In Indonesia, Prabowo aims for a growth spurt with major projects

• By Dessy Sagita / AFP, JAKARTA

Indonesian President Joko Widodo left office yesterday with high approval ratings thanks to strong economic growth, but his successor Prabowo Subianto has bigger ambitions, including a $28 billion free meals plan for students.

With the country regularly experiencing annual growth of around five percent, the former general vowed to capitalize on his predecessors' policies to reach eight percent by harnessing the country's enormous human resources.

Through prosperity, we can bring justice to all the Indonesian people. We must come together to eliminate poverty, eliminate hunger and eliminate the suffering of our people, Prabowo said in his victory speech in March.

To do this, it is banking on major national projects, on the vast natural resources of the archipelago and on attempts to reduce a poverty rate of more than nine percent.

He pledged to largely continue the popular economic agenda of Widodo, better known as Jokowi, and also signaled a more direct attempt to reduce poverty in the country of about 280 million people.

His big campaign promise is a $28 billion plan to provide free meals to tens of millions of schoolchildren and pregnant women nationwide.

He says the program to be rolled out in January would end stunting in a country where more than a fifth of children under five are affected and create several million more jobs.

Still, the plan has been criticized on logistical and cost grounds, with some questioning how he could implement the plan and keep spending within the annual budget deficit limit of three percent of GDP, set by law.

Jokowi has focused on major infrastructure projects, including roads, bridges and airports, aimed at better connecting the archipelago.

However, experts say Prabowo would deviate from this in his attempt to fulfill his election promise to make G20 member Indonesia an advanced and developed economy.

He won't blindly follow in Jokowi's footsteps, but he won't completely abandon or neglect either, so he will fall somewhat in the middle, said Yose Rizal Damuri, an economist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It seems he has a slightly different approach than Jokowi. The priority is no longer the development of infrastructure, but more the development of human capital.

His program would also focus on agriculture, with a food plantation program aimed at achieving food self-sufficiency, land clearing for bioethanol projects in Papua's restive eastern region, and a green fund selling credits from carbon emissions, observers said.

At the same time, Prabowo inherits Jokowi's legacy project, a $32 billion transfer from the congested and crumbling capital of Jakarta to Nusantara, a planned green city in eastern Borneo, where construction is underway. course.

The city will not be ready before 2045, but its rapid construction is already eating into state coffers. Prabowo pledged to continue with the project despite speculation that he would suspend it or keep Jakarta as his capital.

He also supported Jokowi's resource nationalism, particularly in the nickel sector, where Jakarta has imposed export restrictions in a bid to become a key player in the electric vehicle supply chain.

Indonesia is one of the world's largest polluters of fossil fuels, and Prabowo favors gradually reducing the country's dependence on them. However, his family retains ties to the coal industry and processing large quantities of nickel requires coal-fired power plants.

Last year, Chinese investment in Southeast Asia was largest in Indonesia, and Prabowo met Chinese President Xi Jinping () in his first overseas meeting after winning the election.

This speaks to the importance he places on continuing to attract money from Beijing, which has proven crucial to Indonesia's economic growth.

In addition to his first trips abroad, Prabowos' cabinet choices and his first budget after his inauguration would also give a better indication of his economic plans.

Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani said last week that she had been asked to keep her role in the new government, which experts say is a signal to markets that there would be continuity.

Sri Mulyani's arrival in his cabinet shows that Prabowo will be very cautious in terms of tax issues, said Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara, an economist at the Center for Economic and Legal Studies. This is why Jokowis people are being hired again; this shows that Prabowo will be disciplined.