Wearing a bright orange detention uniform, Faiz looked thinner than before as he stepped out of his cell at the Kediri police precinct in East Java. His mother, even more frail, tried to hide her tears as she greeted him. Faiz had been detained since September 21. That morning, he attended his high-school class via Zoom from a police room, studying for the final exam that would decide whether he could graduate.
Faiz is one of thousands of students and young activists rounded up since mass demonstrations erupted across Indonesia earlier this year. Their crime: demanding accountability from the government. While police vans roamed the streets chasing the country’s most critical and idealistic minds, President Prabowo Subianto was flying between capitals, shaking hands with world leaders, and posing as a peace broker in the Middle East.
The irony is almost unbearable. The same man long accused of abducting and torturing pro-democracy activists in the 1990s now sells himself as a mediator for global peace. It is a performance, the kind insecure strongmen master, seeking applause abroad to drown out dissent at home.
One year into his presidency, Prabowo has turned governance into spectacle. The police have become the long arm of a regime obsessed with control, while the economy, bureaucracy, and even public morality are increasingly run by generals and loyalists from his Gerindra Party. The democratic backslide that began under Joko Widodo has not only continued, it has been militarized and perfected.
Yet the police, brutal as they are, are not the biggest elephant in the room. The real problem lies deeper: in the economic and political architecture of Prabowo’s Indonesia, a system that feeds the powerful while numbing the public with illusions of prosperity.
From his first day in office, Prabowo promised to deliver an 8% growth rate, a fantasy figure economists immediately dismissed. The World Bank and IMF project growth of around 4.8–5% for 2025, constrained by slowing exports, weak household consumption, and falling commodity prices. Even 6% would be a stretch. But the government continues to chant “eight percent” as if numbers could be conjured by willpower alone.
Behind these promises, the fiscal picture is far less glorious. Inflation officially hovers around 2.7%, but that statistic hides real pain: rising food and transport costs, shrinking purchasing power, and record household debt. The rupiah has slipped past Rp16,200 to the dollar, the current account deficit is widening, and the state’s debt-service burden now eats up almost one-fifth of annual expenditure.
Yet while schools, hospitals, and social programs struggle, two institutions enjoy record budgets: the military and the police. The Defense Ministry receives Rp166 trillion, the National Police Rp126 trillion, the largest allocations of any agencies. In total, security spending now surpasses Rp425 trillion. It is an absurd contrast: while a teenager like Faiz studies for his exams in a detention cell, the police who jailed him are flush with funds.
But even this repressive apparatus is not entirely stable. Inside the regime, whispers of tension have surfaced between the palace and the police. The National Police, separated from the military after Soeharto’s fall, remains the last semi-autonomous security body in post-Reformasi Indonesia. Its recent heavy-handedness, raiding activists, intimidating journalists, and suppressing student movements, has sparked speculation that the force may be acting beyond Prabowo’s direct control.
Rumors in Jakarta’s political circles suggest Prabowo plans to replace the police chief and reorganize Polri under a newly proposed “Ministry of Security and Order”, effectively bringing the entire law-enforcement structure under his personal authority. If realized, it would mark the most sweeping re-centralization of power since the end of Soeharto’s rule.
That plan mirrors the president’s broader project: to re-militarize governance and re-centralize power, often under the pretext of national efficiency. The old spirit of Reformasi: regional autonomy, civilian oversight, democratic participation, is being drained quietly through programs that sound benevolent but function as instruments of control.
Take the free-meal program (Makan Bergizi Gratis or MBG). Officially designed to feed schoolchildren and combat malnutrition, it commands tens of trillions of rupiah. In reality, much of the money flows to politically connected suppliers and local contractors. In the name of feeding children, the government feeds its own cronies.
Then there’s Danantara, a new state-owned super-holding that supposedly aims to streamline Indonesia’s strategic industries. Modeled rhetorically on Singapore’s Temasek or Malaysia’s Khazanah, it instead centralizes control of key assets, from mining to infrastructure, into a structure dominated by retired generals and Gerindra insiders. It is less a reform than a fortress, designed to place the arteries of the economy under Prabowo’s direct command.
And the Red-White Cooperatives, presented as an effort to “democratize” the economy, in practice reabsorb independent cooperatives into a top-down framework controlled by party loyalists. What was once a people’s movement becomes another bureaucratic arm of patronage: a civilian mirror of military hierarchy.
Together, these programs reveal the true logic of Prabowo’s presidency: not reform, but consolidation. Bureaucrats and technocrats are being replaced by officers and politicians; decision-making is being pulled back to Jakarta, to the palace, to the man himself. Indonesia’s political and economic life is once again being arranged in the image of command.
The result is an economy dressed in populist rhetoric but structurally oligarchic. Manufacturing stagnates below 20% of GDP; inequality widens as the cost of living rises. Youth unemployment hovers around 16%, while millions more remain underemployed in the informal sector. The middle class lives on debt and credit cards, while state contracts enrich a small circle of political-business elites. The 8% growth promise has become a metaphor for the era itself: ambitious, deceptive, and hollow.
This combination of militarized politics and illusionary economics is Indonesia’s new reality. And the police, for all their violence, are only one symptom. They enforce a system that imprisons dissent while the government builds its image abroad. Prabowo’s diplomacy, his eagerness to play global mediator, is less about peace than projection. It’s about legitimacy: the performance of civility that hides the corrosion within.
The tragedy of Faiz, studying for his school exam in a jail cell, is more than personal. It is emblematic of a nation where youthful hope is met with handcuffs, where budgets favor repression over education, and where the future is traded for loyalty. Indonesia is again becoming a land where fear organizes politics and spectacle substitutes for truth.
The police may hold the keys to Faiz’s cell, but the lock was built elsewhere, in fiscal priorities, in political design, in the deliberate re-engineering of power. The real elephant in the room is not the uniformed men who swing the batons; it is the man in the tailored suit who smiles for cameras, speaks of peace and unity, and rebuilds the old machine, piece by piece, under his name.
If the world applauds Prabowo’s diplomacy while ignoring his repression, it will again mistake civility for democracy. Indonesia deserves more than another man in uniform promising peace while tightening the chains.
