties that the fresh political talent is coming from
the regions and through this process of regional democracy.
But that is also a major threat to them and which is part of the reason why I think the
national political elite are souring against decentralized democracy.
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And Joko Widodo I think has often been seen as a man who is a reformer and a pro-democracy
reformer but who was thwarted by the national political dynamic where everyone gets drawn
into these transactional politics.
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But I think Joko Widodo only ever had a very loose commitment to democracy and he is himself
a very instrumentalist political player.
And it is worth noting that when Jokowi tried to push forward what is clearly his agenda
which is the neoliberalisation reforms, these big bang deregulation reforms, plus a massive
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infrastructure agenda which was very much supported by the community.
But when he tried to push those, that was clearly kind of his own pure agenda through,
he often utilised deeply anti-democratic or anti-good governance means to do so.
So I recall very clearly in 2014 him calling in, this is so, he's only been a few months
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in power at this stage, he still had the shine of the Southeast Asia's Obama to him, civil
society had huge hopes for him.
And I remember this peculiar meeting where he calls in the head of the police, the head of
the Attorney General and the head of the Anti-Corruption Commission which then was a commission
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that was fearsome and independent and was absolutely rigorous in their efforts to read
Indonesia with corruption.
And he calls them in to the palace and explains to hit them that he will be embarking upon
a massive infrastructure programme and that they are not to touch his infrastructure projects.
So he wants no investigation, independent investigations of corruption around his infrastructure projects.
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And as his term unfolded, it was certainly a no-go zone.
I mean prosecutors and investigators would talk about that all the time that you could not
touch one of the national infrastructure projects despite the fact that there was enormous
amounts of money being trafficked through those projects.
He also said that Jokowi enabled or allowed or turned a blind eye to somewhere with the
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value of 20 to 30% of those projects being siphoned off by predatory bureaucrats and the
private sector.
So Joko Widodo has this reputation, I guess, of a democrat thwarted or a democrat turned
by a national political system that is so riddled with corruption.
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But I think he is a man who is deeply, deeply instrumentalist, is deeply transactional and
is ruthless in trying to gain what he, you know, in trying to pursue his own interests
and does not have very strong democratic norms by any means.
So in many ways, Indonesian civil society is right in their feeling of being tricked, of
(36:55):
being used and being harnessed to his campaigns of pro-democracy when he himself has no interest
in deepening Indonesian democracy.
Right, and we saw that, I think earlier when he failed in his attempt to try to orchestrate
a third term for himself.
Now during the course of these elections, Jokowi's transition toward becoming more of a
(37:20):
kingmaker, his son, Gibran, as proposed, running made, he's got another son who had a small political
party.
And so he's assuming a role that's similar to other power brokers in Indonesia controlling
things behind the scenes.
So it's very akin to Megawati, who is the daughter of another longtime ruler of Indonesia,
(37:41):
Sukarno.
And so I'm wondering how likely is Jokowi's influence to endure post-presidency?
He has the popularity, but does he have the money also?
That's a really good question.
There's never been a sense that Jokowi himself has an asset base of oligarchal proportions.
(38:07):
Nonetheless, he certainly has many different companies, and those companies are engaged in
very deep relationships with oligarchal parties, ex-military, ethnic Chinese, conglomerates,
and what have you.
He has certainly been careful to shore up, I guess, his family's economic prospects.
(38:31):
But where, if that's his, I don't know whether that's his driver.
There's never been that sense that that's his driver.
Will that money give him an ongoing role in politics?
That's a very good question.
I think he, at this point, he is banking on installing his two sons, international politics
(38:51):
as a means by which of sureing up his legacy.
And I think a lot of people have real questions about how effective that strategy is going
to be.
And he's particularly facing off against a person like Prabowo Subianto, who is a long-term
political player.
And his son's, I think, the vice president, Gibran is only around 37 and doesn't have much
(39:16):
of a political background.
And his other son, Kaesang, who heads up the small political party, I think they're barely
going to make it into parliament.
So their votes are not going to be instrumental in passing legislation.
They're not going to be a powerful member of the Prabowo Subianto coalition.
(39:37):
So it's hard to see what kind of levers and leverage the Jokowi, the sort of post-president
Jakowi can utilize against Prabowo in order to keep him on track.
I dare say Jokowi is not free from playing dirty.
And in both the 2019 campaigns and the 2014 campaigns, there were very credible allegations
(40:03):
that he was instructing his police and attorney general to sort of manufacture or dig up
old allegations of corruption against local elites in order to twist their hand to support
him, and in fact deliver certain numbers of votes.
(40:25):
It may be that Joko Widodo has a compromise against Prabowo Subianto.
And that's why he believes that this pacts between these two giants in politics is going
to hold.
I think it's anybody's guess.
But certainly there will be points of tension.
And it's a question of when will those points of tension arise and around what kinds of
(40:47):
issue?
Many people have said Joko Widodo is a fool to trust Prabowo Subianto and think that he can
control a person like Prabowo Subianto.
But Jokowi is a pretty fearsome political player in himself and I have no doubt he's thought
that through.
So it's a question.
We don't know what is going to transpire, but it will certainly be a very interesting time
(41:10):
for Indonesian politics.
It's worth noting every time political elites of this stature are engaging conflict, it's
Indonesian democracy that is sacrificed in the as elephants, you know, as elephants
stomp, it's the mice that get crushed.
So too is it Indonesian's quality of democracy that becomes eroded?
(41:33):
And speaking of the erosion of democracy in Indonesia, something has struck me as quite
peculiar in terms of how the political system operates, especially in terms of coalition
politics.
So I've tried to map these relationships out and it just seems like this confusing archipelago
of political parties and there seems to be a pattern at least in the Jacoie era of political
(41:58):
parties and politicians running against one another, but then inevitably joining the government
in some shape or form, at least through parliamentary coalitions.
And it seems like Indonesia today or at least in the Jokowi era did not really have a real
political opposition.
So what explains all this?
Yeah, absolutely.
(42:19):
I mean, this is the kind of politics of co-optation and everyone gets a little piece of the pie
that really that really has dominated Indonesian politics all the way back to Suharto in fact.
And it was in fact the previous president, I'm Susilla Bambang-Yudayono, who really brought
in the idea of what was known as rainbow coalitions, that being most of the major political parties
(42:45):
and all political parties must be national.
So there are sort of local political parties except for in the northernmost province of
Arche.
And so you have these national, these political parties and there's only a few of them because
they must be national and they join the government coalition leaving a very, very thin opposition
of say 10 to 20%.
(43:07):
And no party wants to be an opposition.
There's no gain to be made from opposition.
There's no reputational gain.
There's very little interest in making government accountable.
What everybody wants is to be part of the big fat rainbow coalition and have their little
piece of the pie that will enable them to both pursue individual rent seeking and also
(43:35):
to provide money back to the political party.
So it is a very rare political party that will stomach opposition and I doubt that we
will see the competitors against proposals will be under the parties that compete against
him.
I doubt that we will see them hold out to become opposition.
I imagine they will be looking for opportunities to join the government coalition.
