Indonesia held one of the world’s largest elections on Wednesday, with more than 200 million registered voters choosing a president, national legislators and thousands of regional representatives across an archipelago containing more than 17,000 islands. Unofficial quick counts indicate that Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto has won well above the 50% required to avoid a runoff, defeating former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo and former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan. The official count will take longer, so the precise result should not yet be treated as final, but the scale of Prabowo’s apparent lead makes him the clear presumptive winner. Indonesia has therefore accomplished something democratically significant: another enormous, competitive national election and another expected transfer of presidential authority without military intervention.
Yet the election also contains reasons for institutional caution. Prabowo is not an ordinary successor. He is a former general who was once deeply embedded in the authoritarian system of President Suharto, whose 32-year rule ended in 1998. Prabowo was married to Suharto’s daughter and commanded elite military units during the final years of the regime. Human-rights organisations have long accused forces under his command of serious abuses, including the abduction of pro-democracy activists, allegations Prabowo has denied. He was dismissed from the military after Suharto’s fall and subsequently reinvented himself as a democratic politician.
That transformation alone makes his apparent victory historically remarkable. Indonesia’s post-1998 democratic transition, known as Reformasi, was constructed partly in reaction against the political system from which Prabowo emerged. Twenty-six years later, voters appear ready to elect him through the democratic institutions that replaced it.
This does not automatically represent democratic regression.
Democracy allows citizens to elect people whose political histories others find disturbing.
The purpose of elections is not ensuring voters select candidates approved by historians, journalists or foreign governments.
The relevant question is whether institutions remain capable of constraining whoever voters choose.
This distinction between democratic selection and liberal constraint is essential. A politician’s election is democratic if the contest is genuinely competitive and citizens choose them freely. Whether the resulting government remains democratic depends on what the winner subsequently does with state power.
Prabowo therefore should be judged according to both his history and the institutions surrounding his presidency.
Past behaviour informs risk.
It does not predetermine future behaviour.
The more immediate institutional question concerns Joko Widodo, the enormously popular outgoing president universally known as Jokowi. Indonesia’s constitution limits presidents to two five-year terms, so Jokowi could not simply run again after governing since 2014. Term limits performed exactly the function they were designed to perform: preventing a popular leader from converting repeated electoral victories into indefinite personal rule.
Yet Jokowi’s political influence did not disappear simply because the constitution prevented his name appearing on the presidential ballot.
His eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, became Prabowo’s vice-presidential candidate.
That is where democratic succession becomes more complicated.
Gibran was only 36 years old, while Indonesian election law normally required presidential and vice-presidential candidates to be at least 40. In October, Indonesia’s Constitutional Court created an exception allowing candidates below 40 to run if they had previously held elected regional office. Gibran, the mayor of Surakarta, therefore became eligible.
The legal change became especially controversial because the Court’s chief justice, Anwar Usman, was Jokowi’s brother-in-law and Gibran’s uncle. An ethics panel subsequently found Anwar guilty of a serious ethical violation concerning the case and removed him as chief justice, although the ruling itself remained in force.
This is precisely the kind of situation where formal legality and institutional legitimacy can diverge.
Gibran’s candidacy was legally permitted.
The process producing that legality generated serious questions about conflicts of interest.
A democracy cannot operate through the principle that every legally valid decision is therefore institutionally healthy.
Rules matter.
So does confidence in how those rules were interpreted.
This is why judicial independence is not simply about judges reaching outcomes governments dislike. It is about citizens believing legal rules are not being adapted according to family or political relationships.
If a court changes an eligibility requirement and the principal beneficiary happens to be the president’s son while the chief justice is related to that family, even a legally defensible interpretation produces an obvious credibility problem.
Institutions need not merely avoid conflicts of interest.
They need procedures capable of demonstrating that conflicts did not determine outcomes.
This is where Jokowi’s succession differs from straightforward authoritarian dynasticism. He did not cancel elections, abolish term limits or simply appoint Gibran president. Indonesians still voted among several presidential tickets, opposition candidates campaigned nationally and Prabowo appears to have won enormous genuine popular support.
That distinction matters.
Calling Indonesia a dictatorship because the outgoing president’s son joined the winning ticket would be analytically unserious.
But concluding that everything is democratically unproblematic because citizens ultimately voted for the ticket would be equally incomplete.
Democratic institutions can be influenced before voters make their choice.
This returns to the upstream electoral-integrity argument from Pakistan, although Indonesia’s circumstances are very different. Elections do not begin when citizens receive ballots. Candidate eligibility, media environments, state resources and institutional decisions shape which choices become politically viable beforehand.
