Jokowi takes a huge gamble with son’s political elevation

This was a decision tailor-made to enable a vice-presidential candidacy for Gibran – and it wasn’t lost on critics that the court’s chief justice was the president’s brother-in-law and Gibran’s uncle. The decision was promptly excoriated by the press commentariat as judicial activism in the service of a dynasty.

Effectively a public endorsement

Jokowi and the Prabowo campaign were worried enough about the response to commission snap opinion polls to gauge the depth of any backlash.

The results of those polls don’t seem to have deterred the dynastic option. After a dramatic weekend of political manoeuvring, the announcement that Gibran would be Prabowo’s vice-presidential candidate appears imminent ahead of the close of registrations on Wednesday.

Gibran’s appointment has some electoral logic. With polls showing Prabowo’s candidacy largely dependent on the voter base of his losing 2019 campaign, his path to victory in 2024 requires holding that base while making inroads to Jokowi voters in the Javanese heartland, where another presidential candidate, former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo, is dominant.

Despite public polling that suggests an electorate divided on the merits of the court decision and Gibran’s candidacy, Prabowo officially announced his selection of Gibran as his running mate on October 22.

The choice has some electoral logic to it. With Prabowo’s candidacy largely dependent on the voter base of his losing 2019 campaign, his path to victory in 2024 requires him to hold that base while making inroads among Jokowi voters in the Javanese heartland, where former Central Java governor and another presidential candidate, Ganjar Pranowo, is dominant.

Despite sharing with Ganjar an affiliation to the nationalist PDI-P party, Jokowi has made only the most perfunctory efforts to support his presidential campaign, instead moving to aid Prabowo, whom he sees as more independent and receptive to his own post-presidential lobbying.

Supplying his son to Prabowo’s campaign effectively amounts to a public endorsement, and an expectation that Jokowi loyalists now backing his Ganjar will shift their support to Prabowo.

Getting the Jokowi seal of approval in this way could, be a double-edged sword for Prabowo, who for now is widely considered to be the presidential frontrunner. With the election expected to be decided in a run-off scheduled for late June 2024, there’s plenty of time for a long campaign against Prabowo’s complicity in dynasty-building.

An overt alliance with the Widodos could also attract backlash from the anti-Jokowi diehards now rallying around the underdog candidate, former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan, upon whose support Prabowo would depend in a run-off election.

PDI-P sees the cementing of a Prabowo-Jokowi alliance through Gibran — like his father, a PDI-P member — as a grave betrayal on Jokowi’s part. But an acrimonious split between PDI-P and the president isn’t guaranteed, with the party too now in a “mutual hostage situation”, in the words of political scientist Yoes Kenawas.

Mutual need

While “Jokowi still needs PDI-P to ensure his government’s stability in his final year in office”, the party still “needs Jokowi as an electoral magnet for the February 2024 legislative elections”, he wrote.

Regardless of the conflicts that arise once the legislative polls are done and dusted, Gibran’s elevation speaks to a big shift in the balance of power between Jokowi and the PDI-P over the course of his presidency.

His first term was marked by stormy relations with the party and its chairwoman, former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, over often small matters of policy and personnel choices. Now, with the highest approval ratings of any outgoing Indonesian president and drawing on a broad base of elite support, Jokowi has been emboldened to make this audacious move to support his son joining the presidential ticket of PDI-P’s major rival in the 2024 polls.

It also speaks to Jokowi’s late-term boldness that he thinks he can defy the unimpressive record of dynasty-building at the national level. Efforts by former presidents Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Megawati Sukarnoputri to install their children on presidential tickets came to nothing.

So far, Indonesian political dynasties have mostly remained localised, and highly vulnerable to defeat by non-dynastic rivals. Indonesia is a long way from the situation in the Philippines, for instance, where political clans centred on powerful families have long been the main unit of political organisation, dominating local governments, congressional seats, and sometimes the presidency, across generations.

For Jokowi, to roll the dice on his son’s vice-presidential nomination is to raise personal stakes in the 2024 elections: either securing a foothold for himself and his family in the political system for years to come, or setting himself up for an embarrassing rendezvous with the Indonesian voter ambivalence about dynasticism.