TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search resultsIn first year, Prabowo tightens grip, redraws political map
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
President Prabowo Subianto (right) takes the oath during the presidential inauguration ceremony on Oct. 20, 2024, at the House of Representatives building in the Senayan Legislative Complex in Central Jakarta. (AFP/Bay Ismoyo)
P
resident Prabowo Subianto has spent his first year in office consolidating power, expanding an already bloated cabinet, redrawing the political map and strengthening the military’s role in civilian government, further tightening his grip on power.
Since his election victory last year, Prabowo has moved fast to build a broad ruling coalition that includes all but one of the political parties in the House of Representatives, controlling more than 80 percent of the total 580 legislative seats and leaving no formidable opposition.
That has resulted in Prabowo assembling the country’s largest cabinet in decades, giving more than 100 cabinet posts to coalition partners and his election campaigners and volunteers, as well as financial backers, religious groups, figures from the military and the police, most of whom supported his presidential bid.
Political analyst Virdika Rizky Utama from PARA Syndicate said Prabowo has been direct and swift in consolidating power, as seen in “the formation of a broad coalition, the placement of loyalists in strategic roles and the systematic weakening of the opposition”.
“Prabowo makes no attempt to conceal his political calculations. Rather than cloaking his moves in the language of meritocracy or reform, he openly frames the distribution of power as an essential element of ‘national stability’,” Viridka said.
“This makes the political process highly transactional, and the space for opposition or criticism increasingly narrow. The stability being built does not come from institutional strength, but from elite obedience,” Viridka added.
Prabowo’s surprising move in August to grant a pardon to Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) secretary general convicted of bribery was widely seen by analysts as a way to “embrace” the sole de facto opposition party. The pardon prompted the party to soften its stance toward the government even though it remains outside of the ruling coalition.
