Prabowo teamed him up with a seasoned regional politician from his own Gerindra party, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama—usually known by his Hakka-language nickname, “Ahok”—an ethnic Chinese former bupati on the tin-mining island of Belitung. The Gerindra cadres set to work, taking a detailed manifesto for city improvement around the capital’s neighborhoods. The combination of the down-to-earth Jokowi, Javanese and Muslim, and the blunt-speaking Ahok, ethnic Chinese and Christian, swept to victory, signaling a more inclusive mentality in a city that had a long tradition of backing Islamic parties and the Golkar machine.
Within a year, Widodo was so popular that calls mounted for Megawati to stand aside and make him her party’s candidate for president. Opinion polls showed him significantly ahead of the next most popular figure, Prabowo. Inside the PDI-P, the push for Widodo came from the realization that Megawati was unlikely to win the presidency herself; he was the only chance to get the party back into power. Moreover, he was so popular that numerous candidates could expect to win seats in legislatures on his coattails, without the usual campaign expenditure. Outside the party, it was a case both of Widodo’s own popularity and, for some, of the appeal of someone who could defeat Prabowo. Despite his perceived disregard for political guile, however, Widodo paid careful homage to entrenched power groups. On the day of the scandal of the murderous raid on Yogyakarta’s Cebongan prison by vengeful Kopassus soldiers, the Jakarta governor made a call at the Kopassus headquarters on the fringe of the capital—a gesture of support.
Megawati herself was reluctant to step back from the leadership. She had a strong sense of the party as the home of Sukarnoism. Would that family legacy disappear once Widodo took the leadership? While not rejecting Widodo as a possibility, she kept her options open until late in the run-up to the April 2014 parliamentary elections. Disguising his ambitions, Widodo held back from pushing the question for fear of offending her pride. Her followers floated the idea of Widodo serving an apprenticeship as her vice president. This offered Megawati a good prospect of the presidential election win that had eluded her three times before. For his part, an increasingly testy Prabowo tried to hold Megawati to her agreement of 2009. Her entourage could only vaguely remember the piece of paper. When they did recall it, they said it had lapsed because the Megawati-Prabowo team had lost in 2009.
Prabowo’s second line of argument was that Widodo had won Jakarta because of Gerindra’s initiative and campaign support. He had also promised the people of Jakarta to serve them for five years; he needed to show results from his governorship and would still be young enough to contest the presidency in 2019. All Prabowo’s effort and all the funding poured by himself and Hashim into Gerindra since 2008 (about $500 million in total, some of his supporters estimated) depended, it seemed, on Widodo’s sense of his obligations, as well as on Megawati’s stubborn pride.
Early in 2014, however, Megawati recognized what the opinion polls were saying and decided to hand the presidential candidacy to Widodo. The tactical question then arose: when to announce it? Going public too early, Megawati feared, would make her legislative candidates and party campaign managers too complacent. Widodo and his advisers argued that continued suspense would reduce the effectiveness of his contribution to the PDI-P campaign. Megawati held out until the eve of the official three-week campaign period before revealing that Widodo had been anointed to carry forward the Sukarno heritage.
Other parties and candidates trailed behind these two leading camps. In Golkar, the business magnate Aburizal Bakrie held control of the party machine and insisted he would run as its presidential candidate. He had won the party chairmanship in 2009 and had gotten himself nominated in a process that denied others the opportunity to put themselves forward for selection. Free advertising on his group’s two television channels and the publicity spinoff from owning several football clubs projected “Ical” (his preferred nickname) as a down-to-earth pragmatist who could get Indonesia moving.
Bakrie’s standing in the opinion polls languished, however. At Sidoarjo in East Java stood an effigy of him wearing a yellow Golkar campaign shirt, on the vast field of mud spilling from his company’s exploration well. The ongoing dispute in London with other shareholders in the Bumi coal enterprise suggested a business group that was veering from one loan crisis to another, with Bakrie perhaps out to use Golkar’s political power to keep the government agencies off his back.
