WHAT'S NOT TO LIKE? EVERYTHING

 THE KRAKEN WAKES - CLOSE BY  

O Judgment ! Thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason. ― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

The cross-eyed sidekick in Jokowi's eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming

To lead their nation for the next five years Indonesians have picked a sinister military autocrat with a hideous past masquerading as a comic character.

 Through a series of cuddly cartoons, untested promises and silly claims electors were seduced into believing Prabowo Subianto, 72, a cashiered general with a dirty history was really a gemoy,  an adorable and funny guy, fit and proper to run the world’s fourth-largest nation.

Though the two failed candidates (an academic and an administrator) plus 48 civil society watchdogs have alleged  malfeasance, overall the 14 February electoral process seems  likely to withstand challenges.

The campaign had buckets of ballyhoo and thimbles of quality.  The focus was on personalities, not policy.  Avowed piety eclipsed proven merit.

Just as US Republicans backing Donald Trump ignore his gross transgressions and court convictions, so the Indonesian oligarchs, military and big business who run the nation have stamped down a grim past to lift their man into office.

In 2019 President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo invited his once bitter rival to become Defence Minister, ensuring a platform.  Last month he promoted Prabowo to four-star honorary general giving the disgraced soldier more status and bestowing forgiveness.

That's a gesture not all respect, particularly those who believe electors have been sold more than a pup.  They fear discovering their rights and freedoms have been savaged as Indonesia once again becomes a hard-line military dictatorship.

For 32 years (1966-1998) the country was controlled by General Soeharto, Prabowo’s former father-in-law.  Prabowo and his wife divorced 25 years ago and neither has  remarried.

So who is our neighbour's choice? Is the leader-to-be a fascist, a dictator or a reformed bully?  He's certainly a poor reader claiming a sci-fi novel was a research document predicting the end of Indonesia this decade as rapacious foreigners plundered the archipelago’s riches.

Defence Minister Richard Marles has called him  ‘very much a friend of Australia’.

Not all see him so benignly. One-time UN advisor Pat Walsh doubts Prabowo has the  temperament and skill to govern - or the history.  He’s assembled a backgrounder of Prabowo’s East Timor tours with soldiers and militias under his command allegedly committing murders of unarmed civilians and gross human rights abuses.

Former Australian Senator Rex Patrick and journalist Dr  Philip Dorling have summarised what happened in 1998:  ‘Troops under Prabowo's command kidnapped and tortured democracy activists and the General was implicated in orchestrating mob violence in Jakarta against Indonesians of Chinese descent’.

That same year Prabowo was dishonourably discharged from the army and fled to exile in Jordan. He was banned from the US and Australia till 2014. He eventually returned to his homeland and with family help became a business tycoon and political aspirant.  He has never been charged.

Although it put him in power Prabowo isn’t keen on democracy. He joined the military as a teen. Though he’s been educated in the US, UK, briefly at Duntroon and is a polyglot, these are his Trump-style repetitions  according to The Jakarta Post:

 "I’ve participated in five general elections and let me attest, let me testify, that democracy is really, very, very tiring …very, very messy and costly."

He said much the same a decade ago though better expressed during his first shot at the top job. Two Australian experts on Indonesian politics wrote then that he’d asserted “direct elections were not compatible with the Indonesian cultural character.”

The academics commented: “This is an extraordinary state of affairs. It is very rare in the modern world for would-be autocrats to openly state that they want to destroy the electoral system through which they seek to achieve power.

“They mostly mask such intentions before they’re elected.”

Nor is Prabowo fond of a feisty free media, castigating journalists for allegedly “manipulating democracy”. He’s declined interviews with Western writers (including this correspondent), probably concerned they’d ask about his past and highlight transgressions.  Human Rights Watch said he did not respond to questions.

The real thing

Although his unsubstantiated xenophobia was widely rubbished, the hidden message is that thugs are Christians (the second largest faith group though only ten per cent of the citizenry) or the hated atheists - an even smaller minority. Religion can be an explosive issue.