(43:56):
This coalition, well it's got these big broad coalitions, arguably are a constraint on
presidents.
Some people have said they enable corruption, they enable unaccountable lacking in transparent
government and they enable politics as usual to happen.
(44:17):
And that's absolutely true but it also means that they constrain the ability of presidents
to act in discretionary and autonomous ways.
And so some people are arguing that this rainbow coalition will also keep an authoritarian
figure like Prabowo Subianto in check.
So we see these really conflicting indicators on the state of democracy in Indonesia.
(44:42):
You just talked about how these kind of mass coalitions emerge after elections and everyone
wants to get a piece of the pie.
But in spite of all that, elections remain competitive.
A 2021 poll by the Lowy Institute shows that 60% of Indonesians say democracy is preferable
to any other form of government.
(45:03):
And that figures largely unchanged since 2011.
And so we have this sort of consistent support for democracy as a system over the past two
decades.
Election turnout is quite high.
It's been in the 70 to 80% range over the past couple of decades.
But at the same time, economic power is concentrated in the hands of the few and those few dominate
(45:27):
the political system as well, at least at the federal level.
And then we have this issue of the potential for a middle-income trap and pause or an end
to this cycle of growth that Indonesia has seen for the past couple of decades, excluding
the COVID pandemic and other interruptions.
(45:48):
So I'm wondering, when we talk about the status quo in Indonesia, in terms of this political
order and the economic order, is it good enough to just model along or is there a potential
for an economic shock on the horizon that could shake up the political system like the
country saw in 1998 with the reform policy?
(46:10):
I think it's a really great question.
I think democracy is around the world actually a muddling through, right?
And they're inventing new ideological agendas and utilizing new wars on things, whether they
be drugs or migrants or what have you.
In order to distract the lower working class and the middle class from the fact that their
(46:32):
material conditions are degrading, in fact.
We have property homeless crises all around the Western developed world here in Australia,
and absolute rental crisis is hitting our middle class and people are spending two-thirds
of their income or on rents.
(46:53):
It's everywhere.
And so, then politics becomes the art of managing that conflict, that contradiction.
And so it's about how long can the regime in power stir up trouble, distract, deny the
reality of the experience of working people?
(47:16):
And it turns out that they can do that for quite a long time and that can be quite a durable
system.
I think under a person like Prabowo Subianto, who is very populist and authoritarian in his
language, he is very able to utilise those rhetorical flourishes and political agendas
(47:37):
against foreigners and what have you to distract people.
Against from the fact that their material conditions are not improving.
I think Joko Widodo also performs something of a magic trick by delivering, in fact, on
infrastructure.
It's hard to notice.
It's hard not to notice that you can get around Jakarta much better now that there is a
(48:01):
kind of rail system that's functioning.
And that when you go from Salatiga to Samarang, there's a brand new road.
And these things tell you, or governments working, even if my material conditions remain the
same, there has been some transformation in my daily life.
And so I think people can be deceived for a very long time.
(48:26):
But it is a constant moving target.
It's worth noting as well in Indonesia, there's an amazing set of literature that maps the
relationship between Islam and neoliberalism.
And the way that Islam has taken on almost Calvinist kind of connotations.
(48:48):
And by that I mean this idea that, you know, as you work harder, you will get closer to
God and you will reap the rewards of God.
And I think that that has been an incredibly powerful ideological tool for many of the working
class to keep them working, to keep them on that hands to wheel.
So if they are not succeeding, despite the absolutely dreadful and pile of state of education and
(49:13):
health and of workers' rights in Indonesia, it's because, you know, they're not working hard
enough, they're not divine enough, God hasn't chosen them yet.
And this incredible work being done with precarious populations and how religion is used to
stymie and mystify their understanding of the material conditions in which they live.
(49:41):
So I think this is a moving target and a problem for all democracies.
I think we've seen in many regards the discrediting of the neoliberal global economy in terms
of its ability to build a solid, safe middle class.
And so all governments of democracies everywhere and of all stripes are racing around looking
(50:03):
for new ideological cult tropes in order to distract the middle class from their worsening
conditions.
And from the fact that the working poor are never going to make it, right?
They're never going to make it in terms of their aspirations for middle class status.
That question of the relationship between piety, Islamic piety and financial success, material
(50:25):
success to be a podcast on its own.
I think points towards a very distinctive Islamic culture in Southeast Asia across the Indonesia,
Malaysia region and how religion plays an important role for the middle class.
But there is also this economic aspiration element as well.
(50:47):
And the two of fused together in the type of Islam that is very analogous to Calvinism.
And so one may say that there's a Southeast Asian Muslim work ethic that is maybe formed
there.
Now, we're nearing the end of our show.
And before I close, I just wanted to get to the question of Indonesia's role in the world.
(51:08):
One thing that strikes me about Indonesia today, at least compared to its past, is that we
don't really see it as an assertive geopolitical actor.
So Indonesia has been well known, well known for hosting the bundung conference, which paved
the way for the non-aligned movement.
In the past, there's also been erudentist tendencies among Indonesia's leadership with respect
(51:32):
to Malaysia, with respect to East Timor.
But now it seems like there's a shift in terms of the strategic culture as well as what
the public wants.
And it's very much a pragmatic Southeast Asian geopolitical actor, like many countries
in the Aussie on region.
Is that likely to continue under a provol?
(51:53):
Again, I think the kind of academic community is quite split on this.
Many foreign policy analysts in the days leading up to the election argued that it would be,
it's very unlikely that provol will upturn Indonesia's non-aligned status.
And there, and Indonesia's tendency to downplay its role on the international stage because
(52:18):
it's so kind of consumed with domestic politics.
I think that is largely true.
I don't think we will see any large moves in that direction.
But I think it's worth noting that Probor Subeyanto himself does regard himself as something
of a foreign policy and defense expert.
(52:39):
And certainly that's his background.
And he has a tendency, and we saw this under the Joko Widodo government, of coming
out occasionally with sort of off-pist foreign policy suggestions.
He tried to broker, for instance, a peace deal with between Ukraine and Russia without informing
(52:59):
either the president or the foreign minister at a time in which Prabowo was really trying
to carry the attention of the president.
So it seemed almost sort of contradictory or a poorly thought out move to kind of go
off-pist on his own and propose a whole new foreign policy without having actually consulted
(53:22):
the president who he was trying to court.
So I think Prabowo has certainly ears in that regard and believes his own strategic thinking
in that regard.
And I think we might see some surprises in terms of Indonesian foreign policy moving forward.
But they won't be, they will probably be more likely to be at a hawk and based on specific
(53:45):
types of events and possibly also driven by domestic discontent rather than a wholesale
strategic change.
I certainly Indonesia continues to underplay its weight.
It certainly doesn't cut a major figure on the international scene and I don't think we
(54:07):
will see Indonesia change in that regard.
It's also worth noting, I mean, a lot of the question has been like, will Indonesia, where
will it sit in terms of this great power conflict between potentially the US and China?
I mean, Indonesia is very dependent on Chinese funding for its infrastructure and Probor
(54:28):
for all of his sovereignty, populism has not in any way counted or rejected that flow
of funding despite all the kind of debates and some of them have overblown but about debt
trap diplomacy and what have you that comes out of China funding infrastructure.
