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View all search resultsWithout ideas or proposal, Prabowo stands on BRICS periphery
Indonesia may have secured a place at the BRICS table. But a seat at the table is not the same thing as having something distinctive to say at it.
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Leaders of participating countries gather for a family photograph during the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on Sept. 13, 2026. (AFP/Sputnik)
S
eventy-one years ago, countries came to Bandung, West Java, to hear Indonesia speak. Sukarno did not arrive only asking what Indonesia could get from the emerging postcolonial order. He arrived with an argument about what that order ought to become.
Bandung became a political vocabulary for newly independent nations: sovereignty, equality, anti-colonialism, nonintervention and mutual benefit.
Last month, in New Delhi, Indonesia arrived as a new member of a much larger and more complicated bloc. President Prabowo Subianto spoke about resilience, food, energy, education, economic strength and the need for countries not to be dictated to by great powers. Those are important national concerns. But they are largely concerns about how Indonesia can become stronger within the existing system.
That is a very different kind of foreign-policy proposition from asking what the system itself should become. And perhaps that is the real story behind the photograph from New Delhi.
Indonesia may have secured a place at the BRICS table. But a seat at the table is not the same thing as having something distinctive to say at it.
President Prabowo almost disappeared among the heavyweight leaders of BRICS. In the photographs from the summit in New Delhi, held on Sept. 12–13, China’s Xi Jinping walks alongside India’s Narendra Modi and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, occupying the visual center of the gathering. Prabowo is there, but not quite there. He walks behind Xi, almost invisible in the summit’s photos and videos.
In the family photograph, too, Indonesia’s president is placed away from the central cluster of the bloc’s most powerful members. Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was not even in the room; Brazil sent its foreign minister, Mauro Vieira, who nonetheless found himself positioned ahead of Prabowo in the group photograph.
