Prabowo’s victory: Indonesian youths pine for Suharto era, others warn about his dark history

“I hope Suharto becomes our president again,” user Leorzafiksa wrote.

Berlin-based anti-corruption organisation Transparency International dubbed Suharto “one of the most corrupt leaders in modern history,” for allegedly embezzling US$15 billion to US$35 billion in state money during his rule, enabled by systemic corruption and nepotism that benefited his family and cronies.

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He eventually sidelined the country’s first president Sukarno and assumed full power in 1967, becoming the leader of the New Order regime that ruled Indonesia for more than three decades. During that period, freedom of speech and expression were severely repressed and many political dissidents were jailed or disappeared.

Suharto, who died in 2008, never faced trial for his alleged acts of corruption and human rights violations. Many of the former military generals who were in his inner circle remain politically powerful to this day.

Prabowo, who was also one of Suharto’s top military leaders as head of the Army Strategic Reserve Command (Kostrad), went on to become a political party leader, defence minister and now, president-elect of Indonesia.

Election effect

Eve Warburton, a researcher of Indonesian politics at the Australian National University, said that the online trend does not necessarily mean that a majority of Indonesians pine for the days of Suharto’s New Order.

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“It’s very hard to understand the depth and the spread of those ideas among young Indonesians. If you ask people directly in surveys, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of explicit authoritarian nostalgia,” Warburton said.

A survey by Jakarta-based pollster Indikator, released in 2021, found that 59.7 per cent of 1,200 respondents did not agree that Indonesia should return to a dictatorship like the New Order, while 19.4 per cent agreed.

The exit polls indicate that young people helped Prabowo get over that 50 per cent line, Warburton said.

“We don’t know if they supported him because they had different ideas about what the New Order represented and what life was like [in that era], or if they had no ideas about the New Order at all. They may simply be attracted to his mix of militant nationalism and sophisticated online campaign,” she added.

Prabowo, who was married to Titiek for 15 years before they divorced in 1998, invoked the memory of his former father-in-law during a victory rally at an indoor stadium in Jakarta on the day of the election. He said he knew Suharto very well, “as I often had lunch with him”, the mention eliciting cheers from his jubilant supporters. When the stadium’s camera shifted to Titiek, Prabowo’s supporters roared again, shouting “get back together”.

Prabowo has a chequered history of his own. He has admitted to being involved in the kidnapping of pro-democracy activists in 1998, for which he was dismissed from the military.

In 1999, Prabowo’s father Sumitro Djojohadikusumo told the investigative news magazine Tempo that his son “kidnapped nine” activists after following orders from his bosses, including Suharto.

“In Indonesia, people don’t have a critical set of educational tools with which to assess life under the New Order. Civic education about the repressive aspects of the New Order has always been weak, and that’s in part because there has been little political will to go back and investigate a regime that many contemporary elites were part of in some way,” Warburton said.

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Bucking the trend

Not all Indonesians, however, are nostalgic for Suharto, and some have taken to social media to remind their fellow citizens of what life was really like under his regime.

Among them is Tito Ambyo, a journalism lecturer who wrote a viral thread on X about him owning a book on Marxism during the New Order era. Such books were banned due to the government’s fervent attempts to stamp out communism and they remain illegal in Indonesia to this day.

Tito, who is now 43 and teaches at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, wrote that his teachers at his high school in Bandung decided one day to do a random bag search, and he was getting “cold sweat” from thinking about his likely punishment.

He said that he managed to get away with it after one of the teachers pretended not to see the book in his bag.

Another X user, Amelia Martira, also wrote about her experience as a university student in Jakarta towards the end of Suharto’s rule.

“Every day when I go to campus, the streets are full of military equipment on the road. Thinking of taking to the street to protest? You should be afraid of snipers. Initially, the students only dared to give speeches and protest on campus. Even then, they were guarded by soldiers. However, the protests continued to escalate, and Trisakti students were shot. We were stunned,” Amelia wrote.

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She was referring to the deaths of four student democracy activists at Trisakti University on May 12, 1998 at the hands of Indonesian army personnel, which sparked a wave of violence and riots across Jakarta the next day.

Tito argues that “intergenerational trauma” is to blame for the current nostalgia for Suharto, but he said he still harbours hope that the power of storytelling from the older generation, either on social media or in campuses, could shed a light on the darker side of the strongman’s totalitarian regime.

“Since Suharto ascended, in the 1960s, my parents’ generation, and my grandfather’s, didn’t want to talk about [past tragedies] at all, and this continues to this day. The problem is we still don’t have the courage to look at history with two eyes wide open,” he said.