The Jakarta Post
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search resultsTwo years in, Prabowo exhausts Indonesia's state capacity
Indonesia does not need more institutions to become a better economy: It needs stronger state capacity backed by accountable institutions, predictable rules and credible law enforcement.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
President Prabowo Subianto delivers a speech on Oct. 21, 2026, during a plenary cabinet meeting at the Presidential Palace Complex in Central Jakarta, where over 100 officials from his Red and White Cabinet gathered to mark the second anniversary of his presidency. (Antara/Bayu Pratama S.)
P
resident Prabowo Subianto entered office in October 2024 seeking greater state control over the country’s natural resources, expanded welfare provision and an end to poverty. Two years on, his developmental agenda has clearly outpaced his administration’s capacity to deliver.
The gap between the President’s rhetoric and public expectation is widening rapidly. In less than a year, his approval rating has plummeted from 81.2 percent in November 2025 to 44.5 percent in October 2026, according to pollster Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting (SMRC).
This public rebuke is not due to inaction. On the contrary, while struggling to implement key campaign pledges such as his flagship free nutritious meal program for schoolchildren and expectant mothers, Prabowo has aggressively pursued sweeping institutional restructuring under the banner of a pro-poor agenda.
Drawing cues from state-directed developmental models in China and Singapore, Prabowo has leveraged his majority in the House of Representatives to amend laws expanding the domestic role of the military and police, including their co-optation to drive core civilian initiatives: distributing free meals to schools, running special schools for the underprivileged and gifted and spearheading crackdowns on illicit mines and plantations.
Concurrently, he has consolidated control over state-owned enterprises (SOEs) under Danantara, a state asset fund modeled loosely on Singapore’s global investment company Temasek.
Yet these institutional experiments have yielded scant success. The feeding program has been hobbled by systemic corruption and widespread food safety scandals. The National Nutrition Agency (BGN), which administers the program, has churned through three leadership changes in the past six months alone, with a former chief facing criminal prosecution.
The expansion of security institutions has only aggravated interagency friction.
