Former general Prabowo Subianto is on the verge of victory in Indonesia’s presidential election, as vote counting continues. After four election attempts and three presidential races, the 72-year-old Defence Minister is set to succeed President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, who has been in power for a decade.
Almost all quick count results of Wednesday’s election by pollsters showed Prabowo and his running mate, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, leading at 58%, far ahead their rivals, Anies Baswedan-Muhaimin Iskandar and Ganjar Pranowo-Mahfud MD, who look to have obtained around 25% and 16% of votes respectively.
The quick counts also show Prabowo-Gibran won in 36 out of 38 provinces in Indonesia, indicating that the pair won outright in the first round. As of Friday afternoon, the pollsters have counted up to 99% of total votes.
We summarised the views of nine academics on seven crucial issues that have become public discussions following recent presidential and vice-presidential debates. All experts conclude Prabowo-Gibran’s ideas and work programs carry several weaknesses, posing significant risks for Indonesia’s future.
1. Human rights and freedoms on the line
Eka Nugraha Putra, a research fellow from the National University of Singapore and a lecturer in law at the Merdeka University of Malang, East Java, said Prabowo had been the most troubling presidential hopeful, given his poor record of human rights violations.
Prabowo had admitted his involvment in the kidnapping of pro-democracy activists in May 1998 riots, but said he released them. Such a confession should not necessarily make the legal process against the case be dismissed.
Instead, Prabowo’s admission should trigger the authorities to step up investigative and judicial processes to reveal the truth for the families of victims of past human rights violations who have been seeking justice for 26 years. But in fact, Prabowo seems to enjoy legal impunity.
Eka said it was concerning that Prabowo did not include any commitment to resolve past human rights violations in his election platform.
“Hoping for Prabowo to resolve the past human rights cases seems impossible. It is difficult to expect Prabowo to be able to fully protect human rights, including civil, political, economic and socio-cultural rights of the entire community,” Eka said.
In the context of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, a crucial part of civil liberties, Prabowo does not have a clean record.
Eka pointed out how in 2018, Prabowo said journalists were “agents of state destruction”. He made this statement due to a lack of coverage of him coming to the 212 rally, a massive protest by thousands of people from Muslim conservative communities against then-Chinese-Christian Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama. At that time, Prabowo’s Gerindra Party endorsed Anies, who ran in the Jakarta election backed by Muslim groups.
With Prabowo’s apparent one-round victory in this election, Indonesians now face the risk of seeing their freedom, and access to dialogue and criticism of laws and policies, jeopardised.
“Prabowo will likely extend Jokowi’s attitudes: not listening to criticism and ignoring scientific studies from academics and civil society, as well as producing legal products without in-depth studies and transparent process,” Eka concluded.
2. The New Capital’s funding challenge
Prabowo-Gibran’s victory means the development of the New Capital city in East Kalimantan, one of Jokowi’s signature projects, will continue as planned.
Director of the Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS), Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara, argued it would be financially difficult to carry out this ambition, at least in the first year of Prabowo’s administration.
With many of Prabowo-Gibran’s campaign programs requiring substantial funding, including the free lunch and internet programs, money will be tight.
“There is still a burden from the debt inherited by the Jokowi administration, and the interest is also very high. This burden limits the fiscal space,” explained Bhima. Fiscal space refers to the flexibility of the government in its spending choices.
According to him, Prabowo should set some priorities amid his many ambitious promises.
The New Capital project is estimated to require an investment of Rp466 trillion (US$29.84 billion), with the state budget covering around 19% of the total financial needs. It will be challenging to rely on debt financing in the current global conditions, with the trend in government bonds being disrupted and investors in developed countries cautious about investing.
“On the other hand, if we reallocate the social assistance and education budgets (to fund the new capital project), it will impede the performance of other equally important outputs,” he added.
Meanwhile, a doctoral candidate from the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute in the UK, Sandy Nofyanza, said the new capital would affect the sustainability of conservation forests in the Bukit Suharto Grand Forest Park, Sungai Wain Protection Forest and industrial plantation forests in eastern Kalimantan.
As a result, forest cover will decrease and carbon emissions will increase. This does not include the risk of biodiversity loss due to the reduction in cover.
“The government might not register deforestation [in plantation forests]. However, it will show in the global data,” he explained.
3. Food estate’s risk of failure
Prabowo’s victory also increases the chances of continuing Jokowi’s problematic food estate project.
Angga Dwiartama, an expert in agricultural sociology at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), West Java, said mass agricultural projects started in the 1950s promised lucrative food productivity. However, amid a changing climate and the risk of extreme weather, the food estate project is at high risk of failure.
Prabowo must reconsider the food estate project, Angga said, because Indonesia had already experienced two losses by forcing itself to boost mass agriculture: the Suharto-era million-hectare rice field project in Central Kalimantan and the food estate project in Merauke in Papua. The latter was developed in 2010 under the administration of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Jokowi’s predecessor.
“With the current environmental conditions and climate change, (any project in) the agriculture sector is very vulnerable (to failure),” Angga said
4. Strategies for nickel and other industries
According to Krisna Gupta, a senior fellow at the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies, it seems clear Prabowo-Gibran will continue the Jokowi regime’s downstream policies, especially on the nickel industry. This has been explicitly shown in their platform and public statements.
Krisna said it was necessary to observe whether the pair could actually execute the strategy, because after successfully luring billion dollars of investment to support downstreaming, Indonesia’s nickel industry is losing its charm.
