The President Who Cried Wolf? Why Prabowo’s Anti-Foreign Rhetoric is Dangerous

Photo from instagram.com/prabowo

In an article for NYSEAN Partner Indonesia at Melbourne, Nava Nuraniyah asserts that Prabowo risks eroding his government’s credibility by crying “foreign interference” at every challenge to his authority.

In a recent interview, Prabowo once again accused civil society groups and think tanks of being pawns of Western donors seeking to destabilise Indonesia through proxy mobilisation and cognitive warfare.

Foreign influence operations are a genuine security threat, including in Indonesia. But President Prabowo Subianto has turned the threat into a political weapon, using the language of foreign interference to suppress domestic dissent.

Rather than defending Indonesia’s democracy from external information warfare, Prabowo borrows and amplifies Russian narratives to discredit his critics, reaching for an old trick from his New Order-era playbook.

By crying ‘foreign interference’ at every challenge to his authority, Prabowo risks eroding the credibility his government needs to face real external threats.

Nava Nuraniyah is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of International Studies, Macquarie University, specialising in online disinformation. She previously worked as an analyst at the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) in Jakarta and Nanyang Technological University Singapore, where she researched conflict and violent extremism in Southeast Asia