Jokowi Era Dawns

As Indonesia’s new president prepares for his inauguration, political jostling continues behind the scenes

By SIMON ROUGHNEEN / JAKARTA

JAKARTA – When Joko Widodo starts settling into the Merdeka Palace after his inauguration on October 20, he’ll have a lot to contend with.

After all, Jokowi, as he’s widely known, will by then be president of the world’s 4th most populous country, a 3,000 mile long archipelago that by some counts isalso the world’s 10thlargest economy.

If the low-key new president has a minute, however, he’ll surely muse upon how far he has come in the last 10 years. He’s been told it often enough on his surprise visits to neighborhoods and markets in Solo and Jakarta, when he engages in the flesh-pressing that is known as blusukan in Indonesia.

A man of the people, 10 years ago, then aged 43, Mr. Joko was selling furniture in Solo–his Java hometown an hour or so flight east of Jakarta.

He was elected mayor of Solo in 2005, making a name for himself with initiatives such as cleaning up street markets and rebranding Solo as an old-style Javanese tourist destination, bringing it out of the shadow of nearby Jogjakarta.

Mr. Joko is the first president without connections to Indonesia’s New Order era or its long-standing political e lites. Or at least, his connections don’t go back very far–say much past 2012–when some of the country’s political grandees, including future rival Prabowo Subianto, sawhim as a backable candidate to run for the governorship of Indonesia’s trafficclogged capital, Jakarta.

And while Mr. Joko didn’t spend very long in office in Jakarta–in a job often described as the 3rd most powerful in Indonesia–he did enough to convince former President Megawati Sukarnoputri–daughter of Sukarno, the country’s first president–to set aside her ambitions to run again and throw her Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) behind Mr. Joko.

Jeffrey Neilson, an Indonesia watcher at The University of Sydney, said that Mr. Joko has shown a commitment to “cleaner government and improved efficiency in terms of service delivery.”

“His success in negotiating a highlyfavorable contract for Jakarta’s much-needed MRT project alsosuggests that he could make some inroads into Indonesia’s serious infrastructure bottlenecks,” Mr. Neilson wrote in an email.

Mr. Joko’s ascent is the latest adornment to an Indonesian democracy that is now routinely described as the fairest in Southeast Asia–much less violent and somewhat less oligarchic than that of the Philippines, the sole serious rival.

Like an Indonesian Pope Francis–whose impromptu meanderings into the masses in St Peter’s Square have a bit of blusukan aboutthem–Mr. Joko is already showingthat he might spurn some of the gilded trimmings of office, indicating that his ministers can use the current fleet of official cars, rather than splurge on a new garagefull of alloyed Mercs or BMWs.

It is the kind of attitude that, if not overdone, appeals in a country where cynicism about politicians is widespread. Speaking in Solo three days before Indonesia’s Aprilpar liamentary elections, the town’s tourism official Patrick Orlando spokein glowing terms of his former boss.

“Everything developed and grew soquickly,” he recalled, discussing Mr. Joko’s impact as mayor. So popular did the local boy born in a riverside slum become, that he was re-elected in 2010 in a 90 percent landslide.

“The people really respect him,” Mr. Orlando said, an assessment meant as an understatement.

Hernawan Tri Wahyudi, a teacher in Solo, said that he was disappointed by Mr. Joko’s precocious ascent. Mr. Joko has since resigned as governor of

Jakarta to take up the presidency,but had he stuck out his second term as mayor of Solo, he would still be there into next year.

“His job [was] not finished here when heleft,” grumbled Mr. Hernawan, whose chagrin relented enoughfor him to concede that Mr. Joko would make a good president.

But while Mr. Joko’s popularity made himodds-on favorite to win the presidency when his candidacy was pitched in early 2014, “the Jokowi effect” only went so far,it seems.

The PDIP reckoned it could win 30 percent or more of the parliamentary vote by tailgating their new poster-boy. In the end, it got less than 20 percent, while Mr. Joko’s chaotic presidential campaigning almost succumbed to rival Prabowo Subianto’s bombast and smearing–with a double-digit poll lead cut to next to nothing by the eve of the vote.

Mr. Joko won in the end by 8.4 million votes, or 6 percent, though Mr. Prabowo, his chest puffed out to the end, took some convincing–only conceding after a Constitutional Court ruled that the election did not feature the sort of massive fraud that the loser had, to sometimes comic effect, alleged.

At the time of writing, Indonesia’s parliament was mulling a last-ditch move to abolish direct elections for mayors and local heads of government. This would make it muchless likely that another Jokowi could emerge. The lawmakers behindthe proposal supported the losing Prabowo-Hatta Rajasa ticket in the July presidential election, and the word is that the defeated former armyman was behind the maneuver–piqued, even burned, after seeing his protégé win highest office, something Mr. Prabowo had been chasing for adecade.

As things stand, Mr. Prabowo’s supporters make up more than 60 percent of MPs for the next parliament–those lawmakers elected last April who will succeed the current crop of MPs who themselves seem fixated on belying their lame-duck status bypushing through the local election regression.

Such a parliament could make life veryhard for the new president, stymieing his efforts at reforms, such as cutting a fuel subsidy that will absorb around 20 percent of government spending in 2015.

But negotiations are ongoing behind the scenes to try to cajole some of the parties who joined Mr. Subianto’s Laskar Merah Putih, or Red and White coalition, across to the Joko side. The coalition was announced in July and was described, in what would be a truly revolutionary development in Indonesian politics, as “permanent.”

But Mr. Joko’s vice president, Jusuf Kalla, is an old stalwart of Golkar, the party of former dictator Suharto and a part of outgoing President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s all-things-toall-men coalition.

Mr. Jusuf might try to sway Golkar’s 91 MPsto cross over. Others to court may be the United Development Party–now under new leadership after former religious affairs minister and Prabowo allySuryadharma Ali was ousted in September, after being snared byIndonesia’s hyperactive anti-graft commission on charges of manipulating a fund used to send Muslim pilgrims to Mecca.

Hasto Kristiyanto, a member of Mr. Joko’s “tr ansition team” and a key player in the PDIP, told media after Mr. Suryadharma was removed that “we’ll see if Suryadharma’s dismissal will indeed end up with the party joining Jokowi-Kalla.” 