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Prabowo will likely run in 2024 for the sake of his party only
Prabowo may not have formally announced a decision to run in the 2024 elections, but can he really resist bidding for the country's presidency for a third and possibly final time?
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Prabowo Subianto waves as he arrives at the Senayan legislative complex in Jakarta on Oct. 20, 2019 to attend the second inauguration of Joko Widodo as the President of Indonesia. (Reuters/Willy Kurniawan)
I
n a recent conversation, the ambassador of a Latin American country expressed his wonder at why many Indonesians were still enthusiastic about getting Prabowo Subianto to run for the presidency in 2024, even though he had lost in the last two elections. Prabowo actually crashed out three times, if we also take into account his defeat in 2009 as the running mate of then-president Megawati Soekarnoputri.
“People in Latin America have little empathy for a loser. We are very different from Indonesian people, who are very supportive of a dud,” the ambassador said.
He is not alone in this view. Many Indonesians are also doubtful that Prabowo stands a chance at winning the 2024 presidential race after his back-to-back losses.
While the defense minister has not formally announced his intention, a retired Indonesian Army general told me on Oct. 25, “as long as he still breathes, he will never give up”. So Prabowo will run again.
In my reply to the envoy, I told him that Prabowo enjoyed solid grassroots support in his three previous attempts.
In the 2009 legislative election, just one year after its establishment, his Great Indonesia (Gerindra) Party gained 26 out of the 560 seats at the House of Representatives on winning 4.46 percent of the vote, an impressive achievement for a rookie party. Gerindra raked in 73 out of the 575 House seats (11.81 percent votes) in 2014, and five years later, the figure rose to 78 seats (12.59 percent votes). Gerindra finished third in the last two elections, only behind the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) and the Golkar Party.
How did it perform in the presidential elections? In 2014, Prabowo was the choice of 62,576,444 voters (46.85 percent) against the 70,997,833 voters (53.15 percent) who elected Joko “Jokowi” Widodo. In their 2019 rematch, Prabowo claimed 68,659,239 votes (44.50 percent) against Jokowi’s 85,607,362 votes (55.50 percent).