Western governments have to deal with whoever is delivered by voters. Indonesians have picked Prabowo and Canberra must accept their choice.  That doesn't mean they're right.

## 

First published in Independent Australia, 17 March 2024: https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/indonesia-elected-former-military-officer-with-autocratic-streak,18429

DON'T CRY FOR ME INDONESIA - I NEVER LEFT YOU

 KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY

Why did well over half the 200-plus million Indonesian registered electors choose disgraced general Prabowo Subianto as their next President?  Duncan Graham has some answers.

Authority - and fun.  The former cashiered general banned from the US and Australia in a previous life has on early counts  won almost 60 per cent of the popular vote.  Locally he’s considered certain to be the  Republic’s eighth president in October when sworn-in.   He’s even been congratulated by PM Anthony Albanese on X.

He got to the top by portraying himself dishonestly. He purported to be a softie, a good guy when in reality he's an army thug who allegedly did evil things in Java and East Timor.

Prabowo's earlier campaigns (he tried three times and lost the lot) had him as a strutting dictator much like Mussolini the pro-Hitler leader of Italy in the 1930s, complete with a prancing stallion and ranks of guards.

His 2024 appeal was not as a fascist but a jolly oldie, a try-hard who deserved the chance to run the world’s fourth largest nation with 280 million just like the present popular president Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo.

The division is stark, the “gap between the richest and the rest in Indonesia (growing) faster than in any other country in Southeast Asia,” according to Oxfam International.

“It is now the sixth country of greatest wealth inequality in the world. Today, the four richest men in Indonesia have more wealth than the combined total of the poorest 100 million people.”

Prabowo and his brother Hashim Djojohadikusumo, 69, are among the mega-rich.  Unlike Jokowi who came from a riverside shack and could relate to the downtrodden, Prabowo has always been up there with the elite and has no personal knowledge of poverty.

The vast sums spent on getting him elected created an atmosphere of must-win, will-win.

In the 2019 election where Jokowi beat Prabowo by 11 points, religion was considered so important that the winner had an aged Islamic scholar as his sidekick.  This time faith was barely an issue; though Gibran Rakabuming, his Dad and Prabowo are all Muslims they’re  not known for their piety.

Hashim, Prabowo’s brother and co-founder of their Gerindra Party, is a Christian.  So was their late mother  Dora Maria Sigar.  But the family’s beliefs didn’t become a factor in this year’s campaign in a nation where religion dominates all, from food to clothing to lifestyle.

Prabowo was seen as a leader with authority who wouldn't bother electors with boring issues like the economy, corruption, debt to China and foreign relations.  Leave that to the minority eggheads.  The people wanted cheaper foods and a tough guy who'll take them back to the imagined glorious days of his late one-time father-in-law Soeharto.

The second president handled everything, including the killing of anyone that got in his way.  His administration called itself Orde Baru (New Order). Soeharto was a ruthless military dictator who neutered opposition by orchestrating the genocide of an estimated half-million ‘Communists’.

The US and Australia approved. The late PM Harold Holt was quoted as telling the New York Times: "With 500,000 to 1 million Communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.”

Prabowo comes from the same hate factory.  Most volunteers who join the military in any country are women and men who like killing people and fixing problems with force.  They tend to be doers, not debaters. They thrive on discipline.

It's a condemnation of Indonesian schooling  that the present generation is tragically  too ill-educated to inquire and research, to discover for themselves the candidates asking for their backing.

Other factors in Prabowo’s win include Jokowi being insulted by his party head and fifth president Megawati Soekarnoputri - daughter of first president Soekarno.  The public thought this morally wrong.

There's been an abundance of comments and what it means for the democratic future of the nation; much has been the moaning of losers.  An exception has been the Harvard-educated  Islamic scholar Ulil Abshar Abdalla, one of the country’s progressive intellectuals.

In the country’s leading broadsheet Kompas he wrote that “Prabowo’s win reflects the popular desire for continuity rather than change.

