Ruler’s election rival is no Joko

IN the final moves of Indonesia’s presidential campaign, one candidate dashed to Saudi Arabia to meet its king and perform a minor pilgrimage. The other attended a feline photography exhibition and giggled with delight at a giant photo of his own pet cat.

For the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, the message intended by President Joko Widodo’s trip to the birthplace of Islam was obvious after a campaign in which conservative opponents tried to discredit him as insufficiently Islamic.

What his challenger, former special forces general Prabowo Subianto, meant was less apparent. But it presented a softer version of a candidate prone to explosions of anger who has flown around Indonesia in a private jet even as he said he was campaigning for the poor.

About 193 million Indonesians are eligible to vote in presidential and legislative elections today that will decide who leads a nation that is an outpost of democracy in a neighbourhood of authoritarian governments and is forecast to be among the world’s biggest economies by 2030.

Their choice is between five more years of the steady progress achieved under Indonesia’s first president from outside the Jakarta elite or electing a charismatic but volatile figure from the era of the Suharto military dictatorship that ended two decades ago.

The 2014 election of Mr Widodo (pictured), a former furniture exporter, was a “manifestation of the new Indonesia, of the land of opportunity in which democratic opening has made it possible for anyone to come up to the top”, said Dewi Fortuna Anwar, a politics expert at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

“If he wins again, clearly that is a continued reaffirmation of that as well as an endorsement of his track record for the past five years,” she said.

Surveys show Mr Widodo with a lead of up to 20 percentage points over Mr Subianto.

But pollsters are nervous they might be failing to capture facts on the ground in the same way opinion surveys misjudged the 2016 US presidential election.

Even so, to have a chance of winning, Mr Subianto needs to win undecided voters and also claw back gains Mr Widodo has made in Mr Subianto’s stronghold provinces.