Joko Widodo
Joko Widodo, Jokowi, was president of Indonesia from 2014 to 2024, the furniture maker from Solo who had been that city's mayor and then governor of Jakarta, the first president from outside the political, military and business elite, who won two elections against the same former general, Prabowo Subianto, and then, in his last year, made Prabowo his successor by putting his own son on the ticket as vice-president after a constitutional court chaired by his brother-in-law had waived the age limit. The ten years were the roads, the ports, the toll roads across Java and Sumatra, the Jakarta metro, the new capital called Nusantara begun in the Borneo forest, the nickel export ban that built a smelting industry with Chinese money, the pandemic, and the slow closing of the democracy of 1998, with the anti-corruption commission gutted and the criminal code rewritten. He was born in Surakarta in 1961, the son of a timber seller who lived in a riverside shack that was demolished, studied forestry at Gadjah Mada, and built a furniture export business whose Rolling Stones-loving owner the city elected mayor in 2005. He moved the street vendors without a riot, which was noticed, and won Jakarta in 2012 with a Chinese Christian running mate, Ahok, whose later jailing for blasphemy was the sign of what was coming. The election of July 2014 he won by six points as the man of the people, blusukan, the unannounced visits to markets and slums, and the promise of a mental revolution. The first term built and borrowed and executed drug traffickers. The second, from 2019, won by eleven points after a campaign of religious identity that he answered by taking a cleric as running mate, was the omnibus law on jobs that rewrote the labour code and brought the students out, the pandemic that killed two hundred thousand, and the dynasty. His son Gibran mayor of Solo, his son-in-law mayor of Medan, and in October 2023 the court ruling that let Gibran, thirty-six, stand for vice-president. Prabowo and Gibran won in February 2024 with fifty-eight per cent and Jokowi, who had never joined Prabowo's party, was expelled from his own. He handed over on 20 October 2024 with approval ratings of seventy-five per cent and a capital nobody has moved to.
- Lived: 1961 CE – ?
- Nationality: Indonesian
- Roles: president, politician
