Echoes

There are not-so-faint echoes of the 2022 Philippine elections in what happened in Indonesia last Wednesday.

Although the official results will not be released until March 20, it appears Prabowo Subianto has won by a landslide. The normally reliable independent exit surveys give him 60 percent of the vote in a three-way contest. He leads the second strongest candidate by about 33 percentage points. There will likely be no need for a runoff election which happens when no candidate garners 50 percent plus one.

Prabowo was considered the front-running candidate. But the margin of victory astounded even his own supporters.

The winning candidate spent years trying to play down his controversial past and repackage himself before young voters. The Indonesian electorate is very young. Many of the voters are too young to remember Prabowo as a hot-tempered special forces officer alleged responsible for the torture and disappearance of pro-democracy activists during the waning years of the Suharto dictatorship.

Prabowo was not just an officer in Suharto’s military. He married one of the ousted dictator’s daughters.

The crafty former military officer invested years repackaging himself. He first presented himself as a presidential candidate in 2004.

Through a sustained social media campaign, Prabowo repackaged himself as a cuddly grandfather. Surveys conducted before the elections show that he has strongest support among the young voters: Indonesians who did not have to live through the repression of the Suharto years.

This social media campaign is similar to the one used to repackage the Marcos Sr. years and present this period as one of social progress. Young Filipino voters saw the Marcos Sr. period as one of achievement and competent governance, compared to the weak leadership and corruption that characterized the period after the Edsa Revolution.

Human rights groups, who tend to have long memories, raised alarms about Prabowo’s record. The candidate was in fact briefly blacklisted from entering the US because of the accusations against him. He was never charged, however.

The Prabowo campaign studiously avoided recalling the candidate’s past. Some of the better known