"Like it or not, we have to listen carefully to this popular wisdom. Is the narrative of democratic decline really a concern for the wider public, or, on the contrary, only a concern for the middle-class educated group? The people may have different priorities than the issue of democratic decline."

Bothering the "educated groups" has been the nepotism that allowed the courts to give Gibran  36, the right to run as Prabowo's vice-presidential candidate when the law says the minimal age is 40.  Having an uncle as a judge helped the young fellow’s case.

So what?  Graft is widespread and long accepted - except by the ethical thinkers and they’re in the minority.  What the majority know is that Gibran’s Dad is a good guy so his offspring must be the same.  

The reasoning runs that Jokowi, 62,  (who Constitutionally can’t stand for a third term) will be on hand to jerk the strings of his puppet son and through him the new president.

Blessing the union and having the new president continue his predecessor’s policies ( adding free lunch boxes and milk for schoolkids) is all that the majority of voters want to know.

That thinking is flawed; unpredictable and egotistical Prabowo won’t be told how to govern.  

His opponents are reportedly looking at “possible fraud” alleging his camp resorted to “legal manipulation, various forms of coercion, and abuse of state resources to gain an advantage in the contest.”

Their inquiries will go nowhere.

Having the time and energy to debate the subtleties is a privilege only for the oligarchs and their political and media mates.  The wee folk, known as wong cilik have little interest in world affairs or that their nation’s economy now ranks 16^th in the world, and is moving higher.

Prabowo spoke to them with slogans, not statistics.  His rivals, Dr Anies Baswedan and Ganjar Pranowo - candidates with strong administrative experience as governors - were hampered by treating the electorate seriously and releasing policy statements.

Both men were interviewed by Western journalists and replied in English to Human Rights Watch inquiries.  Prabowo, who was educated in the UK and US, refused media requests including from this correspondent.

His tactic was to relate to the electorate by shouting flim-flam promises and basking in the glory of having Jokowi's son as a "cool" partner - as the first-time voters said.  It paid off.  

Now we wait to see if his critics will be cowed into submission by Prabowo's  Orde Baru Versi Dua. (Version Two) with opponents jailed like the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Perhaps Prabowo as president will turn out to be a reformer embracing dissidents.  Maybe wombats will find airspace.

First published in Pearls & Irritations, 20 February 2024:  https://johnmenadue.com/keeping-it-in-the-family/

 

 

 

REGRESSION

 INDONESIA CHOOSES - BACK TO THE PAST    

           

First, the good news from Jakarta on the day after the national election.

The asphalt will not turn red. Canberra and Washington warning their citizens to stay inside and beware of riots were misplaced - no evidence-free allegations that the vote had been rigged, no overturned fire-bombed cop cars, no killings.

Instead, hundreds of thousands cheered and danced to celebrate the apparent win of their heroes - disgraced former general Prabowo Subianto, 72,  and his vice-president sidekick Gibran Rakabuming Raka, 36.  

He’s the eldest son of the present president Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo and mayor of small-town Solo. He was supposedly recruited to attract the youth vote, but also to keep Dad’s infrastructure policies going - particularly the new capital and palace in East Kalimantan.

Although final figures are still unavailable, a quick count yesterday night put the pair capturing 58 per cent of the vote, far ahead of the second place (25 per cent)  held by Dr Anies Baswedan, a one-time academic and governor of Jakarta,

The third candidate, Ganjar Pranowo, the former governor of Central Java, was almost out of sight with 17 per cent.

So Prabowo is set to take over in October.  He'll be the nation's eighth leader since the 1945 Revolution when first president Soekarno declared the archipelago a Republic free from the three-century grip of the Dutch.  A four-year guerrilla war followed before The Hague realised its colonial era was past.

In 1965 Soekarno was overthrown by the military led by General Soeharto who instigated the genocide of maybe 500,000 real or imagined Communists.  More than 32 years of authoritarian rule known as Orde Baru (New Order) followed. In 1998 Soeharto resigned in the face of widespread demands for democracy.

