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Prabowo Subianto: Indonesia’s Deng Xiaoping
Prabowo Subianto, like his Chinese hero, is taking power in his 70s with big ambitions for his country. Yet many view his return to politics with dread
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Prabowo Subianto during an election rally in Jakarta, Indonesia. (Photo by Oscar Siagian/Getty Images)
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Jane Lewis
20 September 2025
in Features
At private dinners with family and confidants, the Indonesian president, Prabowo Subianto, often speaks admiringly of historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, says Bloomberg. “Yet one name stands above the rest.”
Prabowo’s hero is the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, whom he “reveres both for breaking with party orthodoxy to propel China’s economic miracle and for his resilience – cast aside for years, yet taking power at the age of 74”.
For Prabowo, 73, the similarities with his own biography are striking. An ex-special forces commander, who went into self-imposed exile after the fall of dictator Suharto (his father-in-law) in 1998, he views himself as a “transformative” figure – vowing at his election last year to get the country’s growth back to 8%, while rolling out a raft of popular policies, including a $28 billion free-school-meals programme.
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Yet for many of his compatriots, Prabowo’s return inspired dread, says Al Jazeera. “A general once feared across Indonesia and banned from the US” for abductions, torture and other human-rights abuses “has reinvented himself as a ‘cute grandpa’”.
Prabowo’s electoral campaign to woo voters might have worked, but economically things are not going to plan, says the Financial Times.
At the end of August, simmering tensions in the Southeast Asian country erupted into violence when mobs stormed and looted the homes of four parliamentarians, including that of finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati. Within a week, she was jettisoned – prompting shockwaves in local markets. Having served in the role for 14 of the past 20 years, the former managing director of the World Bank was “a widely respected technocrat seen by investors as a guarantor of basic economic orthodoxy”. Alarmingly, her dismissal came just as Indonesia’s central bank signed a “burden-sharing” agreement with the government to help finance its sweeping projects – a worrying blurring of boundaries. The new “hurriedly sworn in” finance chief doesn’t inspire much confidence either, says Bloomberg.
When Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa got the call summoning him to the presidential palace, he initially thought it was “a prank”.
Although an able economist, he is not in Sri Mulyani’s class. Perhaps his best calling card, from the perspective of his new boss, is that he is a self-proclaimed supporter of the ideas of Prabowo’s father Sumitro Djojohadikusomo, who was a finance minister in the 1950s and a trade minister in the 1970s. “Sumitronomics”, as he once explained, is all about achieving political and social stability “through the equitable distribution of gains”.
Prabowo Subianto: democracy is ‘messy and costly’
Prabowo, whose own fortune is put at about $127 million, isn’t short of a bob or two and has enjoyed a lifestyle to match. He owns a mansion on the outskirts of Jakarta and “a guarded mountain retreat” in West Java, says Al Jazeera.
His current wealth derives from going into business with his brother, Hashim Djojohadikusomo, when he was expelled from the military – the family interests span paper pulp and plantation companies as well as oil, gas, coal and palm oil.
Prabowo was raised in an elite and cosmopolitan environment, notes the New Straits Times: spending time in Switzerland, Singapore, Malaysia and later in London. Returning home in 1970, he enrolled in the Indonesia Military Academy and went on to join the elite Kopassus unit under Suharto.
Prabowo feels “comfortable on the world stage”, but he’s no fan of democracy, once saying that it is “tiring” and “messy and costly”, says The Conversation. “Suharto’s system was based on a Faustian bargain that allowed him to rule corruptly and oppressively in return for high economic growth and development.” Prabowo could well adopt the same approach.
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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.
She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.
Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.
She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.
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