Winning a presidential election involves a whole lot more than just grit and pure charisma in today’s political landscape.
Decked in a light blue checkered dress shirt and jeans, Prabowo Subianto waltzes across the stage, performing an awkward jig in front of a jubilant crowd. This was the reaction of Indonesia’s current President upon claiming his victory in the 2024 presidential election — a performance synonymous with his successful rebranding as a “cuddly grandpa”.
Prabowo is lauded by his younger Generation Z (Gen Z) and millennial supporters as “gemoy” and “gemes”, meaning overcome with cuteness, as seen in circulated TikTok videos. This stands diametrically opposed to his formerly contentious, Machiavellian image — one smeared by a dark and bloody past.
Prabowo: a “political chameleon”
Prabowo’s political career is marred by human rights abuse accusations, with links to Suharto’s military dictatorship and massacres during Indonesia’s occupation of Timor-Leste (1975-99). Barred from entering the US as late as 2012, Prabowo’s political path began tumultuously. After losing several presidential cycles, he even filed a lawsuit — albeit an unsuccessful one — alleging election fraud when he lost the 2014 election to Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, the Indonesian politician and businessman who served as Indonesia’s seventh president from 2014 to 2024.
However, Prabowo’s longtime political resilience built him an army of supporters. The results of the 2024 presidential election showed that Prabowo garnered 59% of the vote, a testament to the seismic political shift and recalibrated strategy adopted by the Prabowo-Gibran campaign.
But it is not his resilience that changed the game. It is a result of a deliberately curated marketing ploy. A convergence between being a “political chameleon” and strategic incremental decisions, leveraging both to fulfill an overarching goal: to achieve slide-rule authoritarianism. The “Dark Indonesia” movement reflects the reactionary response to the administration’s austerity policy and revised military law.
Prabowo’s 2019 campaign: the Islamic populist strategy
Much like the Trump administration, Prabowo is unafraid to engage with divisive and controversial populist rhetoric. Whereas US President Donald Trump’s appeal relies on his cult of personality — possessing presidential charisma bordering on self-caricature — which resonates with a vital fraction of the American electorate, Prabowo takes on a contrarian approach by necessity.
Unlike the polarizing demographic in the US, Indonesia’s population consists predominantly of Javanese Muslims. Prabowo’s strategic foregrounding and cultivation of a pious Muslim image expose the importance of having a cohesive political identity, one that aligns with the greater part of the electorate.
His 2019 presidential campaign is a testament to Prabowo’s overt engagement with Islamic populism. At the end of his official national speech (2019) at the Jakarta Convention Centre, titled Indonesia Menang (Indonesia’s Victory), he constructed the image of himself and his close proximity to Islam:
“As a proud son of the nation and of Islam, allow me to proclaim the takbir, ‘Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Independence! Independence!”
Islam became the vehicle in which he performed religious authenticity, a crucible for populist rhetoric, to stitch himself within the social fabric of the Indonesian electorate.
However, the Islamic populist strategy belies his true intentions. The U-turn in Prabowo’s 2024 presidential campaign strategy marks a crucial inflection point in his political career. The president’s decreased engagement with Islamic political rhetoric, in comparison to the 2019 election cycle and earlier years, is not a sign of a shift toward progressive values. It is a shift aimed at broadly appealing to younger voters; it is a means to an end.
The power of political marketing: Prabowo’s reformed image
This phenomenon has a direct consequence and correspondence with the increase in online pandering and deliberate curation of his new image. In other words, Prabowo’s reformed image and accumulated years of Islamic populist strategy boil down to the very core of predatory populism: molding his identity to the prevailing sentiments of mainstream consciousness.
The key differentiator of the 2024 presidential election cycle is that Prabowo has an excellent marketing team backing him up.
The clearest example is turning around a losing debate against his political rivals. The presidential debate between him and the other two political candidates, Anies Baswedan and Ganjar Pranowo, became one of the pivotal moments of the entire campaign. These videos — carefully edited clips — were disseminated through his party’s social media channels. In doing so, he raptured the hearts of voters as well as capitalized on its virality.
In a bid for strategic self-victimization, Prabowo, or rather his marketing team, successfully reframed what would have been a lackluster performance into craftily manipulated propaganda against his rivals.
An AI-generated image of a stylized billboard, portraying infantilized cartoon versions of Prabowo and Gibran, presents the perfect analogy: the idea is to soften his reputation and lodge himself within a digestible narrative. Another instance is a fake, also AI-generated video of Suharto circulated by Prabowo’s party, endorsing his presidency, which amassed as high as 4.5 million views.
Therein lies the core of his newly founded magnetism: an orchestrated reinvention that navigates between algorithmic reach and performative authenticity; the importance of image management has superseded actual engagement with public policy.
It is not Prabowo’s charisma nor his resilience that allowed him to clinch the top spot, but a structured marketing strategy that can easily be emulated. Prabowo’s successful campaign would not be a blip in the political arena, but the bellwether for Indonesia’s future voting behavior.
[Claudia Finak-Fournier edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
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