In the late 1700s, the French Revolution guillotined the ruling royalty to ensure they'd never return. The Indonesian activists who brought down Soeharto at the turn of this century didn't want bloodshed;  they naively assumed the King of the Kleptocrats and his cronies would disappear into quiet retirement tending their grand gardens, all wreathed in shame.

Wrong call: The Soeharto-era just shook its shoulders and garnered the funds to mount a full-on assault on the Palace using the new democracy.

Yesterday's voters knew little of the past and seemed to care less. It didn't matter to them that Prabowo, a professional soldier, had been dishonourably discharged for disobeying orders and then fled to exile in Jordan.

Three US presidents banned him from their country for violating human rights in both Indonesia and East Timor. He was also banned from Australia till 2019 when he entered as  Defence Minister.

With the help of his businessman dollar billionaire younger brother Hashim Djojohadikusumo, Prabowo started the right-wing Gerakan Indonesia Raya (Gerindra - the Great Indonesia Movement) party as a vehicle for his political career after established parties rejected his approaches.

The cashiered former general lost three times, once as a vice president candidate and twice as president against Jokowi, but has now triumphed.

What sort of leader of 280 million people will he be?  Australian Pat Walsh, an advisor to East Timor's CAVR (Comissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e Reconciliação), has no doubt.

In a scarifying review, the co-founder of the prestigious Australian magazine Inside Indonesia concluded that Prabowo was not a fit and proper person to be president.

"(He) …shared responsibility for the fate of hundreds of civilians who endured crimes …that offends the very essence of civilised humanity included starvation, forced displacement (including of children), rape, torture, killings, imprisonment and forced displacement."

This was not the image seen by voters.  Instead, they were presented with a baby-faced gemoy (cute) grandpa, though the divorcee’s only son is childless and lives in Europe as a fashion designer.  A triumph of jolly cartoons over serious policy and the future of the world's fourth-largest nation.

The VP role now held by Gibran is dubbed ban serep (spare tyre) in Indonesian slang, a powerless ceremonial job.  More than half the voters are millennials or belong to Gen Z, so whether Gibran will lie back and enjoy the role or want to be involved and challenge his arrogant boss is one to watch.

Contrary to the imagery, the hot-tempered authoritarian  Prabowo is not cute, says Professor Tim Lindsey of Melbourne University:

“He has repeatedly said Indonesia’s democratic system is not working and the country should return to its original 1945 Constitution. This would mean unraveling most of the reforms introduced since Soeharto fell …

“Among other things, Indonesia’s charter of human rights would go, as would the Constitutional Court. The courts would no longer be independent, direct presidential elections would end, the two-term presidential limit would go and the president could again control the legislature.”

Little is known in Indonesia of Prabowo's past, where a sanitised version of history is taught in schools.  This shows the gallant military fighting for freedom in the 1940s, then defeating godless Communism in the 60s and recovering the former Portuguese colony of  East Timor, now Timor L'Este, in the 70s.

Prabowo had been involved in four tours of duty on the island.  According to Amnesty International, the invasion and occupation cost the lives of  250,000 civilians from violence or starvation during Indonesia’s 24-year control.

"A truth-telling process in Indonesia is needed," wrote Walsh.  "The deeply regrettable downside of this overdue process in Indonesia is that a person with demonstrated disregard for the rule of law, of both the domestic and international kind and regarded by many as a war criminal, may be elected Indonesia's next president."

But he has been elected by the people in a process that may be the last. Commented Lindsey:  “Indonesia’s fragile democratic system may be the next thing he reinvents – or, more likely, dismantles.”

Canberra will have to accept Prabowo and afford him status - that’s international diplomacy.  It also needs Indonesia to help relationships with China that has been doing big business in Indonesia, particularly with loans and labour for nickel smelters, toll roads and fast rail.