No alternatives to Bakrie stood out as potential election winners. The former vice president and party chairman, Jusuf Kalla, had been knocked out in the first-round vote in 2009 when he stood as Golkar candidate with the ex-general Wiranto as his running mate. By 2014 his peacemaking in the eastern islands and Aceh was many years ago, and Kalla himself—turning 72 in May 2014—was regarded as too old for the youthful electorate. Scandal-tarnished figures from the New Order were visible elsewhere in the party’s senior hierarchy. Golkar, it was said, was a party that eats its young. And did it really need the presidency? Holding a consistent 20 percent or so of the vote and the parliamentary seats throughout the reform era, Golkar was highly useful, if not essential, for getting any difficult policy into application. Bargaining was what politics was all about.
Divided according to the different religious aliran (streams), wracked internally by personality disputes, and hit by various scandals, the Muslim parties also seemed set to remain in supporting roles. The PKS, or Prosperous Justice Party, which had once seemed the rising star in Indonesian politics, had sunk in public esteem after the unseemly multiple marriages of its top leaders and the involvement of some of them in the massive beef import corruption case, in which former party president Lutfi Hasan Ishaaq received a sixteen-year jail sentence in December 2013. The other three main Muslim parties—the PAN, under Yudhoyono’s senior minister Hatta Rajasa, the PKB, which was squabbling over Abdurrahman Wahid’s legacy, and the PPP, led by Yudhoyono’s contentious religious affairs minister Suryadharma Ali—were useful allies rather than serious contenders for majority support.
The steady Islamization of Indonesian society was reassuring for believers, who could look at parties that had ideas about improving their livelihoods and welfare. Their leaders were potential running mates for secular candidates. Nominations to run in the presidential election also required the backing of 20 percent of the parliamentary membership elected three months earlier (or 25 percent of the popular vote). The Muslim parties could help lift a candidate over this threshold—hence Yudhoyono’s careful inclusion of them all in his governing coalition, rewarded by ministerial positions. Prabowo, too, seemed alert to this contingency, with his longtime ally and controversial former Kopassus colleague Muchdi Purwoprandjono leaving Gerindra to join the PPP in 2011.
In the election for the DPR held on April 9, 2014 no party emerged with a very clear claim on power. The PDI-P gained the biggest vote, 18.95 per cent, but not quite yielding the 20 per cent of seats needed to nominate a presidential candidate on its own, and showing the effects of Widodo’s delayed anointment. Golkar won 14.75 per cent and Gerindra 11.81 per cent. These three parties were thus in the running to form coalitions around them for a presidential tilt. Yudhoyono’s Partai Demokrat won 10.19 per cent but lacked a magnetic candidate to succeed him. The Muslim parties faired surprisingly well: The NU-based PKB at 9.04 per cent, the Muhammadiyah-linked PAN at 7.59 per cent, the PPP at 6.53 per cent and the Muslim Brotherhood-influenced PKS at 6.79 per cent (the latter confounding predictions that its scandals might result in failure to reach the 3.5 per cent threshold to win DPR seats). Along with two secular parties led by rejected Golkar aspirants, retired general Wiranto’s Hanura at 5.26 percent and media tycoon Surya Paloh’s NasDem (National Democrat) at 6.72 percent, these second-echelon parties were candidates for courtship in the presidential dance.
With the Democrats tied to Yudhoyono’s weak legacy, and Golkar locked to a widely disliked leader in Bakrie, the presidential competition got down to a two-ca
ndidate race. A combination of horse-trading and fervent Islamic appeal gained Prabowo the support of PAN, after he chose its Hatta Rajasa as running mate, and the PKS, with the PPP also signing up, despite an internal revolt against its leader, Suryadharma Ali (by then sacked as religious affairs minister and facing corruption investigations). Prabowo also evoked New Order nostalgia for “firm” government in his overtures to Golkar, which eventually succumbed. This gave him, at least while he looked a potential winner, the backing of nearly 60 per cent of the DPR membership, a vital source of support for a president in a system lacking a US-style presidential veto over legislation. Widodo’s main support outside the PDI-P came from the PKB, from Paloh’s NasDem, and from a clutch of former army generals with deep distrust of Prabowo. These included Wiranto, who brought in his Hanura party, former Jakarta governor Sutiyoso, who had a small party of his own, and Luhut Panjaitan, by then an influential businessman. But from looking like a cakewalk for Widodo, in polling early in the year, the competition narrowed to the point where a month before the election, some polling institutions linked to interests fearful of Prabowo withheld their findings.
