President of Indonesia. His bloated cabinet has over 100 members, up from around 50 under the previous administration. His father is Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, the architect of Indonesia's post-independence development. His brother is Hashim Djojohadikusumo. After winning the presidency he told his brother he would finally be able to "carry out programmes from papi" and fulfil their father's "aspirations and dreams". Markets himself as a friend of both Donald Trump and China's Xi Jinping. A key political rival is related to Sukarno, Indonesia's founding president. He has threatened to sink ships smuggling cheap textiles into Indonesia, reflecting concerns about Chinese goods being diverted to South-East Asian markets.
After sacking Sri Mulyani Indrawati as finance minister, he elevated Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa, a technocrat seen as less fiscally judicious and more pliant. Purbaya is spending down Indonesia's $27bn rainy-day fund (the SAL) to stimulate the economy.
He recently gave himself six marks out of ten for his first six months in office. His most high-profile campaign promise was free school lunches, which he has pledged to spend $28bn a year on. The 2025 budget includes $4bn; his brother has said an extra $6bn was promised on top. The programme increasingly prioritises raw numbers of meals served over nutritional quality; experts say the best way to reduce stunting is to help pregnant women and toddlers, not schoolchildren. In January 2025 he made one-off "efficiency" cuts worth $19bn, including slashing funding for the public-works ministry by 70%.
He launched Danantara, a sovereign wealth fund, in February 2025, putting it in charge of $900bn in state-owned enterprise assets. His brother has claimed it fulfils their father's vision of consolidating state assets, but Danantara reports directly to the president, is chaired by Prabowo's former campaign manager and has little oversight. In July 2025 he unveiled "red-white co-operatives", imposing a uniform model on 80,000 co-operatives nationwide, requiring each to run the same services regardless of local needs—a programme critics say is designed to extend central control into rural areas, rewarding loyal village heads rather than empowering communities.
He has supported local-content requirements but said in April 2025 they may need to become "more realistic". He is rumoured to have spurned hosting duties for the 70th anniversary of the Bandung conference because Sukarno—Indonesia's founding president and the original host—was the father of a key political rival.
In April 2026 Prabowo publicly mused that 70% of East Asia's energy needs and trade pass through the Indonesian straits, implicitly raising the possibility of leveraging Indonesia's control of the Strait of Malacca and other waterways. His finance minister, Purbaya, then openly floated charging a toll on ships transiting the strait, though the idea was swiftly rejected by Singapore and Malaysia, and Indonesia's foreign minister walked it back.
Prabowo served as the commander of the crack special forces in Suharto's army. After Suharto's downfall in 1998 a military panel convened by the reformist successor government dismissed Prabowo from the armed forces but he escaped further punishment. He spent years in self-imposed exile in Jordan before returning to politics. He lost two presidential elections to Joko Widodo (Jokowi) before serving as Jokowi's defence minister from 2019; he won the presidency in 2024 with Jokowi's son as running-mate. He was once married to Suharto's daughter. In the final months of Suharto's rule, as students poured onto the streets, at least nine student leaders disappeared, kidnapped and tortured by Prabowo's troops. Prabowo later acknowledged ordering their kidnapping but says they were unharmed—two, his defenders note, serve as deputy ministers in his administration. In a separate drive, 13 student activists disappeared and were never heard from again. Prabowo says he knows nothing about those cases. Before he was sworn in as president, his party quietly offered the families of some of the victims around $60,000 each.
In 1998 Prabowo allegedly worked with Islamist thugs to sow discord during the crisis—supposedly so that the unrest would allow Suharto to declare martial law and remain in power. Prabowo has always vehemently denied that he worked with the thugs. The unrest cost Suharto the support of his cabinet, leading him to step down.
On November 10th 2025 Prabowo formally elevated Suharto to the pantheon of national heroes. On the same day he also named several of the dictator's opponents national heroes, including Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur), a nearly blind cleric who led opposition to the regime and was elected president in the first free post-Suharto polls, and Marsinah, a labour activist murdered in 1993. Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, one of Suharto's top lieutenants in the 1965-66 massacres of suspected communists, was also named a hero. Critics argue that by honouring both democrats and their suppressors alike, Prabowo is flattening Indonesian history—rendering all struggles, whether for good or ill, equal—in a way that serves his own interest, given his Suharto-era record.
In a speech on August 31st 2025, Prabowo said he supports the right to peaceful assembly, but that some demonstrations tended towards terrorism and sedition. He ordered the armed forces and police to take the strongest lawful actions against rioters. He promised to investigate the police officers responsible for the death of a motorbike-taxi driver killed by an armoured police vehicle on August 28th. He promised to reverse an unpopular plan by MPs to give themselves a $3,000-a-month housing allowance. A foreign diplomat who knows Prabowo well doubts he will resort to repression, saying: "Like all populists, he wants to be popular."
All but one of the eight parties in the lower house have joined his coalition. He has talked of making this arrangement "permanent", arguing it better reflects Indonesian culture than adversarial systems, harking back to Sukarno's political set-up.
When Cyclone Senyar devastated Sumatra in late November 2025, killing more than 1,000 people and displacing nearly 1m, Prabowo declined to formally designate it a national disaster—a step that would have made it easier to accept foreign aid—insisting that Indonesia did not need outside help. He dismissed some criticism as lies spread by foreign forces that "have never liked Indonesia" and said he did not have a "staff of Moses" to fix things straightaway. The head of Indonesia's disaster agency initially suggested the devastation was not as bad as it appeared on social media.
Marriage is the sole cause of divorce.