In October 2024, President Joko Widodo, commonly known as Jokowi, left office after a decade at the helm of Southeast Asia’s most populous nation. The former furniture salesman broke considerable ground, as the first Indonesian president not to hail either from the military or an elite political family, and was seen in the West for a time as a harbinger of democratic reform.

In a new book, “Ruling Indonesia: Jokowi’s Presidency in an Age of Democratic Crisis and Great Power Competition,” Marcus Mietzner, a political scientist at the Australian National University, grapples with the legacies of Jokowi’s decade in office. As he notes in the introduction to the book, which was published last month by University of Michigan Press, Jokowi was not as well-known to Western publics as other leaders from the Global South, yet departed office as one of the most popular presidents in Indonesian history. His time in office coincided with significant changes in Indonesia’s external environment, and would have a significant – and in many respects damaging – impact on the country’s democratic trajectory.

Mietzner spoke to The Diplomat’s Southeast Asia Editor Sebastian Strangio about the Indonesian leader’s infrastructure “obsession,” his erosion of democratic norms, and how these realities differed from perceptions of Jokowi in the West.

Jokowi departed office with sky-high approval ratings from the Indonesian public – figures that would be envy of any Western leader at the beginning of their first term in office let alone at the end of their second. What did you conclude accounts for it, and how do you think we should weigh it in our assessment of Jokowi’s decade-long presidency?

Jokowi was a studious and systematic reader of opinion polls, and he believed that this gave him insights that other leaders did not have. From his analysis of Indonesian opinion surveys, he understood what the majority of the population wanted, and he designed his own image and policies around that. In essence, Jokowi’s key electoral constituency was the Indonesian middle ground: voters who are largely apolitical, reject radicalism from the religious right or the liberal left, primarily want good government services and infrastructure, and a leader who they can relate to and does not display an extravagant lifestyle. He also read in the polls that presidential approval ratings tend to rise and fall with the level of inflation, and so he paid particular attention to the latter.

Thus, for Indonesia’s centrist electorate, Jokowi ticked all important boxes, and Jokowi made sure that he stayed up to date on any shifts – however minor – in the attitude of voters. He mostly responded to such shifts quickly and effectively. In terms of how his high level of popularity should be factored in when assessing his legacy, this depends on the analyst’s perspective. History is stacked with leaders who were extraordinarily popular but left disastrous legacies for their countries. There is no doubt, for instance, that Jokowi left Indonesian democracy in worse shape than when he found it. At the same time, it must matter – especially for foreign observers – that most Indonesian voters approved of Jokowi’s performance.

You write that Jokowi had “a near-obsessive focus on economic development” and that all other aspects of presidential governance were “subordinated to this goal.” What were Jokowi’s primary goals in terms of economic development, and to what extent do you think he succeeded in fulfilling them?

Jokowi did not have a clear concept of economic development priorities when he was elected in 2014. It was only early in his presidency, after seeking advice from other world leaders (including China’s Xi Jinping and Germany’s Angela Merkel), that he settled on infrastructure as the core agenda of his first term. Once set it as his government’s primary goal, he pursued it single-mindedly. Similarly, he defined industrial downstreaming (that is, roughly, the goal of processing natural resources at home before exporting them) as his second term priority after input from his advisers. Again, once adopted as the main priority, Jokowi took no prisoners executing it.

His focus on these development goals delivered some results, but it also led him to ignore more nuanced aspects of economic modernization, especially in the arenas of institution-building, productivity and reduction of corruption as an economic impediment. After a decade in office, he had not moved the macro-economic needle much. Economic growth rates were, in fact, lower than under his predecessor Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. This does not mean that Jokowi did not deliver important infrastructure projects that changed people’s lives. But under him, Indonesia did not break out of its long-term moderate growth trajectory, and it did not close the gap to its competitors.

Much like Barack Obama in the U.S. in 2008, Jokowi was seen during his breakout by many in the West as a great democratic hope. This gave way invariably to disappointment with the “focused and ruthless Machiavellian ruler” that he showed himself to be once in office. How did Jokowi rationalize his approach to Indonesia’s democratic traditions and the institutions established after Suharto’s fall? How, if at all, do you think his relatively humble background shaped his approach to politics and governance?

In hindsight, it was his non-elite background that delivered him – in his mind – the necessary justifications for his autocratic practices. He viewed himself as surrounded by predatory, anti-democratic elites who despised him and sought his removal. For him, therefore, utilizing the state’s coercive instruments against his adversaries was not only an acceptable strategy of self-defense, but an act of democracy defense. The longer he ruled, the more comfortable he became with mobilizing his constitutional powers to sideline his opponents and critics, and at the end, he had no quibbles in manipulating other state organs, either.

While there was some merit in his rationale of having to use robust measures against Indonesia’s “dark” oligarchic forces (and openly anti-democratic Islamist groups, too), this explanation was also highly self-serving and selective. He formed close alliances with oligarchs who backed him, and not all of the “victims” of his increasingly repressive apparatus were anti-democratic figures. Indeed, many pro-democracy activists were targeted, and at the very end, Jokowi chose as his successor Prabowo Subianto, the former son-in-law of long-time autocrat Suharto and an ex-general dismissed from his post for kidnapping government critics in the dying days of the New Order regime. It is hard to think of a more symbolic end to Jokowi’s presidential journey and Machiavellian evolution.