That doesn’t mean the Australian human rights lobby and historians will not rally against the new President. If he does visit Canberra, watch out for the protests now not happening in Jakarta.

## 

First published in Michael West Media, 15 February 2024: https://michaelwest.com.au/indonesia-elects-a-new-president-prabowosubianto/

GETTING CLOSER, NASTIER

 SHAFTED BY ETIQUETTE

Just a fortnight to Indonesia’s big 14 February election and the mood is shifting as more than 200 million electors realise the reality - they’re being played by the oligarchs like puppets.

Last month this column was getting ahead of itself by speculating that front-runner Prabowo Subianto, 73,  a cashiered former general from last century's politics, had snatched a tactical victory by recruiting Gibran Rakabuming Raka, 36,  as his candidate for vice president.

The former mayor of Solo in Central Java is the eldest son of the popular current president Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo constitutionally barred from a third five-year term.

Through pairing with Gibran,  Prabowo planned to capture the youth vote by appealing to the majority under - 40 cohort - people he knows little about.  His only son from a failed marriage with Soeharto's daughter is fashion designer and socialite Didit Hediprasetyo who lives in Europe.

For a while, it worked till electors remembered that vice presidents in the past have been powerless. The current holder was drawn from an Islamic group to give Jokowi an  image of a pious leader and offset slurs that he's a Christian Communist in disguise.

This was the tactic used at the 2019 election.  At the time Jokowi was promoting himself as an action man fixing the nation's crumbling infrastructure, more comfortable in a hard hat talking to engineers with clipboards rather than priests with holy books.

Bit too secular for the hard-liners parading themselves as the nation's moral arbiters, so Islamic scholar Ma'ruf Amin was shanghaied as vice president.  

Now 80 he's the Republic's oldest VP.  If he's done anything in the job other than chant Koranic verses with fellow scholars and fathered nine kids he's aroused no interest in the wider public.

Credit:  Daily News Indonesia

In earlier times he tried to stop Muslims saying Merry Christmas to unbelievers.  His reputation floundered when he was videoed breaking his own rule.

The idea that he might take over should Jokowi tumble under a high-speed Chinese train while commissioning another new track was worrying indeed, for the man has no known administrative abilities or wider interests apart from religion and English football.  To be precise - Liverpool.

Gibran doesn’t easily fit the traditional job description:  He defied his Dad’s desire that he take over the family furniture business and instead started his own catering company, suggesting he wants to go his own way.  It has reportedly earned him more than Papa’s woodworking.

Gibran has no military background and despite his promoters' attempts to show him as a fun fellow from a bang-bang smartphone game, he comes across as dour and serious Suddenly he’s revealed a cynical side that worries the public - if social and mainstream media responses are any guide.

In the last TV debate, he used sarcasm - a common tactic in Western culture and maybe picked up when he was apparently a  University of Technology Sydney student though he graduated in Singapore in 'management development'.

At the TV studio, Gibran peered around the podium claiming he was looking for the policies of his opponents.  He also flummoxed them by asking about 'greenflation' a trendy Western economic term so new it's still being defined.

Not funny. Voters were reminded that Javanese etiquette requires the young to respect the old.  The two VP candidates the subject of his sneers were Muhaimin Iskandar, 57, a former Minister for Manpower, and Mohammad Mahfud Mahmodin, 66, a legal academic.  

Gibran bowed and kissed their wrists before the debate started, then started punching, turning from a polite young man to a smart arse-and that’s not the Javanese way.

 His enrolment may yet turn out to be an impediment to Prabowo’s ambition to U-turn Indonesia back to the days when the military ruled.

Indonesian schools teach a warped version of history where the army in 1965 saved the nation from a real or imagined Communist takeover.  Doubting this account was considered heretical.

The genocide of half a million real or imagined Reds and their mates by army-directed militias is rarely mentioned.

Only now are some daring to question the government’s rigid portrayal of the past, and wondering about Prabowo’s role in the disappearance of 13 students protesting in 1998 against Soeharto’s 32-year authoritarian rule.

