Prabowo’s Year One

No sooner was Prabowo Subianto sworn in as President of Indonesia on 20 October 2024 than the carefully cultivated image of the cuddly grandad was discarded.footnote¹ What emerged from behind the mask was a more familiar visage: arrogant, militaristic, aristocratic, impatient with procedural constraint. The transformation was not so much a rupture as the resolution of a long contradiction. More than any other contemporary Indonesian politician’s, Prabowo’s career has been identified with the dictatorial New Order of his late father-in-law, General Suharto, who, with the armed forces (tni), ruled the country with an iron fist from 1965 to 1998; years marked by the massacre of over half a million Communist Party sympathizers, the incarceration of a million political prisoners on the outer islands, the obliteration of ‘subversive’ ideologies and the ruthless suppression of dissent—not least in East Timor, where Prabowo himself led the murderous counter-insurgency campaign in the 1980s, and in the violence unleashed against the pro-democracy demonstrators who finally overthrew Suharto’s regime in 1998, some of them abducted and ‘disappeared’ on Prabowo’s orders.footnote²

Following his disgrace and self-imposed exile during the first years of the post-1998 democratic-reform era—the Reformasi—Prabowo returned to Indonesia with the hope of contesting the 2004 presidential election for Golkar, the former dictator’s political vehicle. Failing there, he launched his own outfit, the Gerindra Party, with the backing of Hashim Djojohadikusumo, his wealthy younger brother, Muchdi Purwopranjono—a close friend involved in the abductions and assassinations of pro-democracy activists whose career Prabowo had lobbied his father-in-law to further—and Fadli Zon, a budding intellectual under the New Order and Indonesia’s current Minister of Culture. After losing as Megawati Sukarnoputri’s running mate in 2009, Prabowo ran as Gerindra’s presidential candidate against Jokowi (Joko Widodo) in the 2014 and 2019 elections, losing both times. In 2024, now with the connivance of Jokowi—the democratic ‘hope and change’ president turned ally of convenience—the 72-year-old Prabowo at last secured the prize that had eluded him.footnote³ His first year in office has been animated by a single overriding task: to convert an electoral victory into durable political authority, while reengineering the Reformasi settlement that had circumscribed executive power after Suharto’s fall.

To grasp what is at stake here, it may be helpful to sketch the arc of Reformasi itself. The initial period after the fall of the dictator saw the most radical reforms. Between 1998 and 2001, under interim president B. J. Habibie and then Abdurrahman Wahid—leader of the Islamic organization Nahdlatul Ulama—press censorship was lifted, political prisoners freed and fiscal and administrative authority devolved down to the regions, reducing at a stroke the highly centralized accumulation of power in the president’s hands that had developed under Suharto. The ubiquitous presence of tni generals in the political and civil administrations was lessened with the formal abolition of dwifungsi, the civilian-military ‘dual function’ allotted to the armed forces under the dictatorship. Investigations into the 1965–6 massacres were tentatively opened, new history textbooks were produced and fragile constellations of labour groups, students and left organizations sprouted after decades of repression.

The subsequent period saw the re-emergence of the oligarchy that had grown rich under the New Order, now fragmented into competing political factions.footnote⁴ Under Megawati Sukarnoputri (2001–04) and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (2004–14), key institutional reforms were consolidated—notably the establishment of the Corruption Eradication Commission (kpk) and the empowerment of the Constitutional Court—but Reformasi’s deeper social and political ambitions were stalled. Elections became highly monetized, with celebrity candidates drafted in and oligarchic party-cartels dominating the parliament at national (dpr) and local (dprd) levels. Although dwifungsi was abolished in law, the military retained its Territorial Command structure, preserving a dense village-level presence with deeply rooted political networks and extra-budgetary sources of income extorted from local enterprise.

Jokowi entered office in 2014 as an outsider candidate promising the renewal of Reformasi, freed of its authoritarian and oligarchic residues, and even hinted at a proper investigation of the 1965–66 mass killings. Instead, his administration systematically weakened the institutions intended to constrain executive power, defanging the kpk and the Constitutional Court. In 2020 Jokowi pushed through an Omnibus Law, shrinking labour and indigenous rights and rolling back environmental protections. He folded Golkar and Gerindra into his sprawling coalition government and appointed Prabowo Minister of Defence. Ultimately, having considered trying for an unconstitutional third term, he backed Prabowo as his successor, leaning on the Constitutional Court to allow his son, Gibran, to run as Prabowo’s vice president, despite being underage. Given his many backers in the state administration, and above all in the police, Jokowi no doubt thought this would ensure his continued influence and perhaps another shot at the presidency in 2029.footnote⁵

Prabowo’s presidency is best read as the culmination of this long counter-Reformasi drift, distinguished by his open ambition to reverse the post-1998 settlement. In practice, this has translated into a crash programme of fiscal and political recentralization, combined with a major asset grab of state-owned enterprises and the creeping re-militarization of top administrative posts. In January 2025, the government implemented sweeping budget cuts of 256 trillion rupiah, nearly $16 billion, plus a 50 trillion rupiah cut in spending for the regional administrations. The revenues were reallocated to expand the security forces’ budgets, to fund two projects—free school lunches and village cooperatives—aimed at building Prabowo’s electoral base and to float a new sovereign wealth fund, Danantara, which launched in February 2025.footnote⁶ In March, Prabowo pushed through revisions to the military law to permit serving officers to take up positions in fourteen additional government ministries and agencies, in addition to the security, intelligence and disaster-relief roles they were already occupying. Prabowo was building here on foundations laid by his predecessors to recentralize economic command.footnote⁷ But while the tni had made some inroads under Jokowi, the March 2025 military-law amendments—along with a 36 per cent increase in the armed forces’ budget, at a time of fiscal efisiensi (efficiency) and stuttering economic growth—formalized the return of the generals to civil administration.footnote⁸ This did not entail the weakening of the police force, long seen as especially loyal to Jokowi; all the security forces, the police included, were rewarded. At the same time, Prabowo is trying to abolish the direct election of regional heads—governors, mayors and regents—institutionalized in 2005 under the Reformasi.footnote⁹

These priorities speak volumes about the regime’s underlying logic. Danantara, the sovereign wealth fund designated as the central dynamo of Prabowo’s push for 8 per cent annual growth rates, has a mandate both to restructure Indonesia’s state-owned enterprises and to leverage them into an investment vehicle, consolidating diverse semi-autonomous conglomerates under a centralized managerial body which reports directly to the President.footnote¹⁰ Its governance structure includes a steering committee manned by his predecessors, Jokowi and Yudhoyono, alongside an advisory board featuring Ray Dalio, Jeffrey Sachs and Thaksin Shinawatra. With potential assets claimed at nearly 15 quadrillion rupiah (around $900 billion), Danantara is already being described as the world’s seventh largest sovereign wealth fund.footnote¹¹ A number of models have been cited, ranging from Singapore’s Temasek Holdings to the China Investment Corporation and Malaysia’s Khazanah. Left unsaid is the degree to which those funds rest on disciplined party hierarchies, relatively strong planning agencies and enforceable constraints on capital—conditions nowhere to be seen in Indonesia’s oligarchic political economy, where state-owned enterprises have long been instruments for rent-seeking. Accelerated patrimonialism rather than developmental coordination seems the more likely outcome.footnote¹²