Last month, Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto marked his first year in office, following a decisive election victory in February 2024. During that time, he has been an active leader, traveling widely internationally, and launching a number of bold policies, including a program that aims to provide free meals to nearly 90 million children and pregnant women across the archipelago.

Some of his policies, including a legal change that has opened the way to the military’s greater involvement in governance, have also raised concerns about a return to the authoritarianism of President Suharto’s New Order regime, when Prabowo had a decorated military career. These concerns flared again this week after Prabowo granted the title of National Hero to Suharto, who died in 2006.

However, some of these illiberal trends can also be traced to the administration of Prabowo’s predecessor, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, who came to office in 2014 amid high democratic hopes. This is the subject of a recently published book, “The Jokowi Presidency: Indonesia’s Decade of Authoritarian Revival” (ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2025), a collection of essays that was coedited by Eve Warburton and Sana Jaffrey of the Australian National University (ANU).

Warburton, a research fellow at the ANU’s Department of Political & Social Change, spoke to The Diplomat’s Southeast Asia Editor Sebastian Strangio about Prabowo’s first year at the helm, Jokowi’s political legacy, and the fate of reformasi nearly three decades on.

During last year’s election campaign in Indonesia, and indeed during his previous runs in 2014 and 2019, a lot of people expressed alarm about a potential Prabowo pr