Slowly this other history is creeping into the discussions despite Prabowo reminding critics that he’s never been charged with human rights abuses, though the accusations were so strong he was barred from the US.  That’s something only those who lived through the era of fear remember.

Bright, young modern Gibran risks his reputation by tolerating this association.

But maybe few care.  Like Trump supporters, they reject every wrongdoing of their hero.  If he did bad things decades ago then they must have been necessary.

Two weeks more to secure a lead - or stuff up again.  One more TV debate to go on 4 February.  The tea-leaf readers reckon no clear winner so a run-off on 26 June. If right, tense times loom.

 

 Duncan Graham has an MPhil degree, a Walkley Award, two Human Rights Commission awards and other prizes for his radio, TV and print journalism in Australia. He lives in East Java.

First published in Pearls & Irritations, 31 January 2024: https://johnmenadue.com/shafted-by-etiquette/

 

 

 

 

 

 

HARMLESS FOLK FOR SURE

 THE DELIGHTFUL DUO

It looks like a student parody of two pretenders to the throne, but this is from a street poster promoting candidates for the Gerindra Party, cashiered former general and alleged human rights abuser Prabowo Subianto (left) and his vice presidential hopeful Gibran Rakabuming.

One is 73, the other 36.

Their message to the more than 200 million registered electors: Vote for us - we’re cuddly, cute and fun people- ideal for running the world’s third-largest democracy and the nation with more Muslims than any other state.  You don’t want boring folk handling this sort of show.  Life's serious enough.

BTW, no temper tantrums if you don't win, thanks.  The last time was bad enough - eight dead, 300 injured, cars and buildings burned.  Good losers take their toys and toddle home.

CAN GIBRAN BE HIS OWN MAN?

 GOODISH GUY IN BAD COMPANY 

Gibran Rakabuming Raka is smarter than his stolid Dad Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo, President of our huge neighbour since 2014.  As Vice President Gibran could be a positive change agent - but that demands missionary zeal and the guts to challenge his dangerous leader . Does he have The Right Stuff?

 

In the lead-up to the 14 February national poll, a TV debate between Gibran and his older and more accomplished rivals showed the 36-year-old Mayor of Solo in Central Java is no daddy's shadow - as shown in the street posters - but an individual, a VP candidate in his own right.  

However, he's burdened by the company he keeps and the dirty dealings done to give him a shot at the big game. These issues distress the educated middle classes concerned with the erosion of democracy under Jokowi's reign;  sadly most voters won't care a dish of cold rice because nepotism and corruption are accepted as the Indonesian way even though it repels the ethical international investors the economy needs.

That won't change till any new president becomes an Indonesian version of the late Singapore PM Lee Kuan Yew (1959 - 1990) tough enough to burn bridges, stare down the threatening oligarchs and jail mates.  Chances of this happening are about the same as Trump turning to empathy.

After his everyman Dad beat elite opposition to head the world’s third largest democracy his team sought photo-ops with loving family. Gibran was a reluctant drag-in from his catering business.   He looked surly, a young man with better   things to do than play in a political pantomime.

Hot cakes must have done well because a few years later he revealed AUD 2.2 million in assets.  When Papa showed that politics pays better than kitchen toil  Gibran warmed to the addiction of  power.

Fo the sympathy vote Jokowi plays on his poor riverbank home history like Anthony Albanese uses his single-mum, council flat background. But unlike the PM’s story, the President’s oft-told tale sustains popularity ratings of around 80 per cent.  

So the tacticians got young Gibran to tag along with one of the old boys hoping Dad's lustre would rub off and add youth to the real candidate.

That should have been Ganjar Pranowo, the choice of the nationalist Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P).  It’s Jokowi’s party and endorsed him twice but as he constitutionally can’t stand again chose the Governor of Central Java as his replacement.

Gibran is also a member of PDI-P but its axe-grinding matriarch Megawati Soekarnoputri (right) put hatred of Jokowi ahead of political sense and dubbed Mohammad Mahfud Mahmodin (Mahfud MD) as VP candidate.

