The window will open. It always does. 

The problem is not Prabowo Subianto. The problem was never Prabowo Subianto. Prabowo is exactly who he always appeared to be. He has been consistent for thirty years.

The problem is that ‘the man’ who stood for everything different became the architect of everything the same. 

He proves that in Indonesia’s current political architecture, even a genuinely different leader can be reliably converted into an enabler of the system he was elected to reform. 

The question Indonesians need to ask is not whether the next president will be better than Prabowo. The question is whether the system that converted him will convert the next one too. 

Mufli Budi Ananda, the steel commissioner, is not the story. He is a symptom that happens to be legible.

The story is a system that has survived four presidents, two democratic transitions. It rewarded the people inside it, raised the cost of challenging it, and waited for the outrage to subside. 

The more I think about what to do, it almost always comes down to protest. Demonstrations. People power. This almost always happens in every stupid decision made by the government. Sometimes it works and the system moves. But a little later, the energy dissolves. 

Maybe we do not yet understand it completely. The method is not the problem. The structure is the problem. 

The techniques that toppled Suharto are being studied and countered by the governments that came after him. The window that opens for moral spectacle closes faster than it used to.

What this means, concretely, is that Indonesian protests have a shrinking half-life. Each cycle of outrage that ends in a cosmetic concession teaches the government something: the minimum concession required to dissolve the pressure. The government is learning. The movement is not. 

However, Prabowo will not be president forever. His coalition is fragile. His political base is narrowing. The economics of a patronage state always eventually produce a contradiction. There are only so many ‘komisaris’ seats, only so many state enterprises, only so much budget surplus to distribute before the machine runs out of fuel and its internal coalitions begin to fracture.

The window will open. It always does. 

Braunschweig, 01 July 2026