Jokowi’s dream to make Indonesia the world’s battery centre by maximising its nickel reserves is now facing challenges from a shift in interest from electric vehicle manufacturers to use lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries.
Additionally, given its status as one of the world’s biggest nickel producers, Indonesia’s export ban on raw nickel and the flood of semi-finished nickel products in the international market has seen global nickel prices plummet.
Krisna said the downstream aspirations echoed by Prabowo-Gibran were not only about nickel, but also crude palm oil, coal and digital downstreaming. One often encouraged strategy is maximising the domestic component policy to absorb these processed commodities in the domestic market.
However, according to Krisna, more is needed.
“Some of these industries are varied, and many require a wide scale that may not be sufficient if they only rely on the domestic market. This is the challenge ahead because globalisation is not going well at the moment,” he explained.
5. Improving teacher and lecturer welfare
Hariyadi, a lecturer at Jenderal Soedirman University in Purwokerto, Central Java, said Prabowo-Gibran did include education as one of their 17 priority programs.
Although the pair has pledged to improve the welfare of teachers and lecturers whose status is as a civil servant, they did not specify which aspect of welfare they wanted to improve – whether it was the certification allowance component, basic salary, other components, or adding a new element to the educators’ wage structure.
One study found increased welfare could encourage educators to improve the quality of the teaching and learning process. Another study in 2019 showed the fulfilment of adequate welfare for teachers would increase teachers’ enthusiasm when working.
However, a quantitative study showed certification allowances to improve welfare were not directly related to improved performance, because teachers spend their allowances on personal expenses rather than enhancing teaching quality.
Meanwhile, another study found the need to look at the urgency of improving the competencies of educators themselves.
Hariyadi concluded that although necessary, improving welfare was not the only component needed to enhance the quality of public services, especially in the education sector.
The welfare of teachers and lecturers is not only related to salary but also to their wellbeing, pension, social welfare, family support, and time allocated to improve professionalism, without being burdened by too much administration.
“Improving the professionalism of educators, both teachers and lecturers, which also needs to be done, is not mentioned in the work programs of Prabowo-Gibran,” he said.
Prabowo also failed to mention topics such as the appointment of contract teachers, teacher certification and the administrative burden of teachers and lecturers. Their programs also tend to favour civil servants without considering private and contract teachers.
6. Protecting independent research and academic freedom
Masduki, a professor of Media and Journalism from Universitas Islam Indonesia (UII), Yogyakarta, said Prabowo would extend the intervention of academic freedom in higher education institutions that Jokowi had implemented. Intellectual autonomy, he said, had so far only covered institutional matters.
In the presidential debates, Prabowo and his two competitors did not explain their understanding of academic freedom. The discussion about the political environment, academic autonomy and the legal environment determining academic freedom was nowhere to be found.
Masduki said Prabowo should acknowledge academic autonomy from the very beginning: from planning research topics and building the research environment to receiving funding not flavoured with political messages. Academics should also be free from any pressure when presenting their research results.
“Our task is to ensure that the agendas of academic freedom are not reduced. How, for example, professors who are now experiencing resistance, maybe not directly from the government, but from influencers and buzzers, which is typical in the Jokowi era and will certainly continue in the Prabowo era, will not happen again,” Masduki said.
A lecturer in international relations at Bina Mandiri University Gorontalo, Ayu Anastasya Rachman, added universities that experienced authoritarian intervention from the government often faced challenges in maintaining academic freedom and independence in research, resources and curriculum.
Without academic freedom, she said, the public will question the capacity of scientists and educators and the credibility of their work.
State intervention in universities can also ignite fears and encourage silence among lecturers and students. “This inhibits critical thinking and creativity in the university environment,” Ayu said.
7. Progress on helping children grow
The government has targeted reducing the prevalence of stunting (when a child who is short for their age due to malnutrition) to 14% this year.
However, the 2022 Survey on the Status of Nutrition Indonesia (SSGI) shows the figure is still at 21.6% – which makes this year’s target seemingly out of reach.
Public Health expert from Airlangga University, Ilham Akhsanu Ridlo, said that under a likely Prabowo administration, nothing much would change if he kept the “top-down” approaches as Jokowi did. “Such an approach is outdated. The collaboration aspect is less visible,” Ilham said.
The prevalence of stunting cannot go down quickly in only one leadership period, as it is caused by many factors. Reducing it will require sustainable solutions.
“The Health Ministry has a program for the first 1000 days of a child’s life, starting during pregnancy. Just run it, it’s a good program,” said Ilham.
However, Ilham added the president-elect could influence the speed of handling the problem of stunting – whether it is faster, slower, or the same as the previous government.
Although Prabowo included programs to improve the quality of nutrition, clean water and community sanitation to reduce stunting, his flagship program focuses more on providing free meals and milk at schools, which he called Gerakan EMAS (Emak-Emak and Anak-Anak Minum Susu).
“The target (of the program) is unclear, whether (it is) to overcome stunting, malnutrition or other nutrition. They say it is for stunting, but if the child has entered school, it no longer counts as the first thousand days of life,” said Ilham.
Prabowo has also not set a figure on how much he wishes to reduce stunting.
Ultimately, budget allocations may hinder the efforts to reduce stunting, as Jokowi government has eliminated the mandatory spending for health.
Whether stunting will be a budget priority or not will depend on the political will and interests of the elected president and the regional heads.
Rahma Sekar Andini translated this article from Bahasa Indonesia