The theme of politics as SBY’s presidency drew to an end was the kind of government Indonesia needed after a decade of perceived indecisiveness. Prabowo made much of the scandals emerging among provincial and regional governments, suggesting that a tightening of Jakarta’s control was the remedy. Yudhoyono’s own party was floating a draft law to abolish direct elections of bupati and mayors. In official speeches, especially by military leaders, the term Negara Kesatuan (Unitary State) was increasingly attached to Republik Indonesia, which had sufficed until the reform period.
Prabowo ramped up this theme, launching his campaign with a mass rally at a Jakarta football stadium at which he arrived by helicopter and then, wearing knee-high boots, rode a chestnut horse around the perimeter along ranks of young men in red-and-white uniforms. Here and in other speeches in the Indonesian language, he railed against the “thieves” who were stealing Indonesia’s wealth or selling out to foreign interests, and made conspicuous Koranic references. To those with long memories, it looked like protesting too much: Prabowo was the son of the economist whose pupils had re-opened Indonesia to foreign investment and who at one time had been on the CIA payroll; his mother was a Christian from Manado, and his father from the aristocratic priyayi class known for its Hindu leanings; Prabowo himself had been educated outside Indonesia. Yet with 30 per cent of the 188 million eligible voters aged between 17 and 29, many had no memory of all this, nor of the old human rights cases. As the campaign drew on, Prabowo appealed to authoritarian as well as nationalistic yearnings. In one speech ten days ahead of the July 9 vote, he spoke favorably of “a return to the 1945 Constitution” (the charter that conferred wide emergency powers on the president in the desperate days after Japan’s surrender (and of decision-making by consensus rather than majority vote. The floating of this idea deepened fears that a victorious Prabowo would set about undoing all the democratic reforms since the fall of his ex-father-in-law in 1998. Even further, Prabowo’s campaign consciously tried to awaken millenarian hopes among the Javanese: his campaign workers handed out 50,000 rupiah banknotes with a stamp proclaiming him as the ratu adil, the “just ruler” expected in Javanese tradition to appear and come to the rescue when dynasties declined and disorder ruled.
There was a darker side to the campaign too, recalling the “birther” smear against Barack Obama. An unregistered tabloid newspaper appeared six weeks ahead of the vote, showing a fake marriage certificate purporting to show Joko Widodo was a Christian and of Chinese parentage. The newspaper was circulated around mosques and Islamic schools, evidently using a mailing list held at the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was allocated to the PPP in Yudhoyono’s government, a party by then allied to Prabowo. An official in the periphery of Yudhoyono’s advisory circle was identified as the publisher. This crude smear, playing to ethnic and religious prejudice, was patently false, but Widodo felt obliged to make his own Islamic faith more conspicuous (including by a quick umroh or short pilgrimage to Mecca just ahead of the vote).
The generals on Widodo’s side threw back what seemed to be rather more truthful negatives on Prabowo’s part. They said that as his seniors, they had seen military records which allegedly included adverse psychological assessments; Prabowo had been held back a year in the military academy for indiscipline; he had mounted the coup attempt against the army command in 1983; his dismissal in 1998 had been for authorizing the Tim Mawar abductions.
Nonetheless, the Jokowi campaign started weakly. It was badly organized, with the candidate’s daily scheduled hopelessly overloaded, so that local support groups were left carrying expenses when he failed to show up and busloads of reporters were trapped in traffic trying to reach venues. A coherent policy document appeared only five days before the vote. The campaign pitch was mild, emphasizing the candidate’s simple lifestyle, modest upbringing, and reputation for honesty. The slogan was “Jokowi is us.” Widodo used the word publik (the public, emphasizing citizenry with rights) rather the rakyat (the people, suggesting a passive mass) that Prabowo tended to employ. Prabowo evoked an agrarian dream of vast new agricultural zones in the outer islands keeping the bellies of the rakyat full, harking back to Suharto’s drive for self-sufficiency in rice; Widodo talked of smarter consumption of resources. Both spoke of promoting domestic enterprise and keeping foreign investors in their place. Where Prabowo offered a more tegas (firm) leadership that would take the necessary decisions, Widodo talked of administrative systems to take discretion out of the hands of politicians and officials, at least in routine transactions, and to involve the public in consultations ahead of major decisions. At least initially, Widodo looked like an ingénue wandering onto the national political stage. Some Javanese compared this to the episode Petruk Dadi Ratu (Petruk becomes king) inserted into wayang (traditional theatre) versions of the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. In this, the thin one of four clownish figures picks up a talisman of power accidentally dropped by a powerful warrior and becomes king, with comic and chaotic results. Yet as the campaign wore on, centered on five televised debates, Widodo showed more firmness in his grasp of policy issues, while Prabowo noticeably moderated his vehemence, apparently out of fear his strident appeal could evoke fear rather than respect. The vice-presidential candidates were also influential. On Prabowo’s side Hatta Rajasa delivered a welter of figures on demand. Widodo had meanwhile resisted pressures to enlist Megawati’s daughter Puan Maharani as running mate; instead he enlisted Jusuf Kalla. On television, the former vice-president put in some telling blows, including a jibe at the various “mafias” represented in a Prabowo coalition supposed to be resolute against kebocoran (leakage) of state funds.
