Hello friends!
This is the first of the weekly (and eventually twice-weekly) Indonesian presidential election special.
Firstly, all subscribers to Dari Mulut ke Mulut have been popped onto the list. But if you’re not an Indonesia nerd no worries, unsubscribe and it won’t affect your DMKM sub at all.
Secondly, let’s talk about scope and lay out. Today is a bit different to how I’m looking at going forward. I know we’re not all people who spend Saturday nights screeching in bars about the minutiae of the election with friends so today is a look at the four challengers and what I find personally interesting about them. Next week and going ahead we’ll look at one key policy issue, development or mechanics of the election in a short analysis piece.
In the This Week section I will also include shorter briefs about more developments than I have this week, but you’ll see why it’s a special one today.
Okay? Okay! Please feel free to send this around get everyone on it, share it all over the place etc etc.
Erin Cook
(thanks to Twitter/@netmediatama)
The small-town boy who came good. President Joko Widodo. The candidate of dreams. A furniture salesman from Solo becomes the mayor, becomes the governor of Jakarta, becomes the president. His election back in 2014 was meant to be a clean sweep into power on the back of an exciting campaign featuring an army of volunteers, including a swarm of celebrities and activists. By the day of the vote the margin between himself and Prabowo had closed dramatically and is this year spoken about it in reverential terms as predictions are made.
His first term has failed to live up to the high expectations of his supporters. Which is in part that Obama-type thing where hopes were too high and pragmatism set in, but in other respects he’s hardly helped himself. The three ‘failures’ I hear most frequently is the perception of having abandoned his former deputy governor Basuki ‘Ahok’ Tjahaja Purnama during the heady Jakarta gubernatorial election and subsequent jailing, the selection of Ma’ruf Amin as running mate and the disregard for his human rights promises. We’ll look at this final point further as the campaign continues. The question of incumbency will be an interesting one. Among young progressive voters, incumbency may in fact hurt Jokowi’s chances rather than help him.
The elite challenger. You could play bingo with the Prabowo Subianto biographies. Former son-in-law of Suharto, military man, under a cloud of suspicion from 1998. He challenged Joko Widodo back in 2014 and, obviously, lost but the consistent general wisdom that he would again run come 2019 began before Jokowi was even inaugurated. I am personally very struck by the difference in conversation now than four years ago in the wake of the election. Given there’s endless pieces about who he is and what it all means, we may as well focus on that here instead.
In Western press in 2014, the lines were so clearly (and perhaps unethically) defined — Jokowi was the saviour, Prabowo the villain. This view persisted into the first few years of Jokowi’s run but has markedly changed in recent months. Indonesian voters are obviously far better equipped at parsing the nuance of political manoeuvring than us foreign journalists and concerns of Prabowo buddying up with the hardline Islamist fringes of public life are rarely met with the same kind of frenzied criticisms made in the salons of Menteng.
The most curious aspect of Prabowo, to me, is that at this stage he appears very happy to allow running mate Sandiaga Uno run about the archipelago shaking hands and taking selfies with babies while he stays back in Jakarta. Prior to nominations closing it looked as though the Prabowo camp was never certain he would be running until the last minute. Rumours have swirled, the most persistent being the Djojohadikusumo family had debated whether to nominate him with a loss then looking certain (and expensive). That has largely disappeared, particularly as the race is beginning to look very close.
The strong but silent type. Ma'ruf Amin is a lot of things. Most recently, he is a meme. Jokowi’s pick for vice-president was not particularly interested in speaking too much during the first debate of the season, birthing the first of Pilpres’ classic memes. Prior to this, he has spent decades as a powerful figure in the country’s Muslim groups including most recently as the Supreme Leader of Nahdlatul Ulama. His naming as VP candidate will, I think, be one of the more important moments of the election when it is looked back upon in the future. The move was cynically pragmatic — how can critics slam Jokowi for his religious credentials if he’s running with a community leader? — but also lost tons of progressive, young voters. I think it will be very hard to measure how many votes the move lost, but I assume it would be a net positive. But that could prove very short-sighted and we’ll look more into this and the connected golput movement in coming weeks.
Sandi’s day. Sandiaga Uno, whose naming as Prabowo’s vice-prez pick kept me up all night furrowing my brow, is so interesting to me. I’ve never seen someone so blatantly move for power. After his election as vice governor of Jakarta longside Anies Baswedan, it was only a matter of time he moved for the Top Job, although I think most punters expected that to be 2024. I am high key obsessed with him, so we will hear a lot about this businessman turned politician who cruises about the streets of Jakarta in unflattering bike shorts telling everyone chicken and rice is cheaper in Singapore.
THIS WEEK
Reds under the bed. What’s an election in this day and age without some Russia fear-mongering? President Jokowi raised the Moscow spectre earlier this month when he clumsily rejected the ‘foreign puppet’ narrative pushed by Prabowo (that would be China, of course) saying that an unnamed challenger was utilising the skills of a consultant from an unnamed country. I personally don’t think this is particularly interesting because it quickly descended into denials and accusations, including from the Russian embassy. What is interesting here is the endurance of the foreign interloper boogeyman. The Russian bot armies could be an emergent force here, as our friends in Manila have recently seen, but I think on that front the buzzers have that on lock. You do have to feel a little for Defence Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu who welcomed his Russian counterpart to town as all of this was unfolding. Oh, boy.
It’s the economy, bodoh. The economic story of Indonesia for the last couple of years has been the global emerging markets slump and other headwinds which are, largely, out of Indonesia’s policy control. Last year was particularly tough with stocks and the rupiah weakening but the economic team behind the president, including the fan favourite Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, and Bank Indonesia have been applauded for navigating the storm. Growth reached its fastest rate of the Jokowi years last year, hitting 5.17 percent. That was less than the already-revised 5.4 percent target. The 2014 election campaign promise of 7 percent growth has weighed heavily on the president and has opened him up to valid criticism during his term. Prabowo is unhappy with economic management, recently calling it akin to the ‘African country of Haiti’ which saw him receive far more ridicule than Jokowi. He says economic management has been on the wrong path since the fall of Suharto so expect this to ramp up dramatically.
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