(54:50):
And also it's worth noting that when Indonesian or ordinary Indonesian interests conflict
with Chinese-funded infrastructure, Prabowo has also been very, very quiet.
So again, while he certainly has principles and ideas that he believes he is right to voice,
(55:13):
he is also a very tactical and instrumentalist politician whose principles will fall by
the wayside when it suits him.
Right.
And final question for our listeners who may be interested in learning more about Indonesia
and Indonesian politics.
Do you have any books that you'd like to recommend for them?
Yeah, absolutely.
So I might like to pick some fiction books.
Yeah, yeah, fiction is fine.
(55:35):
Mantaga by Ekkakurnyawan made the long list of the booker prize.
I think it's Ekkakurnyawan is Indonesia's most well-regarded international writer and I
had the pleasure of a summer to reread Mantaga and it's an incredible read right up to
the last line.
And what I love about Indonesian fiction is it paints Indonesia so well and it gets to
(56:00):
the heart of why this is a country of such great contradictions and a country that is
so easy to fall in love with.
I mean, for all the discussion we've had today about Indonesia's democracy degrading and
the popular vote going to an authoritarian populist, you know, in my own life, I think Indonesia
(56:20):
and Indonesians have taught me more about democracy than I ever have learnt from living in a
Western democracy.
Indonesians love democracy.
They are, I think, a deeply democratic people who have the capacity to think in new ways
and bring together new political visions.
And I think that's better captured in fiction than it is in nonfiction, unfortunately, perhaps
(56:44):
because of the poor record that Indonesians, so the Indonesian radicalism has, I guess,
on the national political stage.
Another book that I thought was, again, summed up those paradoxes and those contradictions
of Indonesia was a book called Birth Canal, which has just come out by a writer called
(57:05):
Diaz Navita-Wuri, which is about, I won't spoil it for your audience, but it's a really shocking
book about women's bodies and it comes to, you know, for a country, the largest Muslim
country in the world that is kind of presumed to have sorts of certain gender relations, I think
(57:26):
Birth Canal really upturns everything you ever thought about gender in Indonesia.
Two other non-fiction, I guess, for an audience looking to learn more about Indonesia, these
two are written by foreigners, Elizabeth Pasani's Link-Denisha, etc., is a fantastic read,
(57:47):
a real page turner.
And also Vincent Bevin's The Jakarta Method, which was an excellent book about the impact
of US foreign policy on countries and their developmental trajectories, including Indonesia.
And Vincent really draws in ordinary stories into this kind of vast geopolitical cold
(58:11):
war that he narrates.
Thank you for tuning in.
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You're listening to The Pivot brought to you by Globely News where we discuss the leaders,
(00:07):
states, networks, ideologies and technologies that are reshaping the world order.
Visit our website at globely.news.
That's globe ly dot news.
Hi everyone, welcome to The Pivot.
(00:28):
My name is Arif Rafiq and I'm your host.
On February 14, nearly 170 million Indonesians went to the polls to choose their next president.
The final vote count is not yet in, but the preliminary results show a clear winner.
Prabowo Subianto.
Prabowo, as he's known, will be the next president of this rising Southeast Asian country,
(00:51):
an archipelago that stretches thousands of miles wide and is home to more than 270 million
people.
A former general with a troubling past, Prabowo has launched numerous failed bids for higher
office since 2009.
And this time around he's finally proved to be successful.
Using TikTok, this general who is once barred from the US for allegedly ordering the killing
(01:15):
of pro-democracy protesters has rebranded himself as a cuddly grandpa who continued the policies
of his former rival, the popular outgoing president Joko Widodo.
Jokowi, as he's known, is barred by term limits for running for a third term, but he gave Prabowo
a tacit endorsement when one of his sons joined the ex-general as his running mate.
(01:41):
Now these elections mark the end of Jokowi's formal rule over Indonesia, but there are indications
that he's now transitioning to another role in Indonesia's oligarchic, dynastic political
system, that of kingmaker.
Jokowi's transformation from a middle-class furniture maker to an unlikely president and
finally to one of Indonesia's many dynastic leaders raises questions over the health of
(02:06):
this flawed and messy democracy, and who will wield power in this emerging Southeast Asian
economic giant?
To unpack all this, we're joined by Dr. Jacqui Baker, a lecturer at Australia's Murdoch
University and a long-time researcher on Indonesia's politics.
Dr. Baker, thanks for joining us.
It's an absolute pleasure, Arif.
(02:28):
So with 77% of the results in at the time of our recording, Prabowo Subianto to his secured
59% of the vote, all but confirming that he'll be Indonesia's next president.
Now Prabowo has been seeking the presidency since 2004, and he's been part of three failed
presidential tickets since 2009.
(02:49):
What was behind his success this time around?
Well, clearly it's the Jokowi factor, right?
So Jokowi president Jokowi Widodo was looking for a successor to shore up his legacy and found
that his own political party, with whom he had long-had, fractious relationships, that
party is known as the party of democratic struggle.
(03:11):
And it's a dynastic party whose roots trace back to Sukarno and the period of Indonesia's
independence.
So it's a party of great entitlement and privilege and sees itself as the vanguard of democracy
whilst not acting very democratic.
And it's a head, Megawati Sukano Putri, daughter of Sukarno, she always made it clear that
(03:35):
Jokowi was only ever in power because of her, she bestowed that upon her, him, and that
he was nothing but a mere member of the party and that he added really, very little to the
party's agenda.
And so he was just a figurehead of a president for the exercise of her power and her party's
(03:56):
power.
And I think two terms of that kind of disparagement ultimately saw Jokui Dodo seek another air outside
of his nominated party.
This is what led him into the arms of Prabowo Subianto.
Now of course they had had a kind of reconciliation after the 2019 election wherein Prabowo Subianto
(04:22):
joined the Jokowi cabinet.
So you think of two sort of enemies having these horrible bruising elections.
They seemed like an enemy, you know, a split of all of the ages within Indonesian democratic
politics.
And then suddenly Prabowo turns around and flips and enters the Jokowi Widodo cabinet as Minister
(04:43):
of Defence.
This is a classic tactic from the president.
He likes to pacify by bringing people on board to his agenda by sharing out the spoils
of power.
So Jokowi Widodo and Prabowo Subianto had some kind of reconciliation starting 2019.
So when it came to 2022, 2023 and Jokowi Widodo was scouting around for an air, having exhausted
(05:10):
all other possible alternatives for extending his own presidency, including mulling a very
illegal third term.
He found himself in the arms of Prabowo Subianto who had pitched that he would run with Jokowi
Widodo's own son, Gibran Raka Raka Bumin.
And I think the temptation of that plus the kind of push factors of his own party's
(05:36):
truculance led him to make an alliance with Prabowo.
Prabowo's own massive success in winning this election comes in large part because Jokui
Widodo was able to give him the sort of blessings of a highly favored president whose own popularity
(05:58):
ratings were up in the 80% or something, giving the president a kind of cache of voters who
were looking for his endorsement.
