REGIONAL
Jokowi Era Dawns As Indonesia’s new president prepares for his inauguration, political jostling continues behind the scenes By SIMON ROUGHNEEN / JAKARTA
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AKARTA – 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 is also 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 elites. 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, saw him as
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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 highly favorable contract for Jakarta’s much-needed MRT project also suggests 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 about them–Mr. Joko is already showing that 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 April parliamentary elections, the town’s tourism official Patrick Orlando spoke in glowing terms of his former boss. “Everything developed and grew so quickly,” 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 October 2014