The election became a stark choice between two kinds of leadership. As one businessman and writer in Surabaya, Johannes Nugroho, put it: “Prabowo embodies the quasi-feudal Indonesia in which leaders emerge from ‘lineage’ families such as his, the continuity of tradition and privilege of the ruling class. His brand of power is paternalism in its highest form. In complete contrasts Joko Widodo is a self-made businessman who ventured into politics, whose ancestry is no different from that of most Indonesians. Yet this is the essence of his mass appeal. Jokowi is the Indonesian Dream in the making.” Another election watcher in the East Java city, political scientist Suka Widodo, saw it as contest of old and new political styles. “In Java, there is a belief that the leader has to be impressive, handing out benefits,” he said. “By contrast Jokowi is asking for volunteers and donations from the voters, instead of handing out money to the people. Prabowo looks the part.”
If Prabowo drew on some of the George W. Bush campaign methods, Widodo’s campaign adopted part of the Barack Obama model in 2008. Large numbers of young volunteers turned out to campaign and monitor officialdom. This became critical in the count which began immediately after some 134 million of the 188 million
eligible Indonesians voted on July 9, the largest one-day election so far held anywhere. The potential for bribery with so-called uang saksi [witness money] or straight-out intimidation of officials making the first count at 460,000 voting stations across the archipelago was a real worry. That these counts were then aggregated through five stages before the final result was tallied by the Komisi Pemilu Umum [KPU, General Election Commission] in Jakarta on July 22 increased the risk of interference. But “crowd-sourcing” brought thousands of young netizens into play as a safeguard: they photographed voting tallies with their smartphones and relayed them to ad hoc networks like Kawal Pemilu [Guard the Election], set up by a young Singapore-based technology graduate, Ainun Najib, and a clutch of tech-savvy friends.
The long wait between the vote and the official count was tense for Indonesia. Early estimates by most private polling institutions, based on samples, showed Widodo with a lead. Prabowo’s camp produced their own forecasts from somewhat less credible groups. On the eve of the announcement, Prabowo appeared to announce his withdrawal from the election, claiming systemic cheating in the count; his headquarters called for a massing of supporters outside the KPU for the announcement; it appeared to some analysts that the expected loser might create unrest. Yudhoyono was concerned enough to sack his army chief, General Budiman, that night. Reports of the army’s village-level monitors, the sergeants known as babinsa, making the rounds of households to urge votes for Prabowo had been widespread. The military had a strong stake in the election, hoping Prabowo would wrestle back anti-terrorism and internal security responsibility from the police if he won.
But support was melting away from Prabowo. His running mate, Hatta Rajasa, failed to appear with him at press conferences, and his chief legal adviser resigned. The result confirmed Widodo had won with 53.15 per cent of the vote, a margin of some 8.5 million votes too big for a challenge in the Constitutional Court to disqualify. The Jokowi era was about to begin. In his victory speech, delivered late that night from the deck of a traditional wooden ship docked in Sunda Kelapa, Jakarta’s old port, Widodo declared a duty to show that “politics is full of fun, that there is happiness in politics, that there is goodness in politics, and that politics is a liberation” and that Indonesia’s “long-lost voluntarism is now back with a new spirit.”
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