And Prabowo Subianto won that endorsement.
Right.
So we have a mix of factors that explain Prabowo's victory.
You've talked about the Jokowi Widodo factor and will unpack that a bit more later.
(06:21):
But there's also an element of rebranding of Prabowo.
He has a military background, has been implicated in crimes against civilians in terms of targeting
democratic protesters, minorities in regions like East Timor, but he's rebranded himself as
more of affable grandfatherly figure.
(06:44):
And what I found interesting was that according to exit polls, there's one exit poll by
Compos and Indonesian newspaper.
Prabowo won nearly 66% of the Gen Z vote.
And this is an older man with a pretty horrible human rights record and he performed best
among younger voters.
And that belies the thinking about, you know, younger voters tend to be more idealistic
(07:10):
and change oriented.
So what explains all this?
There's talk of TikTok playing a role in terms of the rebranding of Prabowo is the story
that, you know, there's just a bunch of kids who are tricked into voting for him using TikTok
or is there much more to this?
And you've kind of hinted at this with the Joko Widodo factor.
Well, certainly, you know, Prabowo Subianto was the prime candidate across all age categories.
(07:39):
So he was winning across all, you know, the various categories of age amongst the voting cohort.
However, as the cohort got older, so, you know, 50 to 60, 60 to 70, his margin of success
became lower and lower.
So it was a kind of absolute inverse with Gen Z, where he was the absolute highest.
(08:02):
And as you said, 67%, some people put that up in the previous polls prior to the election,
some people put that up to 70 plus percent that he sort, that he received favor from the Gen Z cohort.
I think, you know, is there something fairly wrong with the Gen Zs of Indonesia?
(08:23):
I mean, no, I think that we still do see a very idealistic group of Gen Zs.
It's worth noting that Gen Zs across the campuses made an incredibly hard push throughout
the Joko Widodo presidency for democracy, arguing that Reformasi or the social democratic revolution
(08:45):
that had happened in 1998, it was collapsing and then it had been betrayed.
So there were enormous efforts to stime the voices of Gen Z, who were largely arguably elite voices,
voices from the campuses, people who were able to study, which are still a very small percentage
of Gen Z.
(09:06):
But Gen Zs still, you know, the backbone of, I guess, activist movements,
but those groups were crushed by the Joko Widodo administration and broken up.
And the universities were very complicit in silencing those voices.
Nonetheless, in the days before the election, again, the campuses erupted this time in partnership
(09:30):
with the lecturers trying to push for an anti-Prabowo vote, sort of anyone but probole,
reminding people that democracy was a central win of the 1998 revolution
and that it deserved to be protected.
So I guess, you know, while Gen Z did certainly plump before this rebranded,
(09:54):
cuddly uncle Prabowo, there are certainly elements of Gen Z that were incredibly hostile to his
re-election.
I mean, a lot of people put the large numbers of Gen Z voting for Prabowo to an absence of knowledge
about democracy.
I think that's probably a little glib.
(10:16):
I think more likely is that you have very large numbers of Gen Z, who probably don't
see great prospects, who are undereducated, who don't see where they fit into the wider economy.
And in that context of a large floating unemployed, low-skilled cohort of individuals,
(10:41):
you know, strongmen can really appeal, especially strongmen who have been endorsed by a president
that they largely see as having driven a very successful economic development of Indonesia.
So I guess it's a mixed picture.
And the short-hand answer is that a lot of people, probably, a lot of young people probably
(11:01):
didn't care, or a lot of young people were more concerned about showing up their futures
and saw that future with a strong man like Prabowo Subianto.
Yeah, maybe I should be less dismissive of this Gen Z tiktok voter demographic.
Now, as you had said, Probole was to a large extent, riding the co-tales of Joko Widodo,
(11:26):
and also a signaling continuity of his developmentalist agenda.
So one of Prabowo's signature programs, a free school lunch and milk program, which could
cost at least $7 billion or close to $8 billion in its first year, roughly two percent
of GDP, signals that for a large number of voters, especially the young, these kind of social
(11:50):
welfare spending, along with ensuring jobs for new entrants into the labor market are pretty
important.
And do you feel that this points towards a kind of precarity or economic security among
Indonesia's middle and lower middle classes?
Because, you know, we hear a lot about rapid growth at top level, but this is also a very
(12:12):
unequal society, and in terms of the spoils of this growth, it's not really distributed fairly.
So underlying all this is their economic insecurity that is a major political force, not just
in this election, but in Indonesian politics in general.
Absolutely.
I think that's what's underlying the current Joko Widodo government, and that will underlie
(12:37):
the dynamics of future governments.
Is the fact that their Indonesia's economic growth is very poorly distributed.
In fact, some people argue that most of, you know, something 90% of Indonesia's wealth lies
in the hands of 1% of its population.
And that may be, that may have changed somewhat over the last few years, but there is nonetheless
(13:00):
a very large group of Indonesians, somewhere up to 40%, who live with a constant feeling
of precarity.
So Indonesia has been, is the kind of success story of Southeast Asia in terms of its ability
to drive down poverty.
And Indonesia has almost eradicated, in fact, extreme poverty.
(13:25):
But with that comes new political challenges and new political realities, which is that
you have brought on enormous numbers of people with you in your government on the promise
that they too can be middle class.
But often, you know, the nature of neoliberal economic growth means that you have to have a
level of flexibility within the workplace and deregulation within the workplace that
(13:48):
makes those secure, stable, middle class jobs very, very difficult to achieve.
On top of the fact that there are also major issues with Indonesian education system, where
quality of education is quite low. It has been a system that has been focused on rolling
(14:09):
out schools as opposed to providing quality education.
And that's also at the tertiary level.
So what you have are people of a kind of lower middle class or precarious middle class is
the word I like to use, investing in low quality education that doesn't actually translate into
(14:30):
stable jobs for their young people, right, for their children.
And this is a point of absolute frustration and it's well recognised, I think, by parents.
And I think in politics, there's nothing so dangerous as a dashed aspiration, as a promise
of something better that never, never appears, you know?
(14:52):
And I often see this precarious working class within Indonesia as feeling like they're
on the way to middle class, but never really getting there.
They're on a hamster wheel of precarious short term contract jobs.
And that's been amplified by the rise in services like Godzek, which is kind of a ride share
(15:14):
program, ride share application and other types of low paid career work, which seems to
absorb a lot of Indonesia's working poor, particularly in the cities, for instance.
And so I think you've got very large heaving cities within Indonesia, with large levels,
(15:36):
large numbers up to 40 to 50% of people who are watching the city grow around them, watching
the trappings of wealth amplify around them and are being shut out of that promise.
And they can feel it themselves as rents go up, as in at the cost of education goes up, as
they become more and more vulnerable to kind of scams being offered at the lower middle
(16:01):
class and in the middle class, offering them, again, this will be the way to become rich.
And this will be the way to shore up your child's education and they don't really provide
or they tend to be very low quality services.
And so I think this is a real problem for many middle income countries who are, who have
promised their populations, a middle class, a developed world economy.
(16:27):
And yet only some people are using the kind of the ideology of that economy and the method
and the strategies for developing that economy towards a developed economy.
