20,000 troops vs palace bugs

How do you go from 81% approval, a commanding legislative majority, and a grand political bargain with powerful elites, to deploying 20,000 troops to protect yourself?

Let's ask Indonesia's strongman president, Prabowo Subianto, who finally got the top job in 2024 after marrying into a dominant First Family (the Suhartos), rising to special forces chief, then mounting four failed electoral bids for the palace.

After teaming up with the son of his wildly popular predecessor / rival (Jokowi), he finally rode to power promising 8% growth, free school lunches for ~80 million kids, and a smooth continuation of Indonesia's infrastructure boom.

Then... what went wrong?

Well some of the earliest wobbles were in Prabowo's own signature school lunches, with corrupt bureaucrats and contractors pilfering millions, while rushed execution left ~50,000 kids ill from food poisoning. Meanwhile, massive bulk state buying for thousands of new school kitchens just fuelled inflation for everyone else!

And then? (“no and then!”)

All that spending (lunches, defence, a new capital) clashed with the market-darling finance minister (Indrawati) who Prabowo inherited to keep investors happy. But rather than heed her advice, he sacked her! Her replacement? Barely lasted a year.

So with markets already rattled, the Iran war then spiked Indonesia's energy costs, the rupiah plunged to new lows, and the central bank governor then abruptly quit ahead of schedule this July, just as index giant MSCI threatened a humiliating downgrade over Indonesia's opaque and insider-dominated equities market.

Then as if that economic turmoil weren't enough, brutal bushfires (palm oil, timber, farmers) irked neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia with toxic smoke.

And yet things somehow got even worse: an October court ruling threatened Prabowo's entire grand bargain by fanning doubts whether his own veep (son of the ex-president) held a valid high-school diploma, a constitutional requirement to run.

So with approvals plunging 30 points and the courts adding a dash of political turmoil, Prabowo pulled what he thought was a masterstroke: he kick-promoted Indonesia's powerful police-chief (Listyo) into the palace as his own chief of staff.

Why a masterstroke?

It’s an open secret the last president (Jokowi) wields influence in the shadows to protect his allies and shield his interests, via loyalists like Listyo the police chief. So by ✌️promoting✌️ the police-chief to the palace, Prabowo was pulling a classic ‘keep your rivals close’ move to strip him of police command while reining him in.

But it soon backfired because, within weeks, investigators say they caught Listyo and top cops running unauthorised surveillance against the president and his allies!

And it’s all now spawning a web of theories:

• Was Jokowi just using this top cop to keep tabs on his erratic successor?

• Was Listyo just gathering leverage to protect himself from a looming purge?

• Or was paranoid Prabowo himself just jumping at (or inventing) shadows here?

Any option now feels plausible, and yet still insufficient to explain the sky-high stakes as two powerful dynasties maybe face off, with the state caught in the middle.

Which brings us right back to the beginning: Listyo is now potentially facing treason-level charges, and 20,000 troops are now deployed across Jakarta, not to fend off some foreign foe, but because this strongman president has fears closer to home.

Sound even smarter:

• The US previously banned Prabowo from entering the United States over human rights allegations from his special forces days.

• Officials insist the 20,000 troops are just on a routine rotation through the capital.