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Prabowo Subianto’s strong, first-round victory in Indonesia’s Feb. 14, 2024 presidential elections has made many pundits and observers draw parallels with the Philippines’ 2022 presidential election won by Ferdinand Marcos Jr. I cannot blame them.

Prabowo served in the military under President Suharto, who came to power after the overthrow of President Sukarno and a brutal anti-communist campaign. Suharto ruled Indonesia with an iron fist from 1968 to 1998.

Prabowo joined the Suharto family when he married the president’s daughter Titiek in 1983. The couple’s son Didit is now a fashion designer. They divorced in 1998 after Suharto’s ouster.

Now 72, Prabowo’s fresh victory came after two failed attempts to become president in 2014 and 2019. Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi, defeated him in both elections as candidate of PDI-P, the party headed by Megawati, Sukarno’s daughter and herself a former president.

Jokowi named Prabowo as Minister of Defense in 2019, which many could argue would be the starting date of their political alliance. The next milestone is Prabowo’s choice of Jokowi’s son Gibran Rakabuming Raka as his running mate in the 2024 elections.

Many Indonesian and international analysts point to this alliance and Jokowi’s influence as the main factor in Prabowo’s third – and triumphant – attempt to be president. They say that Jokowi, through gestures and actions, practically named Prabowo as his chosen successor.

As to the parallels with the Philippines, many point to Prabowo’s military record and family ties with Suharto.

In his 2014 campaign, the Civil Society Coalition Against Forgetting rejected his candidacy, due to his alleged involvement in human rights violations, including forced disappearances when he was commander of Kopassus, an Indonesian Army special forces group.

The coalition said Prabowo should be held accountable for at least the disappearance of 13 pro-democracy activists in 1998 as many of them were last seen alive in a Kopassus headquarters.

“Our rejection of this presidential candidate who is alleged to have been involved in human rights violations is part of our struggle to combat the neglect of past human rights violations and to promote a democratic way of life and better law enforcement,” the coalition said in 2014.

Although abandoned by Jokowi in favor of rival Gerindra’s tandem, the PDI-P is set to return to the legislature as the biggest party. That cannot be said of parties that ran against Marcos.

Quite a number of my Indonesian friends are as heartbroken by Prabowo’s victory as we were by the election of another President Marcos. In the run-up to both elections, public opinion polls consistently predicted a huge victory by Prabowo and Marcos.

As to how and why these happened and reached this seemingly common point, the jury is still out.

But we could agree that we should stay away from falling into the folly of simplistically blaming voters for supposedly making a wrong choice. There are many historical and contemporary factors at play.

In our case, the Philippines is said to have lost a generation of young leaders in the 1970s to killings, abductions, and disappearances during martial law. The 1986 and 2001 uprisings only managed to unseat presidents, with the political and economic system’s swift consolidation denying us the benefit of full accountability – or in other words, promoting a culture of impunity.

By the way, Indonesians and Filipinos are not in an exclusive club of the similarly-situated.

In 2013, South Koreans elected as their president Park Gyeun-he, the daughter of former dictator Park Chung Hee. (She was impeached in 2017 and convicted by a court, removed from office, and jailed in 2018. She was pardoned in 2021.)

In many countries from Sweden to Paraguay, and The Netherlands to Argentina, far-right and populist candidates and parties won power in 2022-2023.
Americans picked Donald Trump in 2016, and is now mounting a serious strong challenge to Joe Biden in the November elections, despite an avalanche of lawsuits over attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and an attack on the US Congress.

Why are such illiberal, populist, and extreme right-wing candidates and parties getting electable and elected? Why are liberals and democrats getting crushed? What’s happening in many countries and the world?

We have a lot of time to answer these questions. Today, we in Manila could send to friends in Jakarta our good wishes and solidarity. May our common causes find their realization in the near future, in our lifetimes.