That means that a lot of people's hopes are going to be dashed along the way.
It's worth remembering that a middle class, a safe middle, secure middle class is the backbone
(16:47):
of democracy.
And often that's come about through labor rights and in Indonesia, labor rights are very,
very precarious and unions have a very mixed record in terms of delivering for workers.
Right.
And the COVID pandemic itself was a reminder to many in Indonesia, India and many other emerging
(17:08):
markets or middle income countries of how precarious much of their populations are that
there are many people, millions, hundreds of millions of people who exist just above the poverty
line.
And all it takes is a pandemic or a sharp economic downturn for them to re-experience the
poverty that they had experienced in their lifetimes or maybe their ancestors had.
(17:33):
And so for a lot of these countries, there is not just the potential for the middle income
trap, but also for the regression for some in the event of a deep-seated economic crisis.
And that's why we see politicians like Modi in India who've seen a center right economically
actually deploy social welfare spending as a big part of his economic agenda and it's had
(17:57):
tremendous benefits in terms of the electoral politics as well.
That's a good point.
That said, in Indonesia, the social welfare spending has not been aimed towards the middle
and middle and sort of lower the working poor.
Primarily, the social welfare spending is for the poorest of the poor, which is still somewhere
(18:19):
in the vicinity of 10%.
So I think what the working poor and the lower middle class need in order to stabilize and
get see their prospects increase is better education and health.
And these are areas that are incredibly difficult to transform, that are riddled with vested
(18:42):
interests and that in themselves are very nutty policy problems.
And I'm sure I think Jokowi has been right to emphasise education and health in his previous
two terms, but he has had to make political compromises that has meant that both of those
sectors have not reformed in a way that is fast enough or that will bring about change for
(19:04):
those demographics.
So yes, so I think that managing this vast, the aspirations of a lower working class who
believe fervorantly that they will make it to middle class is vital.
And then we saw during the pandemic, we saw many of that working poor, that sort of the
(19:25):
striving class, the aspirational class actually spend up all of their savings in order to keep
a float.
So it doesn't even take economic downturn to rock these people, right?
It takes a cancer diagnosis or an ill parent or the loss of a bond on a rental property
(19:46):
and they are thrust back into poverty.
So it's worth noting that the precarity has really increased after the pandemic as people's
now the little assets that they had were sold in order to keep families of float during
the pandemic.
Right, and skills development are key to greater productivity and rising towards being an
upper income economy and that transition really requires deep seated reforms to the education
(20:12):
system.
And this is a big country, 270 billion people, so to do that at scale is a phenomenal task.
Now getting back to Prabowo, he's been alleged to have been involved in massacres and he's
T-more going back to at least the 1980s, the abduction of pro-democracy activists in 1998
(20:34):
and the murder and sexual violence targeting Chinese communities in that year as well.
And when I read about Prabowo, the image that comes to mind is an Indonesian deterte.
Maybe that's a force analogy on my part, but there is a profile of him on the investigative
news website, the interest of the author recalls an interview with him in from 2001 in which
(20:56):
Prabowo says Indonesia is not ready for democracy.
The country needs a benign authoritarian regime.
So is Prabowo really a changed man?
That's the million dollar question, Arif.
It's a great question and that's the question everyone's asking.
I think there's sort of two schools of thought.
On one side you've got people who speak to Prabowo Subianto's character and he is a blue
(21:22):
blood who made his way to the absolute tip of the spear in terms of the military under the
new order, was incredibly close to the new order family, Suharto married into the family
itself, Marititi Suharto, although they eventually divorced.
He's a man who has long had the ambition of being president.
(21:46):
He's a man who believes he knows what's best for the country, particularly in terms of foreign
policy and defense strategy.
And he's also a man with whose temperament is well known.
He tends to be very aggressive when challenged.
He loses his temper very easily.
(22:06):
It's worth noting that some of his previous running mates say Sandiega Uno has refused to
work with him again on this in this current presidential campaign.
So he makes enemies and some people feel that he has betrayed them or sold them out.
Nonetheless, so some people argue that you can't sort of, a tiger can't change his stripes
(22:29):
or you can't sort of change the fundamental character of a person.
It's worth noting, however, that Prabowo has found success as a centrist and he has rebranded
himself as cuddly uncle who has very central, centralist, moderate sort of center-right economic
(22:50):
ideas.
That's what he puts on the his sort of core policy platform.
However, when confronted or when provoked on the, on the hustings, you know, out in the
campaign, we certainly see old Prabowo kind of sticking his head through and hear discussion
around or sort of angry thumping around, you know, our sovereignty and foreigners are taking
(23:12):
our land and what have you.
So there's kind of a Prabowo, there is certainly an internal Prabowo who may be busting to get
out and a Prabowo that is deeply authoritarian, a Prabowo that truly, I agree with you, does
not believe that democracy is appropriate in a country like Indonesia.
He's also shorted up by his party, Gerindra or the Greater National Indonesia party.
(23:36):
And that party has long held in its manifesto that it should wind back democratic elections
at the, at the local level.
So at the city, mayoral, regency and provincial levels where Indonesians get to elect their direct,
directly elect to their governors and what have you.
(23:57):
And Prabowo believes and is, is increasingly turning the political elite to his position
that those forms of democracy are messy, corrupt and they should be wound back.
There's also been some discussion and it included during the campaign that Indonesia shouldn't
really be directly electing its presidential candidates.
(24:19):
So winding back the direct elections for the president, which is one of the core wins
of the Reformation movement has been something that's been discussed and promoted by his allies.
They would prefer a system that returns to the new order wherein a kind of expanded legislature.
What we might think of the second chamber of the legislature would nominate a president.
(24:42):
And that's what happened under Suharto, which led to one of the longest dictatorships in
Southeast Asian history.
Right.
And we'll talk a bit more later about the state of Indonesian democracy and its, and its
resilience.
But it seems like, in at least in terms of the near term future, Prabowo represents a challenge
(25:02):
to the devolution of power and federalism and direct democracy in Indonesia as opposed
to the entire democratic system itself.
Now Prabowo himself is quite wealthy and his brother Hashim is also a very wealthy man.
Their net worth is somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
His brother is his former wealthier.
(25:23):
And they've used their own money to bankroll Prabowo's election campaigns.
And this points towards a contradiction in Prabowo's public image.
He's has an aristocratic lineage.
He's an oligarch.
And he's also a populist and forgive me for another potentially forced analogy, but it reminds
me of Trump.
But I like you to talk to us about the connection between money and power in Indonesia because
(25:49):
it is one of the more unequal societies in Southeast Asia and it seems like there is a bit of a void
in terms of the country's politics.
There is a demand for responsive politics and material sense, but the agents for delivery
are politicians who are oligarchs or tools of oligarchs.
(26:12):
So I'm wondering, has Indonesian politics been totally captured by oligarchs?
And is there space for civil society and grassroots forces?
That's absolutely the argument, I'd say the dominant academic argument in the field,
which is that Indonesia's politics have been captured by oligarchs or the Indonesian
politics resembles an oligarchy.