A standard factory-made politician Mahfud was picked to draw Gen Z which covers around a third of the electors, with his supposed competence and experience.  He also hectors and his record repels.

In a separate forum, the 66-year old misogynist explained corruption this way:  “In many cases, husbands get involved in crimes because their wives are not good.” The coward’s defence: ‘She made me do it, ya honour’.

When the PDI-P door shut by Mega, Jokowi's ambitious offspring was seduced by Gerindra (Greater Indonesia), the party of cashiered general Prabowo Subianto.  He drives a jeep load of unresolved human rights allegations involving kidnappings and killings.  He's so ruthless he makes Peter Dutton look woke.

 Fabled Aesop wrote that “a man is known by the company he keeps”. Gibran has stained his nascent character.  To bypass regulations banning under 40s standing for high office there was an appeal to the Constitutional Court, conveniently chaired by his uncle  Anwar Usman.  Though the judge has since lost his job for a gross ethical breach, the decision stands.

Gibran has much to learn.  He prefers the teenage pout to the mature politicians’ ersatz smile. His rivals dub him anak ingusan (snotty child), but that’s not his TV image.  In the overlong over-managed debate he was calm, sharp, articulate, well-prepared and surprisingly confronting.

That breaks the Javanese code of respect for elders, suggesting he’s absorbed Western ways. That will annoy oldies but delight the young and restless.

He was educated in Singapore and Sydney (UTS) so should know about civil liberties -something his political partner fears.

So far he’s snubbed the foreign media.  After a stake-out ABC correspondent Bill Birtles only snagged a cursory "feeling confident" tossed out of a moving car’s window.

Though he follows all the rituals, Gibran is not known as a prisoner of religion. His other rival is Muhaimin “Cak Imin” Iskandar, chair of  the PKB (National Awakening) Islamic party.

His inclusion is supposed to magnetise the Muslim vote for Dr Anies Baswedan.  Indonesia has more Muslims than any other nation so conventional wisdom has meant pandering to this block in return for ‘wet’ (lucrative) ministries.

The political plotters have now discovered that the young are getting better educated and more inclined to pick candidates on merit rather than supposed piety. They don’t come structured so immune to payoffs.

This shrieks problems for Prabowo who has no idea who these voters are and what they want.  As a way to their hearts his media advisers have urged him to endorse a cartoon blob, the type used to sell toilet chemicals.

To transform from villain to jolly fellow he does TikTok moves.  These simulate bayonet charges.  Artists' makeovers turn Gibran sage and Prabowo, who’s old enough to be his grandfather, into a sibling.  The ad agencies’ contempt for voters is limitless.

Indonesia’s VPs are called ‘spare tyres’, not there to help with the steering.  They must stay in the boot and follow the last century duduk diam (siddown and shuddup) rule,  alien to Gibran’s progressive generation.

There’ll be confrontations; Gibran has no military background so won’t accept orders shouted by an autocrat demanding obedience.  Should Prabowo make it into the Jakarta White House, the impatient VP won’t stand around waiting for Allah to send the villainous  P to his place in the abyss.

Prabowo (with Jokowi, right) should be worried.  Like Cassius,  Gibran thinks too much; such men are dangerous. His first major public performance proves he runs his own show.  Local commentators reckon he'll be jerked by the strings held offstage by his dahlang (puppet master) Dad and continue the policies of infrastructure and development.

That assumption is open to doubt. Kompas media group polls put the undecideds close to 30 per cent.  Does this mean the electorate is getting more discriminating, better able to see through the fog of lies and crass diversions?   Let it be so.

 

Duncan Graham has a MPhil degree, a Walkley Award, two Human Rights Commission awards and other prizes for his radio, TV and print journalism in Australia. He lives in East Java.

 First published in Pearls & Irritations, 4 January 2024: https://johnmenadue.com/goodish-guy-in-bad-company/