Titiek Soeharto

Titiek Soeharto is the second daughter of Indonesia's long-ruling president, was married to the man who became president in 2024, and is now a minister in his government. Her legal name is Siti Hediati Hariyadi. She grew up in the family that ran Indonesia for thirty-two years, was educated in business, and held directorships across the conglomerates that grew around the presidency - the timber, toll road, petrochemical and plantation interests that made the Suharto children a byword for what was later called KKN, corruption, collusion and nepotism. She married Prabowo Subianto in 1983; he was an officer whose own father Sumitro Djojohadikusumo had been a minister and a rebel, and the marriage joined the two most consequential political families in the country. They separated after Suharto fell in 1998 and Prabowo was discharged from the army over the abduction of activists, though they never formally divorced by some accounts and she campaigned for him afterwards. She entered parliament for Golkar in 2014 and moved to Gerindra, her former husband's party. When Prabowo won the presidency in 2024 she was appointed a deputy minister and then minister of forestry. Her brother Tommy served time for ordering the murder of the judge who had convicted him. The return of the family to office is the clearest single measure of how far the reckoning with the New Order has and has not gone. Suharto himself was never tried; proceedings were halted on health grounds and he died in 2008. Indonesia has not recovered most of the assets identified by the investigations of 1999. She was elected deputy speaker of the upper house in 2024.

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