Jokowi now cleared to run to the finish line as Indonesia's next president

In the race for the Indonesian presidential elections in July, Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo has just been nominated as PDI-P’s presidential candidate. This follows a decision by former president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, to shelve her own plans for an unlikely comeback to support the long-standing front-runner.
The 52 year old Jokowi is streets ahead of the nearest contender, former Kopassus chief and ex-Sunarto son-in-law Prabowo Subianto. Opinion polls show Jokowi consistently running at between double and triple Prabowo’s potential vote, with more than a third of the electorate favouring Jokowi in the first presidential round. Translated into a second round vote, Jokowi should, on current numbers, win the presidency in a landslide.
Having said that, Indonesia’s presidential elections are not a foregone conclusion. Indeed, nothing is a foregone conclusion in politics. But Jokowi would now have to make a serious error not to have a fairly easy run to the finish line.
Such challenges that the preferred presidential candidate now face will come after the elections, not before. The challenges that Jokowi will face will be principally around economic policy – he doesn’t have any, yet Indonesia desperately needs to start charting a clear course if its economy is to reach anything like its potential.
Related to this, there remains a big question as to how Jokowi will handle Indonesia’s economic rise, assuming it happens as predicted, and its parallel rise as a strategic power. The choices he will face are whether to continue to be inwardly focused and not assert Indonesia’s increasingly important role in the region, or to look outwards and make Indonesia a more active international player.
On balance, one would say he will likely remain a conservative, or a minimalist, on foreign policy. Indonesia’s economy, on the other hand, could certainly benefit from clear economic direction, but Jokowi can be expected to be fairly hands off, with his default position tending towards nationalist or protectionist policies.
Beyond that, at this stage of the political game, there is not a great deal the others can do to ‘steal’ Jokowi’s limelight. In Javanese culture, power accrues through perceived lack of action, or discreet action, rather than through overt action.
The more Jokowi’s main rivals, Prabowo and Golkar’s Aburizal Bakri, act, the more they will be seen as ‘kasar’ or coarse and over-reaching. Jokowi only need be himself to continue his good run of luck and the sense of charisma that appears to build based in his populist but not assertive appearances.
Jokowi is often portrayed as a ‘man of the people’, and he can claim to be closer to the ‘wong cilik’ (little people) than most of the political elite. Indeed, so much invested in Jokowi’s populism that he is seen to represent a clean break with the corruption and money politics that has dominated Indonesia in its post-Suharto period.
Yet in Indonesia, it is all but impossible to be successful in business, as Jokowi was in his home town of Surakarta, without at least flirting with corruption. That he has been a successful politician, first in his home town and then as Governor of Jakarta, perhaps speaks more to his engagement outside the main players in Indonesia’s oligarchy, rather than his complete removal from the world of patronage and favors.
The only possible problem that Jokowi would now face in his run to the presidential finish line will be if there is a critical issue between now and the election that Jokowi is unable to respond to adequately, and if his facade consequently crumbles, His charisma might then quickly crumble.
This close to the elections, though, it would have to be a dramatic issue and an equally dramatic collapse to have any real impact. All Jokowi need do is react little and he would be sufficiently politically preserved to use his electoral buffer to get across the line.
If one was to lay a bet, one would have to say that the odds are now very much stacked in favor of Jokowi becoming Indonesia’s next president. The next big question will be, once in office, how he will wield the still considerable authority the office holds, and whether he can stitch together a legislative majority to help ensure that whatever program he does try to implement will have some success of being passed into law.
Achieving office, in Indonesia, is one thing. Being able to do something with it to address the country’s sense of drift is, however, quite another.