As a former top military official and leader of the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto can’t quite understand what the US and Israel were thinking.
The aerial assault on Iran has little chance of succeeding without massive indiscriminate bombing, the president said in a rare weekend interview. To win, Tehran’s leaders “really just have to survive.”
“We are all confused,” Prabowo, who has offered himself as a mediator, said from his hilltop estate about an hour’s drive south of Jakarta, the world’s most-populous city. “And I’m saddened. I don’t feel there’s any rationality in this.”
The military campaign poses problems for Prabowo at home, where he’s already taking heat for signing up to President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. Now, surging oil prices threaten to throw off a tricky budgetary balancing act as he looks to ramp up growth while staying within a legally mandated fiscal-deficit cap.
Markets are clearly skeptical of Prabowo’s plans: Indonesia’s benchmark stock index is the world’s worst performer this year, and its currency is near a record low.
Still, Prabowo, 74, remains an optimist. He insisted any breach of the deficit cap would be for emergencies and the economy could still expand 8% annually by the end of his term in 2029, up from around 5% now.
To get there, he vowed to go after “thieves” in Indonesia’s elite and continue removing “idiotic” officials. He also wants his newly created sovereign wealth fund to control more of the nation’s resources wealth, generating $50 billion a year.
Referring to himself as a pragmatist, Prabowo insists his critics in the markets are wrong, and that time will prove him right.
An avid swimmer, Prabowo said some of his best ideas come in the pool.
It’s clear he’s not done thinking of more ways to prove the skeptics wrong. — Daniel Ten Kate