Of the many states holding elections this year, the upshot in Indonesia is perhaps the most opaque. In the world’s fourth-largest country, and by far the most populous Muslim state, the presidency was won by a former Special Forces general, the ex-dictator’s son-in-law, with a record of overseeing counter-insurgency massacres in East Timor and West Papua in the 1980s and 90s, as well as abducting and torturing democracy activists, and inciting riots that killed more than a thousand in 1998: Prabowo Subianto. Yet Prabowo’s previous runs for the presidential seat in 2014 and 2019 had ended in humiliating defeat at the hands of his bitter rival, Jokowi, the popular candidate of the pdi–p, a party with roots in Indonesia’s post-independence era. This time, too, Prabowo was floundering in the polls until Jokowi, after failing to extend his presidential term, lent him a helping hand—not only giving Prabowo explicit support against the official pdi–p candidate, and mobilizing the state machinery behind him, but providing his son Gibran as Prabowo’s running-mate, after getting the Constitutional Court, currently headed by his son-in-law, to lower the eligibility age for vice-presidential candidates.

The February 2024 election result showed a thundering first-round victory for Prabowo, with close to 59 per cent of the vote on a turnout of 82 per cent. Almost half of pdi–p supporters split the ticket—backing pdi–p candidates for the legislature, but Prabowo as president. Many activists, lawyers and journalists cried foul, protesting at Jokowi’s promiscuous display of nepotism and Prabowo’s blatant collusion. Yet, ahead of the scheduled transfer of power in October, Jokowi’s approval rating had remained high, at over 70 per cent, until major protests erupted in August. To understand this outcome, it may be helpful to set it in a comparative frame.

The classic left–right division of party systems has undergone a mutation, diminution or even obliteration across much of the world in the 21st century—a sign of what Wang Hui has called ‘depoliticized politics’.footnote¹ The continent that forms an exception to this trend is the Americas. Last year, Brazil saw a fiercely polarized contest between Lula and Bolsonaro; this year, between amlo’s successor and a standard-bearer of the right in Mexico—both ending in victories, one narrow and the other broad, of the left. In November, the United States will see a replay of the virulently partisan competition of 2016 and 2020. In Europe, national elections mostly proceed along apparently traditional lines—yielding to clear-cut outcomes only where, as in Britain, electoral systems are rigged to produce them—but the differences between centre-right and centre-left parties have become so small that, at eu level, a ‘Groko’ (Grosse Koalition) fusing these into a single establishment bloc, has dominated the Strasbourg–Brussels Parliament without interruption since the Treaty of Maastricht. Parties of populist protest lie more or less impotently on either side of the Groko, though mostly to its right, as Europe’s working classes now tend to vote for right populisms rather than left; they operate as ostracized outsiders to the system, when they don’t get drawn into its consensual logic.

In Asia, the pattern is not just the diminution of the left–right division but its root-and-branch elimination. It’s true that in South Korea, conservative and left-democratic parties regularly battle it out at the polls, government alternating between them. In more mitigated form, the contest has resurfaced on the other side of the continent, in Turkey. But virtually everywhere else, the general trend shows its effacement by one degree or another of dynastic politics. The divisions structuring the electoral field are not ideological expressions of class politics, but differences of religious, territorial or ethnic identity, capitalized by family ties or privilege. These can coexist with older forms of political preference and need not be monopolistic to determine the overall character of electoral competition. The pattern can persist without the familial element, as in Taiwan, where the two main parties are largely indistinguishable, differing only on territorial relations with China.

Where there is no electoral competition at all, dynastic succession pure and simple can prevail, as in the three generations of Kims ruling North Korea. In Laos, Sonexay Siphandone’s father, and in Cambodia, Hun Manet’s, smoothed the ascent to power. In the near one-party state of Japan, kinship has been a constant of elite politics, from the Kishi–Sato–Abe line to the Hatoyama, Koizumi, Tanaka connections, without the ldp’s grip on power being affected at the polls. In Thailand, where Thaksin won a strong peasant base in the countryside but was ousted from office by the military, his sister and now daughter could each become Premier as locums for him. In the Philippines, the Aquino, Marcos and Macapagal clans have ruled their country for over half its history as an independent state, as have the two Begums of rival clans—Hasina and Khaleda, each widow of a former ruler—in Bangladesh; in Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew and his son have been in office for four-fifths. Aung San Suu Kyi and Sirimavo Bandaranaike, daughter and widow of post-independence leaders of their nations, fitted the bill in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, the latter followed by the trio of Rajapaksa brothers. Longest lasting of all has been the regnant dynasty of Congress in India, the Nehru–Gandhi line stretching from Pandit to Indira to Rajiv to Sonia and now to Rahul. Pakistan mustered Bhutto, his daughter Benazir and her widower Zardari, the current president. Further west, the Aliev and Assad clans in Azerbaijan and Syria, together with the numerous hereditary sultans and sheikhs of the Arab world and of Brunei, complete the picture.

Indonesia may not stand out among its neighbours in reproducing this ‘depoliticized politics’ and dynastic pattern, though, as we’ll see, the levels of familial nepotism, corruption and collusion—so ubiquitous that they are popularly known among Indonesians as nkk—and the ease with which parties and politicians switch loyalties, are in a class of their own. Some of these parties have deep roots; some of the governing families, too. But the depoliticization is more recent. It has been produced and reproduced in different stages, interacting with dynasticism’s thickening webs. It is worth unpacking what these have been, to gain an understanding of Prabowo’s ascent.

Across South and Southeast Asia, independence movements against the occupying European colonial powers incubated quite a few of the subsequent dynastic families. Dutch colonial rule, expanding from spice-trade posts in the seventeenth century to island-by-island military conquest in the nineteenth, forged a ramshackle administrative unit out of hundreds of pre-existing polities, stretching across the 3,000-mile archipelago—the ancient Javanese kingdom, the Sumatran sultanate, old trading ports, secluded villages—encompassing thousands of barely inhabited islands. While peasants were drafted as coolie labour in the plantations, mines and forests, the sons of the traditional Javanese aristocracy, the priyayi, were recruited to staff the expanding colonial service. Prabowo’s family came from this layer. His grandfather Margono Djojohadikusumo, born in Java in 1894, was a high-ranking ambtenaar civil servant in the colonial administration, operating at the intersection of government and finance, who helped found the country’s Central Bank.footnote² The grandfather on Prabowo’s Minahasan mother’s side, meanwhile, was another senior ambtenaar, member of the colonial Volksraad, an advisory assembly set up by the Dutch authorities, in Manado, Sulawesi, descending from a Hulptroepen captain contracted by the Dutch Empire to crush rebels in the Java War of 1825–30.footnote³