(26:33):
And I think there's two ways of thinking about that oligarchy.
One is that actual oligarchs are within the political system who have, they have seen
that they are better off shoring up their wealth through the political process by bankrolling
political parties and running for elections and having their little parties engage in the
(26:56):
transactional, collisional politics of Indonesian government.
And they've been able to show up their interests that way.
But another way of thinking about oligarchy is as a relationship between what has been a
very racialized economy in Indonesia, historically, in a incredibly racialized economy in which
a very small minority, an ethnic Chinese minority, dominate most of Indonesia's economic activity
(27:21):
and top all of the sort of top 10 lists of Indonesia's most wealthiest.
And they are embedded in relationships with a, what's known as a pre-bume or an indigenous
political elite and that these kinds of relationships are what has dominated Indonesian politics
(27:41):
throughout the new order.
I mean, the new order really better down this system of joint enterprises and backing
and protection between a sort of parasitic relationship between capital and politics.
I think that has loosened up somewhat in the last 20 years under Reformasi in which we see
(28:05):
the pre-bume elite or the political elite themselves become very serious oligarchs.
And we're also seeing new sectors in which you see the rise of indigenous elites, for instance
in technology and other areas.
One while our ethnic Chinese oligarchs who have long sought to capture the political elites,
(28:29):
they have found new markets abroad.
So we're seeing it's that traditional sense of oligarchy with this symbiotic relationship
between politics and capital.
While it is still very solid, I think, and it is still the dominant way in which politics
works, we're certainly seeing it get more complicated, I guess, in its picture.
(28:51):
But that is not proving to bring about better democracy or better outcomes for ordinary
Indonesian people.
Really, what it is doing is expanding the pool and making, I think, the fights between elites
much more sharp and bitter.
And that in itself tends to close off the political sphere.
(29:13):
As I guess, warring, economic and political elites utilize their whatever resources they
have against each other.
But I think what we see, I think, over the last, at least certainly over the last decade,
is the kind of closing off of the national political space for this pool of incestuous,
(29:35):
warring, competitive and also very aligned political and economic elites in Indonesia.
And really, it does feel like a kind of, you know, a cartel effectively that runs the country.
And really, what you get in these coalitions that back up the president is just the same old
(29:57):
figures backed by their own backers who also back everybody else.
And they just sort of play a bit of musical chairs.
And so certainly, I think the national level politics has been closed off to ordinary people,
political parties and new political parties really struggle.
(30:20):
The political party system is fundamental in keeping out change and keeping out new faces.
And turning efforts to make change say the new solidarity, Indonesian solidarity party,
which was a real effort to reinvigorate reform and drawing them into the kind of corrupt
politics of this cartel.
(30:42):
So that party is now very much aligned with the current and soon to be exiting president
Jokowi.org.
So I guess it's like you can't come into politics without playing the game of politics and therefore
being tainted by it.
And it's very, very difficult to see how national politics can change in this context when you
(31:03):
have a party system and an oligarchy that polices this national space so fiercely.
Right.
And on that subject of initially transformative political forces being transformed by the
system itself, Jokowi Widodo initially came to power and was seen as an outsider, this
(31:24):
non-elite politician, at least abroad.
He was described as Indonesia's Obama, but in that period, I think at least the US news media
was trying to look for other Obama's and other parts of the world.
It's self-absorbed nature of how the US media looks at the world.
And I'm wondering one to what extent was that mythical because there's indication Jokowi
(31:47):
was actually funded by oligarchs even before becoming president.
And then since coming to power, he's been co-opted by or co-opted many of these elites at
least to survive in power and push forward as a agenda.
So what does that say about the possibilities of political change in Indonesia because
(32:12):
with although it has this tremendous popularity somewhere close to 80% according to the latest
polls, but that star power and that public support hasn't really translated into a kind
of ability to implement his own agenda without being tainted by these establishment forces.
(32:36):
I guess it is the absolute paradox that a political outsider like Jokowi who was, whose political
career was honed and trained through the decentralized democracy system.
So he was a mayor of solo and became governor of Jakarta before he became president.
(32:58):
So he came through the kind of provincial ranks and this was seen as a way that the national
political system would get fresh talent and fresh blood.
And certainly Prabowo Subianto's competitors, Ganjar Pranowo, he is also a governor for Central
Java and Anis Buswiedan was the governor for Jakarta.
(33:24):
So there is certainly a sense from the parties that the fresh political talent is coming from
the regions and through this process of regional democracy.
But that is also a major threat to them and which is part of the reason why I think the
national political elite are souring against decentralized democracy.
(33:45):
And Joko Widodo I think has often been seen as a man who is a reformer and a pro-democracy
reformer but who was thwarted by the national political dynamic where everyone gets drawn
into these transactional politics.
(34:06):
But I think Joko Widodo only ever had a very loose commitment to democracy and he is himself
a very instrumentalist political player.
And it is worth noting that when Jokowi tried to push forward what is clearly his agenda
which is the neoliberalisation reforms, these big bang deregulation reforms, plus a massive
(34:35):
infrastructure agenda which was very much supported by the community.
But when he tried to push those, that was clearly kind of his own pure agenda through,
he often utilised deeply anti-democratic or anti-good governance means to do so.
So I recall very clearly in 2014 him calling in, this is so, he's only been a few months
(34:58):
in power at this stage, he still had the shine of the Southeast Asia's Obama to him, civil
society had huge hopes for him.
And I remember this peculiar meeting where he calls in the head of the police, the head of
the Attorney General and the head of the Anti-Corruption Commission which then was a commission
(35:20):
that was fearsome and independent and was absolutely rigorous in their efforts to read
Indonesia with corruption.
And he calls them in to the palace and explains to hit them that he will be embarking upon
a massive infrastructure programme and that they are not to touch his infrastructure projects.
So he wants no investigation, independent investigations of corruption around his infrastructure projects.
(35:44):
And as his term unfolded, it was certainly a no-go zone.
I mean prosecutors and investigators would talk about that all the time that you could not
touch one of the national infrastructure projects despite the fact that there was enormous
amounts of money being trafficked through those projects.
He also said that Jokowi enabled or allowed or turned a blind eye to somewhere with the
(36:10):
value of 20 to 30% of those projects being siphoned off by predatory bureaucrats and the
private sector.
So Joko Widodo has this reputation, I guess, of a democrat thwarted or a democrat turned
by a national political system that is so riddled with corruption.
(36:30):
But I think he is a man who is deeply, deeply instrumentalist, is deeply transactional and
is ruthless in trying to gain what he, you know, in trying to pursue his own interests
and does not have very strong democratic norms by any means.
So in many ways, Indonesian civil society is right in their feeling of being tricked, of
(36:55):
being used and being harnessed to his campaigns of pro-democracy when he himself has no interest
in deepening Indonesian democracy.
Right, and we saw that, I think earlier when he failed in his attempt to try to orchestrate
a third term for himself.
Now during the course of these elections, Jokowi's transition toward becoming more of a
(37:20):
kingmaker, his son, Gibran, as proposed, running made, he's got another son who had a small political
party.