The important difference is that Prabowo did not need obvious coercion to become viable.
He benefited from something much more powerful: Jokowi’s popularity.
Jokowi remains extraordinarily popular after nearly a decade in office, partly because his governments expanded infrastructure, social programmes and Indonesia’s international economic profile. Prabowo therefore transformed himself during this election from Jokowi’s former rival into the candidate most strongly associated with preserving Jokowi’s legacy.
That transformation is politically extraordinary because Prabowo spent years attacking Jokowi.
He lost the 2014 presidential election to him.
He lost again in 2019.
After the second defeat, Jokowi appointed Prabowo defence minister.
The rival entered the government he had attempted to defeat.
Five years later, he is positioned to inherit it.
This is coalition politics operating at a deeply personalised level.
It also demonstrates how political systems can absorb opponents.
Jokowi reduced Prabowo’s incentives to remain an anti-system challenger by giving him responsibility inside government. Prabowo gained executive experience and gradually moderated the confrontational political image associated with his earlier campaigns.
This resembles the argument surrounding Geert Wilders in the Netherlands: participation can moderate political outsiders because responsibility forces them to confront institutional constraints.
But incorporation can work in the opposite direction too.
If every major rival eventually joins the governing coalition, political competition weakens because fewer powerful actors remain outside government.
Indonesia under Jokowi has increasingly produced extremely broad governing coalitions containing parties that previously opposed one another.
That creates stability.
It can reduce accountability.
A parliament where almost everyone participates in government contains fewer parties with strong incentives to scrutinise government aggressively.
Coalition inclusiveness therefore contains another trade-off.
It reduces polarisation.
It can reduce opposition.
Democracy needs both governability and adversarial scrutiny.
Prabowo’s alliance with Jokowi demonstrates how difficult those objectives can be to maximise simultaneously.
The economic argument for continuity is strong. Indonesia has maintained relatively robust growth, expanded infrastructure and attempted to move beyond exporting raw commodities towards processing them domestically. Jokowi’s government famously restricted exports of unprocessed nickel, attempting to force investment into Indonesian refining and battery-related industries.
The policy represents a form of resource-based industrialisation.
Indonesia possesses enormous nickel reserves.
Rather than allowing foreign companies simply to extract ore and process it elsewhere, Jakarta wants more of the value chain to remain domestically.
This is the same development problem many resource-rich countries face.
Owning a resource does not guarantee capturing most of its economic value.
The country extracting lithium, cobalt or nickel may receive relatively little compared with the firms processing materials, manufacturing batteries and designing final products.
Industrial policy attempts to move domestic production further along that chain.
Prabowo has promised substantial continuity with this strategy.
That makes his victory partly a vote for an economic model rather than merely for personalities.
Indonesia wants to use its resource position to become important in electric-vehicle supply chains as the world decarbonises.
This creates geopolitical leverage because China, the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea all want secure access to critical minerals and battery production.
Indonesia can therefore practise a version of the multi-alignment strategy we have repeatedly discussed through India.
It does not need to choose permanently between Beijing and Washington.
Chinese companies have invested heavily in Indonesian nickel processing.
Western governments want diversified mineral supply chains.
Indonesia can negotiate with both.
Again, strategic autonomy becomes bargaining power when several larger powers need something you possess.
The difference from India is that Indonesia’s leverage derives partly from resource geography rather than enormous technological or military capability.
That creates opportunity.
It also creates dependence.
Nickel prices fluctuate.
Processing can create serious environmental damage.
Chinese investment can create technological and financial dependencies even while reducing dependence on raw-material exports.
Moving one step up the value chain is therefore not the same as achieving complete industrial autonomy.
Indonesia needs domestic firms, skills and technology capable of capturing increasing shares of the industry’s value.
This is another reason institutional quality matters.
Resource-based industrial policy creates enormous rents.
Governments determine mining licences, export restrictions, infrastructure and investment approvals.
Companies therefore have strong incentives to influence government.
A political system becoming more dynastic or less transparent could make industrial policy more vulnerable to politically connected capital.
Economic development and democratic institutions therefore interact.
A capable developmental state needs enough political authority to coordinate investment.
It also needs enough accountability to prevent coordination becoming patronage.
Indonesia’s experience under Suharto provides a historical warning because rapid economic development coexisted with extensive corruption and political concentration.
The lesson from that period should not be that strong government is inherently dangerous.
It is that state capacity without accountability can become family capacity.
Political connections determine access to economic opportunities.
The boundary between public policy and private networks weakens.
