Opinion | Indonesia’s next president will uphold Jokowi’s legacy. But that on its own might not be enough
- Whoever wins the election, fresh thinking and brave action will be needed to meet the developmental challenges facing Southeast Asia’s largest economy
- Whether the next government can set the right trajectory for Indonesia to become an advanced and prosperous nation by 2045 remains open to scrutiny
From a national development perspective, the three pairs of candidates – Anies Baswedan and Muhaimin Iskandar (Team AMIN), Prabowo Subianto and Gibran Rakabuming Raka, and Ganjar Pranowo and Mahfud MD – each have ways they can shape the future of Indonesia. So what are the policy possibilities post-election? And what are the potential effects on Indonesia’s development trajectory?
As policy (content) cannot be separated from the politics (process) and polity (culture), it’s important to start answering these questions by examining what the presidential nominees’ campaigns reveal about the state of the Indonesian political elite.
These agendas are reflected in the candidates’ campaign narratives: Team AMIN offer “change”, Prabowo-Gibran “continuity”, and Ganjar-Mahfud “improvement” – keywords that also capture their main policy approaches for key development issues.
Despite their promise to bring about significant change, Team AMIN have set quite a conservative target for annual economic growth of between 5.5 to 6.5 per cent until 2029. They say they aim to reach this through shared prosperity, wealth distribution, and social justice.
Prabowo-Gibran’s target is 6 to 7 per cent using a vague, jargonistic strategy of “Jokowinomics”. This has been interpreted as a version of a “Pancasila economy” – basically a controlled market economy acting as a counterbalance against neoclassical economic tenets such as individualism and free-market economics.