President Prabowo Subianto’s speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, was an emotionally charged performance of good intent, delivered with confidence, warmth, and an avalanche of numbers meant to reassure the world.
Introduced as Prabowonomics by his aides, Prabowo spoke of peace and stability as the foundations of prosperity, of a resilient economy growing above five percent, of inflation under control and a fiscal deficit safely below the legal ceiling. He spoke of efficiency, redistribution, industrialisation and dignity. Listening from the conference hall in Switzerland, one could believe Indonesia had entered a new era of competent, benevolent statecraft.
If only that was the case. If only good intentions alone could govern a country of more than 280 million people. If only ambition automatically translated into well-calibrated, research-based policy, executed efficiently by capable institutions and people, without wasting taxpayers’ money or eroding democratic safeguards.
Prabowo proudly cited economic growth above five percent as proof of success. Yet for Indonesia, five percent growth is not exceptional; it is ordinary. Nearly every president since the early 2000s has governed during periods of similar growth, if not higher. During his own campaign, Prabowo repeatedly dismissed five percent as insufficient, arguing that Indonesia would “go nowhere” without eight percent annual growth.
In Davos, however, the benchmark quietly shifted. What was once framed as failure is now celebrated as achievement. The recalibration reveals less an economic breakthrough than a political adjustment of expectations.
More telling than headline growth is its quality. Indonesia’s growth has long failed to translate into secure employment. Nearly 90 million Indonesians still work in the informal sector, without stability or protection. Youth unemployment remains stubbornly high. Job fairs attract thousands for a handful of positions. Growth figures that look respectable on international slides do little to change the daily reality of precarious work and stagnant productivity.
Do we even talk about the same Indonesia? Do we live in the same universe as Prabowo? This criticism is not written for the sake of criticism. It is not meant to belittle hard work or deny the urgency of social policy. It is an attempt to present realities different from the ones his close circles appear to be feeding him, realities that millions of Indonesians experience daily, far from Swiss conference halls.
In Davos, Prabowo boasted that Indonesia’s free nutritious meal programme (or MBG) now produces nearly 60 million meals a day and will soon surpass McDonald’s in scale. The comparison drew applause, but it also revealed how spectacle replaces scrutiny. Feeding people is not a competition of volume. A multinational fast-food corporation and a taxpayer-funded national programme operate under entirely different logics. Counting meals without transparently accounting for cost per unit, procurement integrity, nutritional standards and long-term funding tells us nothing about success. It tells us only that the state wants to be seen as generous.
The president framed this abundance as the result of efficiency savings: tens of billions of dollars allegedly freed from waste and redirected toward social spending.
Yet efficiency, when invoked repeatedly without independent audits or institutional reform, risks becoming a rhetorical substitute for structural solutions. Indonesia’s tax ratio remains low. Tax revenues have fallen sharply in recent months. And the fiscal deficit, already approaching the constitutional limit of three percent of GDP, leaves little room for error.
A politics of generosity that avoids confronting fiscal reality may win applause today, but it postpones difficult questions to tomorrow.
These questions grow heavier when placed alongside Prabowo’s showcase of Danantara, the newly established sovereign wealth fund said to manage assets worth one trillion US dollars. In Davos, Danantara was presented as proof that Indonesia now stands as an equal partner to global capital, capable of financing industrialisation, social programmes and national self-reliance all at once.
Yet a sovereign wealth fund does not generate money; it reallocates existing assets, many of them illiquid and already encumbered. At the very moment Danantara is celebrated as a symbol of strength, the rupiah has weakened toward 17,000 per US dollar, its lowest level in years. Currency depreciation is not a technical footnote but a referendum on confidence. A weaker rupiah makes Indonesia’s growing foreign debt more expensive to service, raises the cost of imported food, energy and technology, and quietly transfers the burden of policy ambition onto ordinary Indonesians through higher prices and eroded purchasing power.
Self-reliance proclaimed on the global stage sits uneasily with a development model increasingly exposed to external financing and currency pressure. When sovereignty is asserted in speeches but tested daily in exchange rates, it is the rupiah, not rhetoric, that ultimately tells the truth.
Prabowo repeatedly emphasised education as the key to breaking the cycle of poverty. He spoke of renovating tens of thousands of schools and equipping classrooms with large interactive panels so that children in remote villages could feel the presence of the state. The vision is seductive. But screens, software licences, maintenance and teacher training all cost money, a great deal of it. At the same time, significant portions of the education and social budget have been reallocated to finance the free-meal programme. The trade-off is rarely acknowledged. Education becomes a promise layered on top of an already stretched fiscal structure, rather than a coherent long-term investment.
These fiscal pressures are compounded by Indonesia’s mounting debt burden. Government debt has climbed above nine thousand trillion rupiah, with a substantial share denominated in foreign currency. Prabowo proudly reminded his Davos audience that Indonesia has never defaulted on its debt. That is true. But honouring debts is not the same as managing them sustainably. As revenues weaken and the rupiah depreciates, debt servicing consumes a growing share of the budget, narrowing space for health, education and social protection. Future governments, and future generations, inherit the bill.
Prabowo also cast himself as a champion of the rule of law, pointing to the revocation of permits for 28 plantation and forestry companies accused of violating environmental regulations after devastating floods and landslides in Sumatra killed more than a thousand people. On its face, the move appeared bold, and long overdue. Yet the pattern of enforcement tells a more troubling story. While concessions linked to major conglomerates lost their permits, as they should have, Tusam Hutani Lestari, a plantation company controlling nearly 100,000 hectares in Aceh and linked to Prabowo himself, remained untouched. The law, it seems, falls heavily on some and carefully sidesteps others.
The contradiction deepens further east. While environmental enforcement is showcased in Sumatra, forests in Merauke, Papua, continue to be cleared on a massive scale under the banner of national food and energy estates. Backed by powerful business interests, millions of hectares are being opened, indigenous communities displaced, and resistance criminalised. What is framed as discipline in one region becomes permissiveness in another. Law is not applied evenly but selectively, in ways that consolidate power and streamline control.
All this unfolds alongside a steady erosion of democratic norms. At home, while Prabowo speaks of dignity abroad, his administration places more military figures in civilian posts, proposes to weaken direct local elections, and advances political dynasties, including pushing his own nephew into a key position at the central bank, a move that immediately rattled markets and weakened the rupiah further. Stability, it turns out, is increasingly defined as obedience, not accountability.
Davos applauds optimism, confidence and grand narratives. Indonesia lives with policy. Five percent growth, praised abroad, remains insufficient to deliver dignity at work. Free meals and digital panels make powerful images, but rising debt, a weakening currency and selective law enforcement shape everyday life. Between these two worlds lies the real test of leadership: not how convincingly a country can narrate itself on the global stage, but whether it can govern honestly, fairly and sustainably at home.
A nation cannot be governed by speeches alone. Forests cannot be saved, children educated, and democracy preserved through spectacle and selectivity. Until the Indonesia celebrated in Davos becomes the same Indonesia experienced by its people, the country will continue to exist in two different universes, one eloquently narrated to the world, and another quietly endured at home.
