President Prabowo Subianto held a plenary cabinet meeting, marking exactly one year of his administration, at the State Palace within the Presidential Palace Complex, Central Jakarta, on October 20, 2025 | Doc. Press Bureau of the Presidential Secretariat
In this article published by Indonesia at Melbourne, Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara asserts that after two years of Prabowo’s presidency, the economic costs of his policies have sparked growing concerns.
President Prabowo Subianto marked his two years in office on 20 October 2026 amid growing public discontent over not only how his administration handles the forest fires in Kalimantan and Sumatra, which have choked millions in Indonesia and beyond, but also the state of the nation’s economy and the direction it is heading.
A recent survey by the Center for Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS) has found that 75 per cent of Indonesians are feeling ‘stressed’ over the government’s policies, mainly on the economic front (53 per cent).
The warning signs are just impossible to ignore. The rupiah has now breached the Rp18,000 mark against the greenback, a historic low, while the Indonesian stock market has suffered its steepest fall since the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Significantly, this happened even as the economy grew by more than 5 per cent.
What has gone wrong?