That is why Gibran’s vice-presidential candidacy deserves scrutiny even if Indonesian voters support him genuinely.
Political dynasties are not automatically undemocratic. If citizens freely elect members of the same family repeatedly, banning them merely because of their surname would itself restrict voter choice.
The problem is intergenerational political advantage.
Children of powerful politicians inherit name recognition, networks, donors, party access and relationships with institutions that ordinary citizens do not possess.
Elections can therefore remain competitive while the pool of realistically competitive candidates becomes socially narrow.
This resembles inherited wealth in economics.
Equality before law does not produce equality of opportunity when starting assets differ enormously.
Political families inherit political capital.
That does not invalidate their victories.
It changes the competitive environment in which those victories occur.
The Philippines demonstrates an extreme version, where political dynasties dominate many levels of government despite regular elections.
India contains the Nehru-Gandhi family and numerous regional political dynasties.
The United States has had the Kennedys, Bushes and Clintons.
Dynastic politics therefore is not uniquely Asian or inherently authoritarian.
It becomes institutionally dangerous when family access combines with control over state institutions.
The distinction is between inheritance of popularity and inheritance of power.
Popularity can legitimately pass through voters.
State power should not pass through institutions designed around family relationships.
Indonesia’s constitutional term limit prevented Jokowi from inheriting his own office indefinitely.
The political question is whether his influence over succession has nevertheless become strong enough to weaken the spirit of that constraint.
Term limits are designed not merely to change the name of the person sitting in the presidential palace.
They are designed to interrupt the concentration of political networks around one leader.
If the outgoing president can effectively transfer those networks towards a preferred successor and place a family member on the ticket, formal rotation can coexist with substantial political continuity.
That is not automatically wrong.
Continuity can be economically valuable.
Infrastructure projects extend across electoral cycles.
Industrial strategies require policy stability.
Investors benefit when rules do not change completely after every election.
The question is whether continuity remains contestable.
Could Anies or Ganjar realistically have won?
Could opposition parties organise?
Could voters reject Jokowi’s preferred succession?
The existence of a genuine possibility of rejection is what separates democratic continuity from dynastic appointment.
Indonesia appears still to possess meaningful electoral competition.
The concern is whether that competition is gradually becoming less balanced.
Democratic erosion usually attracts attention when leaders do something dramatic.
Cancel an election.
Close parliament.
Arrest an opponent.
Abolish term limits.
But institutions can weaken incrementally through appointments, conflicts of interest and the gradual blurring of party, family and state.
No individual decision destroys democracy.
The cumulative direction matters.
This is why Indonesia should be analysed neither through alarmism nor complacency.
Its democracy has accomplished something extraordinary since 1998.
The world’s fourth-most-populous country moved from authoritarian rule towards repeated competitive elections, decentralisation and peaceful transfers of power across an enormous and diverse archipelago.
That achievement is real.
It is also not irreversible.
Democracies do not graduate permanently from institutional risk.
Every generation of leaders inherits constraints built by the previous one and decides whether to strengthen or weaken them.
Prabowo’s apparent victory will therefore become a particularly important test because his personal history connects Indonesia’s authoritarian past with its democratic present.
A former general associated with the final years of Suharto’s regime is being elevated through a democratic election.
That could demonstrate the strength of Indonesian democracy: the political system has become robust enough to absorb a former authoritarian insider and constrain him through elections and institutions.
It could also expose vulnerabilities if Prabowo interprets his large mandate as permission to weaken those constraints.
We do not know yet.
That uncertainty should remain part of the analysis.
The same applies to Gibran.
His presence could simply become the beginning of an ordinary political career that voters evaluate independently from his father.
It could become the foundation of a Jokowi political dynasty.
The difference will be determined by institutions and future elections, not his surname alone.
For now, the most important lesson is about how democracy handles popular leaders.
Jokowi is leaving office because the constitution requires him to leave.
That is institutional strength.
His son is positioned to become vice-president after a controversial eligibility ruling involving a family-connected court.
That is institutional reason for concern.
Prabowo appears to have won an enormous genuine electoral mandate.
That is democratic legitimacy.
His historical record creates legitimate questions about how he will use it.
Those propositions can all be true simultaneously.
Indonesia does not need to choose between celebrating its election and scrutinising the political environment surrounding it.
Healthy democracies should do both.
The strongest democratic institutions are not those that prevent voters from choosing controversial leaders.
They are those capable of surviving controversial leaders after voters choose them.
Indonesia has apparently chosen Prabowo.
The next test is whether the institutions built since Reformasi remain stronger than the personalities now inheriting them.
