Thousands of young people stood in a long line outside Kasablanka Hall in South Jakarta on Saturday morning. They had travelled from every corner of Indonesia. From Aceh, Papua, Makassar, Ambon, Pontianak, Lombok, they made the journey on their own initiative and with their own money.
Some had just arrived from Palembang by ship. Others from Papua paid exorbitant airfares, then spent the night squeezed together in a small rented room. Students from Nusa Tenggara and Maluku carried their own stories of sleepless ferries, last-minute buses, and borrowed funds to reach the capital.
No, they were not Swifties lining up for a Taylor Swift concert, nor fans chasing Korean girl groups or boy bands. They came for something far more serious: to reclaim the world from the country’s elite group. They came to attend what Coordinating Minister for Infrastructure and Development Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono (AHY), in his keynote speech, called the biggest annual foreign policy event for young Indonesians: the Indonesian Foreign Policy Conference (IFPC), organized by the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia (FPCI).
Inside the packed hall, students engaged AHY directly.
“I will choose China over the US,” one student replied instantly when asked to pick between the two.
A high school girl, when posed the same question, confidently refused the binary: “Whatever. I will choose peace.”
This was the kind of dialogue taking place inside the conference room: fearless, curious, unfiltered.
Their presence highlights one of the most striking contrasts in Indonesia today: a president who centralizes foreign policy in his own hands, guided by instinct and private diplomacy, and a generation of young Indonesians determined to break it open. As Prabowo Subianto turns Indonesia’s global posture into a personal performance, these youths treat foreign policy as a civic space. As he narrows it inside the palace, they democratize it in halls, classrooms, TikTok feeds, and midnight study circles across the archipelago.
Their journey to Jakarta is a form of resistance, a collective refusal to let Indonesia’s world affairs be determined by one man alone.
Across Indonesia, from Aceh’s universities to Papua’s community centers, young people have developed an extraordinary appetite for international affairs. They debate ASEAN’s future, question the meaning of non-alignment, follow China’s maneuvers, dissect BRICS, and scrutinize Indonesia’s silence on Palestine. They talk about climate diplomacy, migrant workers, global inequality, and the shifts reshaping world politics. Their conversations often show a depth missing in the government’s own statements.
For them, foreign policy is no longer an elite abstraction. It is daily life. It shapes the price of rice, job opportunities, regional stability, and Indonesia’s ability to navigate an increasingly turbulent world.
Their enthusiasm comes from lived experience: Indonesia can no longer afford foreign policy that drifts without clarity or principle. And this generation refuses to let foreign affairs remain the private playground of politicians.
That urgency is what brought more than 7,000 young people to Jakarta for the Nov. 29 conference. They arrived with notebooks, questions, and conviction, not as passive spectators but as citizens ready to shape the conversation.
Yet the event also carried a moment of disappointment: the absence of Foreign Minister Sugiono. He had no major diplomatic engagements that day, no overseas meetings, no urgent commitments. While at the last minute Deputy Foreign Minister Havas Oegroseno came to deliver a closing speech, it was the minister who had been expected.
Dino Patti Djalal, FPCI’s founder and chairman, voiced his frustration. He noted that the foreign minister seemed afraid to return to the same stage where, a year earlier, he delivered a disastrous speech that became the subject of ridicule on social media and among participants, journalists, and even foreign diplomats.
Instead of seizing the opportunity to come back stronger and reengage with the public, he withdrew. And his silence created a vacuum, one the youth filled themselves.
“It’s sad. He should have come and just read his speech in front of thousands of Indonesian young people,” Dino said.
Despite having served as foreign minister for a year, the Indonesian public has hardly heard him speak about foreign policy, his vision or the goals he hopes to achieve. In fact, after being appointed secretary-general of Prabowo’s ruling Gerindra Party, he has been occupied with party duties, making videos on Gerindra’s behalf and addressing flooding in Sumatra just a day before the conference.
His absence symbolized something deeper: under President Prabowo Subianto, foreign policy has grown increasingly personal, impulsive, and opaque. What once depended on deliberation, institutional memory, and bureaucratic expertise has been reduced to leader-to-leader gestures and spur-of-the-moment statements.
Prabowo’s worldview, one that is shaped by a belief in harmony, a discomfort with confrontation, and insecurities rooted in his past, produces a foreign policy that values superficial friendliness over strategic coherence. His mantra, “One enemy is too many, a thousand friends are too few,” is less a doctrine than a preference to avoid difficult choices. It allows him to sidestep serious questions rather than confront them.
Yet this is where Indonesia’s paradox emerges: as foreign policy shrinks at the top, it expands at the bottom.
The youth are not merely filling a void. They are reclaiming a space that Prabowo has attempted to monopolize. Their travels across islands are statements that foreign policy does not belong to one man. Their late-night discussions in cramped rooms are acts of political participation. Their questions and hunger to learn reflect a civic awakening, a belief that Indonesia’s global future must be shaped by the people, not dictated from above.
These young people are restoring something neglected in the Prabowo era: the idea that foreign policy is a national project requiring transparency, accountability, and public engagement. Their presence at Kasablanka Hall represents a version of Indonesia that Prabowo’s government has failed to articulate, an Indonesia that is confident, outward-looking, and unafraid to confront global challenges.
And this transformation is quiet but politically significant. The youth are pulling foreign policy away from the grip of personalized power and returning it to the public sphere, where it belongs. They are breaking open what Prabowo tries to keep closed. They are reclaiming Indonesia’s place in the world not through street protests or fury, but through understanding, debate, and participation.
They are creating a people’s foreign policy, one shaped from below.
This movement is not accidental. It reflects the frustrations of a generation living in a world where crises cross borders: climate change, economic insecurity, pandemics, conflicts, technological disruption, mass migration. They understand that Indonesia cannot afford foreign policy driven by nostalgia, personal sentiment, or improvised friendliness. They see the cost of incoherence in the form of missed opportunities, weakened alliances, diminished credibility, and an Indonesia increasingly overshadowed on the global stage.
Prabowo may try to keep the world to himself. But across the archipelago, the youth have already begun to open it. They are transforming foreign policy from a private performance into a shared responsibility. They are turning curiosity into citizenship, questions into public pessure, and engagement into a form of resistance.
They are reminding the nation that Indonesia’s global destiny cannot be confined to the instincts of one man.
The world belongs to those who care. And today, it is Indonesia’s young people who are traveling across seas and islands, queuing in long lines, filling halls with questions and courage, who care the most. They are not waiting for permission to participate. They are taking back the world already, piece by piece, discussion by discussion, question by question.
In caring, they are reclaiming Indonesia’s future, its voice, its direction, its place in the world. And in doing so, they are bringing foreign policy back to where it always belonged: the people.
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Omong-Omong Media’s editorial is also published in The Jakarta Post every Monday.
