THE 2024 presidential election, some people say, will be a derby match for the coalition of parties supporting President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and for Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the nation’s largest Islamic organisation.
The idea is that whatever the election outcome is, the president and NU will come out as the biggest winners.
I argue that it is actually the mining oligarchs, rather than Jokowi’s political dynasty or NU, who will rake in the spoils of the election.
Here is why. It is true that all the candidate pairs contesting the election are backed by pro-government parties.
There is no political alliance led or dominated by the opposition parties.
Furthermore, President Jokowi has either a minister or a son on all the election tickets, making it a race for all the president’s men, and sons.
NU also seems to have a stake in every registered ticket. Mahfud MD, a renowned NU intellectual, is Ganjar Pranowo’s running mate. Muhaimin Iskandar, leader of the NU-linked National Awakening Party (PKB), is Anies Baswedan’s.
The Prabowo Subianto-Gibran Rakabuming Raka pair is also likely backed, albeit tacitly, by the NU establishment led by Yahya Cholil Staquf, a close ally of the president himself.
On the other hand, the mining oligarchs failed to secure a vice-president seat despite having spent much of their energy and resources with this in mind. State-owned Enterprises Minister Erick Thohir, the brother of coal tycoon Garibaldi “Boy” Thohir, must accept the fact that the president has the final say on who Prabowo’s running mate should be.
Meanwhile, in the eyes of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) leader Megawati Soekarnoputri, Tourism and Creative Economy Minister Sandiaga Uno, a mining businessman, is simply not the running mate that Ganjar needs.
But a closer reading into the state of the race today shows that the mining oligarchs are in a more secure and more advantageous position.
The reality is that the president is in fact betting on a single horse in the race: Prabowo. His decision to pair the former general with his son, Gibran, has practically ended his already rocky relationship with PDI-P.
While Jokowi is still officially a PDI-P member, the party has made it clear that it is treating him as a competitor. With Gibran in Prabowo’s camp and Kaesang Pangarep, Jokowi’s youngest son, now leading the Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI), the PDI-P’s nemesis, there is no way that the “bull” party will simply forgive the President should Ganjar win the election.
Anies, too, is by no means a candidate that Jokowi can rely on. The former Jakarta governor is running on a platform of “change”.
He has no interest in continuing the incumbent’s flagship programmes, including the ambitious new capital project in East Kalimantan. If anything, the NasDem Party, which nominated Anies, is still keeping tabs on the President after two of his ministers were arrested for corruption.
The party has said that it is now being targeted because of its decision to endorse Anies. NU is, in fact, on a weaker footing than it was in the last election. Neither Muhaimin nor Mahfud is the candidate favoured by the NU establishment. Muhaimin is more PKB than NU, while Mahfud is only culturally NU.
The group’s roles in the Prabowo camp are also far from significant, as neither of the candidates is an NU figure.
It surely will not top its own success in 2019, when its leader was elected vice-president. Erick and Sandiaga’s failure to get a vice-president nomination, meanwhile, should not be interpreted as the end of the growing mining industry’s influence in the government. Ganjar and Prabowo have appointed the current chief and former chiefs of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin), Arsjad Rasyid and Rosan Roeslani, as leaders of their respective campaign teams.
Both men are influential figures within the mining sector, holding key positions in their respective companies. Arsjad is the president director of mining and energy firm Indika Energy, while Rosan is cofounder of Recapital Group.
It is not clear who Anies will pick to lead his campaign team, but regardless of who he chooses, Arsjad and Rosan are already working for the candidates with the higher chances of winning the election, according to most pollsters. Their key roles in the campaigns would guarantee them key positions in the next government.
The same thing occurred in the previous election when Erick and Rosan were campaigning for Jokowi while Sandiaga was running for vice-president alongside Prabowo. The three men were perhaps competitors politically, but they were also business partners.
After Jokowi’s reelection, Erick was appointed state-owned enterprises minister, while Rosan was appointed ambassador to the United States and later made Erick’s deputy. Sandiaga, meanwhile, was appointed Tourism and Creative Economy minister.
The significance of these new elites in the making of Jokowi’s economic policies cannot be overstated. Kadin is a powerful lobby group that played a critical role in the controversial passage of the 2020 Job Creation Law as well as the 2020 revision to the Coal and Mineral Mining Law.
As the Jokowi government seeks to develop an electric vehicle (EV) ecosystem by downstreaming the mining sectors for nickel, copper, cobalt and bauxite, the essential materials for EV batteries, the mining oligarchs will continue to expand their clout in the country’s energy policymaking.
The question now is whether the growing influence of mining oligarchs in the government is good for the Indonesian people. We can all agree that transitioning away from dirty energy is the way of the future.
Having said that, we are also deeply concerned that oligarchic pressures are putting an intolerable strain on our democratic institutions, which are supposed to serve as safeguards against predatory business interests. The people should not be the losers in the election. — The Jakarta Post/ANN
Ary Hermawan is an editor at large of The Jakarta Post. The views expressed are the writer’s own.