Jokowi’s decade in power coincided with a sharp intensification of the strategic competition between China and the United States. How did he attempt to manage this competition and position Indonesia in a more tense and constrained world?

Jokowi was a non-ideological, utilitarian pragmatist when approaching the Sino-American rivalry. He was often accused – both at home and in Western capitals – of being too close to China, but he rejected this view with good reasons. From his perspective, he offered both China and the United States opportunities of engaging with Indonesia, especially in the economic realm. China, he argued, made more use of these offers than the United States. China sent regular trade and investment missions to Indonesia, and that showed in the economic statistics: under Jokowi, China strengthened its position as Indonesia’s biggest trading partner, and it climbed up the ladder of the largest investors.

The United States, on the other hand, declined in both categories, while frequently lecturing Jokowi that he had an obligation of siding with the United States against China because of their shared democratic values. According to Jokowi, time and again he asked to United States to invest more in Indonesia or consider giving it other economic benefits, as Washington routinely does when a country is geopolitically important to it. But he got very little. In fact, he felt that the United States was sabotaging his industrial down-streaming agenda because it made Indonesian nickel exports to the United States more difficult.

However, while he felt China was doing more than the United States to earn Indonesia’s attention, he remained suspicious of Beijing. He refused to join BRICS; he instructed his finance minister to keep Indonesia’s debt to China low; and he did not water down Indonesia’s position on China’s illegitimate claims in the South China Sea. Overall, then, Jokowi kept Indonesia in its traditional non-aligned lane, while expressing disappointment that the United States – and the West more generally – did not do more to assist Indonesia in its quest for reaching the status of a fully industrialized nation.

You describe in detail Jokowi’s attempts to engineer a transition of the presidency to Prabowo, whom he had welcomed into his cabinet as defense minister after defeating him at the 2014 and 2019 elections. How did Jokowi describe these efforts and his goals, in particular his anointment of Prabowo, and do you think he was successful in his aims? What has Jokowi’s political role been since leaving office?

It is worth recalling that Jokowi’s support for Prabowo as his successor only emerged after several other plans had fallen through for him. Initially, Jokowi wanted a third term, which the constitution did not allow for. After it became clear that the elite would not change the constitution for him, Jokowi seemed to back Ganjar Pranowo, a member of the president’s own party. But he abandoned that support after concluding that Ganjar was more beholden to Megawati Sukarnoputri, the party’s long-time chairperson, than to him.

Ultimately, he convinced himself that picking Prabowo as his successor and helping him win the election was the best available outcome for him. Prabowo sealed that deal by promising Jokowi continued influence under his – Prabowo’s – administration, and by naming Jokowi’s son Gibran as his running mate. It is hard to tell how strongly Jokowi believed in Prabowo’s promises – but he described this arrangement to me as better than anything he could have gotten from Ganjar.

To be sure, many of Jokowi’s advisers told him that Prabowo’s pledges wouldn’t be worth much once Prabowo was in the palace. And indeed, Jokowi’s influence on politics declined rapidly after his departure from the presidency. Prabowo has played this game very shrewdly: while he continues to praise his predecessor in public, he has ensured that Gibran remains tightly caged in as vice-president; he nominally continued some of Jokowi’s pet projects – such as the new capital – but in fact reduced funding for them; and he isolated some key ministers who Jokowi nominated to remain in cabinet. Other politicians quickly sensed the shift in power and heaped pledges of loyalty onto Prabowo. Thus, Jokowi’s purely transactional gamble on his succession has not paid him many dividends so far – and this is only likely to change should Prabowo become incapacitated and Gibran president by default.

Have you noticed any continuities during the first 18 months of Prabowo’s presidency, and where has he differed as a leader from Jokowi?

Prabowo is a very different leader from Jokowi. Prior to his 2024 election, Prabowo promised Jokowi that he would act as his loyal apprentice when holding the presidency, and he presented himself in the electoral campaign as a much softer, mellowed-by-the-years centrist. But since becoming president, many of Prabowo’s old autocratic traits have made their way back into the political realm. As mentioned earlier, he pays lip service to the Jokowi era and sets some money aside to superficially sustain a limited number of his predecessor’s programs.

But otherwise, he has broken with key policies of the Jokowi regime: he has proposed to abolish direct elections for local government heads, which Jokowi had consistently defended; he is profoundly re-centralising governance after a quarter of a century of decentralization programs; he has expanded the role of the armed forces in non-military arenas, such as food production; he launched a massive, military-backed free meals program that – by all accounts – Jokowi doesn’t think much of; and he disbanded the Ministry of State-Owned Enterprises, which had played a key pole in Jokowi’s infrastructure programs.

In the arena of foreign policy, Prabowo joined BRICS; he told China that he is ready to compromise on South China Sea disputes; and he joined US President’s Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, compromising Indonesia’s decades-long stance on Palestine. Thus, Prabowo is going far beyond Jokowi’s own autocratic ideas, and while his hyper-activism in foreign policy has made Indonesia more visible on the international stage, it has also become less predictable.

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