The announcement of Prabowo Subianto and Gibran Rakabuming Raka as the last presidential candidate pairing to be registered with the General Elections Commission (KPU) reveals a cold antagonism between sitting President Joko ‘’Jokowi’’ Widodo and former president and party matron Megawati Soekarnoputri, which could go on long beyond the 2024 elections.

Both Jokowi and Megawati are important figures in the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) who should have been side by side supporting PDI-P’s president and vice president candidates Ganjar Pranowo and Mahfud MD. In fact, the arrangement for Gibran, who is Jokowi’s eldest son, to be Prabowo’s vice presidential candidate might be a contending case that Jokowi is inclined to support Prabowo and opposes Megawati’s pick.

All indications show that Jokowi and Megawati are not on good terms anymore. Megawati made a sudden announcement of Mahfud MD to be Ganjar’s running mate when Jokowi was away on state visits to China and Saudi Arabia. A few days later, Prabowo and his coalition of political parties announced their pick of Gibran as his running mate. Jokowi publicly said that as a parent, he would support what his son decided to do.

Jokowi’s role in the 2024 election has never been more significant as his blessing, contested by both Prabowo and Ganjar, could be decisive in the final result. His high public approval rating of 81.2 percent, the highest ever for a sitting president, provides him promising political capital to be a kingmaker for the upcoming election.

Jokowi’s strong political muscle seems to be out of Megawati’s reach as she has belittled Jokowi several times, saying Jokowi was merely a party officer, or without the PDI-P, Jokowi would have been nobody. Megawati strongly suggested that Jokowi be loyal to PDI-P as the party consistently supported him to occupy the mayoral seat in Surakarta, Central Java, and governorship in Jakarta before winning two consecutive presidential elections in 2014 and 2019. As the president, Jokowi, however, has refused to be hand-tied with the party-officer label.

As a card-carrying PDI-P member and political son of Megawati, Jokowi might not dare to openly go toe-to-toe with his own chairwoman. However, Gibran becoming Prabowo’s running mate, Jokowi’s other son Kaesang Pangarep becoming chairman of the Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI), which tacitly supports Prabowo and a recent declaration by Jokowi’s loyalist organization Pro-Jokowi (ProJo) to support Prabowo is evidence that Jokowi has made his stance bright against Megawati.

Jokowi has also consolidated power around him during his recent cabinet reshuffles, taking his own loyalists to the cabinet at the expense of PDI-P. Last July, he recruited ProJo chairman Budi Arie Setiadi as the communications and information minister, and on Wednesday reinstalled another loyalist Amran Soelaiman as agriculture minister, both replacing NasDem Party politicians who were implicated in corruption scandals. Like Budi Arie, Amran has also supported Prabowo. Amran and Prabowo had met several times, and the retired general hinted in August that Amran could help him with his presidential campaign.

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