Faiz is one of the thousands of students and young activists who have been rounded up since nationwide demonstrations erupted earlier this year. Their crime: demanding accountability from the government.

While police vans roamed the streets chasing the country’s most critical and idealistic minds, President Prabowo Subianto was flying between capitals, shaking hands with world leaders and posing as a peace broker in the Middle East.

The irony is almost unbearable. The same man long accused of abducting and torturing pro-democracy activists in the 1990s is now promoting himself as a mediator for global peace.

One year into his presidency, Prabowo has turned governance into spectacle. The police have become the long arm of a regime obsessed with control while the economy, bureaucracy and even public morality are increasingly run by generals and loyalists from his Gerindra Party. The democratic backsliding that began under his predecessor Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has not only continued, it has been militarized and perfected.

Yet the police, brutal as they are, are not the biggest elephant in the room. The real problem lies deeper, in the economic and political architecture of Prabowo’s Indonesia, a system that feeds the powerful while numbing the public with illusions of prosperity.

From his first day in office, Prabowo has promised to deliver a growth rate of 8 percent, a fantasy figure economists immediately dismissed. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund project growth of 4.8-5 percent for 2025, constrained by slowing exports, weak household consumption and falling commodity prices.