And so he's assuming a role that's similar to other power brokers in Indonesia controlling
things behind the scenes.
So it's very akin to Megawati, who is the daughter of another longtime ruler of Indonesia,
(37:41):
Sukarno.
And so I'm wondering how likely is Jokowi's influence to endure post-presidency?
He has the popularity, but does he have the money also?
That's a really good question.
There's never been a sense that Jokowi himself has an asset base of oligarchal proportions.
(38:07):
Nonetheless, he certainly has many different companies, and those companies are engaged in
very deep relationships with oligarchal parties, ex-military, ethnic Chinese, conglomerates,
and what have you.
He has certainly been careful to shore up, I guess, his family's economic prospects.
(38:31):
But where, if that's his, I don't know whether that's his driver.
There's never been that sense that that's his driver.
Will that money give him an ongoing role in politics?
That's a very good question.
I think he, at this point, he is banking on installing his two sons, international politics
(38:51):
as a means by which of sureing up his legacy.
And I think a lot of people have real questions about how effective that strategy is going
to be.
And he's particularly facing off against a person like Prabowo Subianto, who is a long-term
political player.
And his son's, I think, the vice president, Gibran is only around 37 and doesn't have much
(39:16):
of a political background.
And his other son, Kaesang, who heads up the small political party, I think they're barely
going to make it into parliament.
So their votes are not going to be instrumental in passing legislation.
They're not going to be a powerful member of the Prabowo Subianto coalition.
(39:37):
So it's hard to see what kind of levers and leverage the Jokowi, the sort of post-president
Jakowi can utilize against Prabowo in order to keep him on track.
I dare say Jokowi is not free from playing dirty.
And in both the 2019 campaigns and the 2014 campaigns, there were very credible allegations
(40:03):
that he was instructing his police and attorney general to sort of manufacture or dig up
old allegations of corruption against local elites in order to twist their hand to support
him, and in fact deliver certain numbers of votes.
(40:25):
It may be that Joko Widodo has a compromise against Prabowo Subianto.
And that's why he believes that this pacts between these two giants in politics is going
to hold.
I think it's anybody's guess.
But certainly there will be points of tension.
And it's a question of when will those points of tension arise and around what kinds of
(40:47):
issue?
Many people have said Joko Widodo is a fool to trust Prabowo Subianto and think that he can
control a person like Prabowo Subianto.
But Jokowi is a pretty fearsome political player in himself and I have no doubt he's thought
that through.
So it's a question.
We don't know what is going to transpire, but it will certainly be a very interesting time
(41:10):
for Indonesian politics.
It's worth noting every time political elites of this stature are engaging conflict, it's
Indonesian democracy that is sacrificed in the as elephants, you know, as elephants
stomp, it's the mice that get crushed.
So too is it Indonesian's quality of democracy that becomes eroded?
(41:33):
And speaking of the erosion of democracy in Indonesia, something has struck me as quite
peculiar in terms of how the political system operates, especially in terms of coalition
politics.
So I've tried to map these relationships out and it just seems like this confusing archipelago
of political parties and there seems to be a pattern at least in the Jacoie era of political
(41:58):
parties and politicians running against one another, but then inevitably joining the government
in some shape or form, at least through parliamentary coalitions.
And it seems like Indonesia today or at least in the Jokowi era did not really have a real
political opposition.
So what explains all this?
Yeah, absolutely.
(42:19):
I mean, this is the kind of politics of co-optation and everyone gets a little piece of the pie
that really that really has dominated Indonesian politics all the way back to Suharto in fact.
And it was in fact the previous president, I'm Susilla Bambang-Yudayono, who really brought
in the idea of what was known as rainbow coalitions, that being most of the major political parties
(42:45):
and all political parties must be national.
So there are sort of local political parties except for in the northernmost province of
Arche.
And so you have these national, these political parties and there's only a few of them because
they must be national and they join the government coalition leaving a very, very thin opposition
of say 10 to 20%.
(43:07):
And no party wants to be an opposition.
There's no gain to be made from opposition.
There's no reputational gain.
There's very little interest in making government accountable.
What everybody wants is to be part of the big fat rainbow coalition and have their little
piece of the pie that will enable them to both pursue individual rent seeking and also
(43:35):
to provide money back to the political party.
So it is a very rare political party that will stomach opposition and I doubt that we
will see the competitors against proposals will be under the parties that compete against
him.
I doubt that we will see them hold out to become opposition.
I imagine they will be looking for opportunities to join the government coalition.
(43:56):
This coalition, well it's got these big broad coalitions, arguably are a constraint on
presidents.
Some people have said they enable corruption, they enable unaccountable lacking in transparent
government and they enable politics as usual to happen.
(44:17):
And that's absolutely true but it also means that they constrain the ability of presidents
to act in discretionary and autonomous ways.
And so some people are arguing that this rainbow coalition will also keep an authoritarian
figure like Prabowo Subianto in check.
So we see these really conflicting indicators on the state of democracy in Indonesia.
(44:42):
You just talked about how these kind of mass coalitions emerge after elections and everyone
wants to get a piece of the pie.
But in spite of all that, elections remain competitive.
A 2021 poll by the Lowy Institute shows that 60% of Indonesians say democracy is preferable
to any other form of government.
(45:03):
And that figures largely unchanged since 2011.
And so we have this sort of consistent support for democracy as a system over the past two
decades.
Election turnout is quite high.
It's been in the 70 to 80% range over the past couple of decades.
But at the same time, economic power is concentrated in the hands of the few and those few dominate
(45:27):
the political system as well, at least at the federal level.
And then we have this issue of the potential for a middle-income trap and pause or an end
to this cycle of growth that Indonesia has seen for the past couple of decades, excluding
the COVID pandemic and other interruptions.
(45:48):
So I'm wondering, when we talk about the status quo in Indonesia, in terms of this political
order and the economic order, is it good enough to just model along or is there a potential
for an economic shock on the horizon that could shake up the political system like the
country saw in 1998 with the reform policy?
(46:10):
I think it's a really great question.
I think democracy is around the world actually a muddling through, right?
And they're inventing new ideological agendas and utilizing new wars on things, whether they
be drugs or migrants or what have you.
In order to distract the lower working class and the middle class from the fact that their
(46:32):
material conditions are degrading, in fact.
We have property homeless crises all around the Western developed world here in Australia,
and absolute rental crisis is hitting our middle class and people are spending two-thirds
of their income or on rents.
(46:53):
It's everywhere.
And so, then politics becomes the art of managing that conflict, that contradiction.
And so it's about how long can the regime in power stir up trouble, distract, deny the
reality of the experience of working people?
(47:16):
And it turns out that they can do that for quite a long time and that can be quite a durable
system.
I think under a person like Prabowo Subianto, who is very populist and authoritarian in his
language, he is very able to utilise those rhetorical flourishes and political agendas
(47:37):
against foreigners and what have you to distract people.
Against from the fact that their material conditions are not improving.
I think Joko Widodo also performs something of a magic trick by delivering, in fact, on
infrastructure.
It's hard to notice.
It's hard not to notice that you can get around Jakarta much better now that there is a
(48:01):
kind of rail system that's functioning.
