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Kaesang joins PSI ahead of Depok run
President Joko Widodo’s youngest son, Kaesang Pangarep, has joined Partai Solidaritas Indonesia. As with just about everything at the moment, it is reflective of the internecine beef at PDI-P between the president’s camp and that of party boss Megawati Sukarnoputri.
PSI is an interesting little outfit. Founded back in 2014, they had an exciting week or two back during the 2019 campaign after endorsing Jokowi. It was followed with glowing profile pieces about the upstart Millennial-focused party (think what we saw in Thailand with Future Forward and then Move Forward) but that failed to translate into votes. The party did not clear the 2% threshold to be represented in the DPR. In the years since, their whole thing seems to have been ‘we love Jokowi’ and are widely, if not cynically, seen as an informal youth wing of PDI-P.
That’s the point for Kaesang, writes
. He plans on running for mayor in Depok, one of Jakarta’s enormous satellite cities and home to the University of Indonesia campus. “By choosing PSI over PDI-P, Jokowi strips PDI-P of a likely easy win in Depok next year. It also conveys to PDI-P and Megawati that Jokowi is happy to send his sons off to rival parties should he be treated in such a manner,” Tantau wrote for 5 Things. “PSI will be hoping that the political clout of the Widodo family will provide the party with a much-needed electoral boost at the 2024 general and regional elections.”Kaesang himself tied PSI to Move Forward’s success during a meeting in his hometown of Solo this weekend. “Let's take a look at the Move Forward Party in Thailand, composed of young individuals, which managed to succeed in the elections. If they can do it in Thailand, we can do the same in Indonesia,” he said, as reported by the Jakarta Globe.
This is my little bugbear, I think. These sorts of characterisations misunderstand why Move Forward was so immensely successful — the age factor, I think, has much less of a role than the overarching political environment of Thailand which, thankfully, Indonesia has not experienced for some time.
Still, his comments on youth voters are more than welcome, in my view. Even as a young would-be politician who is obviously highly connected, he’s right: “The younger generation has often played a passive role in elections. We want them to be more active because the future of our nation rests in their hands.”
SBY ditches Anies, backs Prabowo
To the shock of no one, former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has thrown his Democratic Party lot in with Prabowo Subianto. After Anies Baswedan selected PKB’s Cak Imin as running mate — and not scion Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono — SBY responded in barely veiled rage, condemning the candidate for not holding his word.
Both the Democrats and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), mates within Anies’ Coalition of Change for Unity, were surprised by the VP announcement, although PKS has since decided to stay put.
Yurica Lai (whose reporting for the Jakarta Post is top tier) notes a talked about collab with the United Development Party (PPP) could have resulted in a Sandiaga Uno-Agus ticket, but was widely seen as “unconvincing,” in the words of one analyst. That SBY would find a home with Gerindra, given the Dems don’t hold enough seats to nominate on its own, seemed a likely solution before it was announced last weekend.
Jokowi’s no lame duck
It really is a remarkable position President Joko Widodo is in as he reaches the end of his two terms. ‘Keep the ship right’ is his message to those vying to be his successor, and vowing to do so is a common refrain from the candidates.
“Each leader shouldn’t have their own vision — changing the vision and the orientation would put us back at the start,” the president told Bloomberg last week, reflecting on the economic and infrastructure packages on which he campaigned in 2019. He had an enormous hiccup there with the pandemic but he is full steam ahead now, he told the finance paper from the imminently-opening high-speed rail project connecting Jakarta and Bandung. He’s got ‘16 new airports, 18 new ports, 36 dams and over 2,000 kilometres of toll roads’ coming down the pipeline.
Fake news and millions of views: Bawasalu and TikTok team up
Bawasalu, the general election supervisory agency, has teamed up with TikTok to stamp out misinformation on the app as the race heats up. “We have found a great meeting point on the community standard. We have the agreement, so it's a matter of the flexibility to enforce the agreement in accordance with Bawaslu's inquiries to safeguard the 2024 general elections,” Bawasalu member Lolly Suhenty said on Sept. 19 after the agreement was signed, as per Tempo.
She pointed out that in 2019, the agency received over 5,000 complaints about content on the site and 193 of those were found to be violations. “We pressed for these accounts to be taken down, but only 43 of them were taken down. The issue lies with unequal community standards,” she said.
This is something that’s been on my mind a lot this year, after reading Nuurrianti Jalli’s fantastic piece in the Conversation back in March looking at hate speech on the platform during Malaysia’s general election last year. Malaysia certainly has its own unique elements there, but Jalli notes the platform itself did little intervention, even on the most egregious examples.
Given Indonesia’s user base — second only in the world to the US — and ongoing fears of misinformation and fake news causing divisions, how this will look in practice will be interesting.
More on Cak Imin and the NU influence
Ahalla Tsauro and Fakhridho Susilo have more on what the Anies Baswedan-Muhaimin Iskandar ticket can tell us about the direction of the powerful Nahdlatul Ulama. “As the largest Muslim organisation in Indonesia, the votes of NU grassroots followers — or nahdliyin — have always been highly prized, and even considered a decisive factor in securing victory in presidential elections,” the pair wrote this month for New Mandala. They point to President Joko Widodo’s selection of Kyai Maruf Amin as running mate in 2019 as a decisive factor in his win.
But the new ticket has “brought into light existing fissures within the nahdliyin community.” These are far-sweeping, they contend, and include the organisation’s overall ideological orientation and the role NU plays in electoral politics. A lot of that comes back to Anies’ courting of hardline elements during the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial campaign, which was seen by many in NU as anathema to what the organisation stands for.
“At the grassroots level, and especially on social media, tensions surrounding Muhaimin’s nomination have been reflected in a split between those who oppose the nomination on the grounds of maintaining the “neutrality” of NU as a social organisation and those who believe that the political identity of PKB [the National Awakening Party, of which Cak Imin is chair] is inseparable from NU’s socio-ideological milieu,” they write.