And that when you go from Salatiga to Samarang, there's a brand new road.
And these things tell you, or governments working, even if my material conditions remain the
same, there has been some transformation in my daily life.
And so I think people can be deceived for a very long time.
(48:26):
But it is a constant moving target.
It's worth noting as well in Indonesia, there's an amazing set of literature that maps the
relationship between Islam and neoliberalism.
And the way that Islam has taken on almost Calvinist kind of connotations.
(48:48):
And by that I mean this idea that, you know, as you work harder, you will get closer to
God and you will reap the rewards of God.
And I think that that has been an incredibly powerful ideological tool for many of the working
class to keep them working, to keep them on that hands to wheel.
So if they are not succeeding, despite the absolutely dreadful and pile of state of education and
(49:13):
health and of workers' rights in Indonesia, it's because, you know, they're not working hard
enough, they're not divine enough, God hasn't chosen them yet.
And this incredible work being done with precarious populations and how religion is used to
stymie and mystify their understanding of the material conditions in which they live.
(49:41):
So I think this is a moving target and a problem for all democracies.
I think we've seen in many regards the discrediting of the neoliberal global economy in terms
of its ability to build a solid, safe middle class.
And so all governments of democracies everywhere and of all stripes are racing around looking
(50:03):
for new ideological cult tropes in order to distract the middle class from their worsening
conditions.
And from the fact that the working poor are never going to make it, right?
They're never going to make it in terms of their aspirations for middle class status.
That question of the relationship between piety, Islamic piety and financial success, material
(50:25):
success to be a podcast on its own.
I think points towards a very distinctive Islamic culture in Southeast Asia across the Indonesia,
Malaysia region and how religion plays an important role for the middle class.
But there is also this economic aspiration element as well.
(50:47):
And the two of fused together in the type of Islam that is very analogous to Calvinism.
And so one may say that there's a Southeast Asian Muslim work ethic that is maybe formed
there.
Now, we're nearing the end of our show.
And before I close, I just wanted to get to the question of Indonesia's role in the world.
(51:08):
One thing that strikes me about Indonesia today, at least compared to its past, is that we
don't really see it as an assertive geopolitical actor.
So Indonesia has been well known, well known for hosting the bundung conference, which paved
the way for the non-aligned movement.
In the past, there's also been erudentist tendencies among Indonesia's leadership with respect
(51:32):
to Malaysia, with respect to East Timor.
But now it seems like there's a shift in terms of the strategic culture as well as what
the public wants.
And it's very much a pragmatic Southeast Asian geopolitical actor, like many countries
in the Aussie on region.
Is that likely to continue under a provol?
(51:53):
Again, I think the kind of academic community is quite split on this.
Many foreign policy analysts in the days leading up to the election argued that it would be,
it's very unlikely that provol will upturn Indonesia's non-aligned status.
And there, and Indonesia's tendency to downplay its role on the international stage because
(52:18):
it's so kind of consumed with domestic politics.
I think that is largely true.
I don't think we will see any large moves in that direction.
But I think it's worth noting that Probor Subeyanto himself does regard himself as something
of a foreign policy and defense expert.
(52:39):
And certainly that's his background.
And he has a tendency, and we saw this under the Joko Widodo government, of coming
out occasionally with sort of off-pist foreign policy suggestions.
He tried to broker, for instance, a peace deal with between Ukraine and Russia without informing
(52:59):
either the president or the foreign minister at a time in which Prabowo was really trying
to carry the attention of the president.
So it seemed almost sort of contradictory or a poorly thought out move to kind of go
off-pist on his own and propose a whole new foreign policy without having actually consulted
(53:22):
the president who he was trying to court.
So I think Prabowo has certainly ears in that regard and believes his own strategic thinking
in that regard.
And I think we might see some surprises in terms of Indonesian foreign policy moving forward.
But they won't be, they will probably be more likely to be at a hawk and based on specific
(53:45):
types of events and possibly also driven by domestic discontent rather than a wholesale
strategic change.
I certainly Indonesia continues to underplay its weight.
It certainly doesn't cut a major figure on the international scene and I don't think we
(54:07):
will see Indonesia change in that regard.
It's also worth noting, I mean, a lot of the question has been like, will Indonesia, where
will it sit in terms of this great power conflict between potentially the US and China?
I mean, Indonesia is very dependent on Chinese funding for its infrastructure and Probor
(54:28):
for all of his sovereignty, populism has not in any way counted or rejected that flow
of funding despite all the kind of debates and some of them have overblown but about debt
trap diplomacy and what have you that comes out of China funding infrastructure.
(54:50):
And also it's worth noting that when Indonesian or ordinary Indonesian interests conflict
with Chinese-funded infrastructure, Prabowo has also been very, very quiet.
So again, while he certainly has principles and ideas that he believes he is right to voice,
(55:13):
he is also a very tactical and instrumentalist politician whose principles will fall by
the wayside when it suits him.
Right.
And final question for our listeners who may be interested in learning more about Indonesia
and Indonesian politics.
Do you have any books that you'd like to recommend for them?
Yeah, absolutely.
So I might like to pick some fiction books.
Yeah, yeah, fiction is fine.
(55:35):
Mantaga by Ekkakurnyawan made the long list of the booker prize.
I think it's Ekkakurnyawan is Indonesia's most well-regarded international writer and I
had the pleasure of a summer to reread Mantaga and it's an incredible read right up to
the last line.
And what I love about Indonesian fiction is it paints Indonesia so well and it gets to
(56:00):
the heart of why this is a country of such great contradictions and a country that is
so easy to fall in love with.
I mean, for all the discussion we've had today about Indonesia's democracy degrading and
the popular vote going to an authoritarian populist, you know, in my own life, I think Indonesia
(56:20):
and Indonesians have taught me more about democracy than I ever have learnt from living in a
Western democracy.
Indonesians love democracy.
They are, I think, a deeply democratic people who have the capacity to think in new ways
and bring together new political visions.
And I think that's better captured in fiction than it is in nonfiction, unfortunately, perhaps
(56:44):
because of the poor record that Indonesians, so the Indonesian radicalism has, I guess,
on the national political stage.
Another book that I thought was, again, summed up those paradoxes and those contradictions
of Indonesia was a book called Birth Canal, which has just come out by a writer called
(57:05):
Diaz Navita-Wuri, which is about, I won't spoil it for your audience, but it's a really shocking
book about women's bodies and it comes to, you know, for a country, the largest Muslim
country in the world that is kind of presumed to have sorts of certain gender relations, I think
(57:26):
Birth Canal really upturns everything you ever thought about gender in Indonesia.
Two other non-fiction, I guess, for an audience looking to learn more about Indonesia, these
two are written by foreigners, Elizabeth Pasani's Link-Denisha, etc., is a fantastic read,
(57:47):
a real page turner.
And also Vincent Bevin's The Jakarta Method, which was an excellent book about the impact
of US foreign policy on countries and their developmental trajectories, including Indonesia.
And Vincent really draws in ordinary stories into this kind of vast geopolitical cold
(58:11):
war that he narrates.
Thank you for tuning in.
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