On a bright morning a few weeks ago, the leader of the world’s third-largest democracy rode a bicycle through the streets of Yogyakarta en route to a rock concert-slash-campaign rally. Trailed by his wife and a procession of fellow university alumni, Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s 57-year-old president, who goes by Jokowi, looked like he was having the time of his life. A toothy grin on his face, he waved to supporters lining the roadside, his vintage bike wobbling each time he shook the hand of a fan who had darted past the security detail. Reed-thin, clad in jeans, trainers and a navy-blue bomber jacket despite the withering heat, Widodo arrived at an outdoor field and strode down a raised walkway into a sea of matching white shirts, raised smartphones, and fluttering cardboard thumbs-ups, a symbol of his re-election campaign. “I am so happy to be back in Yogya!” Thousands cheered. He delivered a stump speech in a sometimes-hoarse voice, bags cradling his perpetually smiling eyes. The day before, Widodo had visited five of Indonesia’s 34 provinces, a fact he used to extol the diversity of the archipelago’s 260 million residents and several hundred ethnic groups. As the Jokowi! Jokowi! chant broke out, he hurled his jacket into the crowd. Widodo, who always seems composed and relaxed, is a metalhead. In 2013, when he was governor of the capital city of Jakarta, Metallica’s bassist gave him a signed guitar, which he promptly turned over to the anti-corruption agency to comply with ethics rules prohibiting gifts to public servants. Rock stars and celebrities fuelled the youthful euphoria surrounding his successful 2014 presidential bid. At the rally, legendary Indonesian rock band God Bless took the stage behind him, as Widodo knelt into the crowd to shake hands and pose for selfies. The equatorial sun beat down, but he moved relentlessly from section to section along the edge of the stage, pausing only to towel the sweat from his wide brow. An aide tells me his fingers often hurt from all the flesh-pressing. Finally, Widodo exited stage-right to catch a plane to another event. The band rocked on, but most of the audience streamed out now that the star had left. With Indonesians heading to the polls on April 17, Widodo, a slum-born furniture manufacturer, is campaigning at full bore, even though all signs indicate the election is in the bag: he has a stable economy, the support of most political parties and mass media, and a healthy lead in the polls over Prabowo Subianto, the 67-year-old former general who Widodo defeated in the 2014 race. The basis of Widodo’s popularity is his character, and one quality in particular: closeness to the people. At a time when almost any unconventional politician is called a populist, Widodo is a man of the people in the truest sense. He shops at traditional markets. Eats street food. Drinks herbal medicine. When travelling the country, he sometimes stays in cheap hotels, to the consternation of his entourage. His speech is simple, laconic, folksy. He doesn’t golf or hobnob with elites, preferring instead to ride his bike and play with his two-year-old grandson. A Muslim like 88 per cent of Indonesians, he fasts for Ramadan and prays, though he doesn’t make a big show of it. “He’s an everyman. I don’t see it as an act. I don’t see it as contrived. It’s the essence of him. He’s just a regular person. And I think people pick up on that. People feel they can approach him. They are genuinely comfortable around him,” says Meidyatama Suryodiningrat, president director of Antara News Agency. “He stands out among world leaders, both current and historical, in that he has an incredible capacity for connecting with the public – and not just connecting, but showing authentic concern and empathy,” says Kevin O’Rourke, a policy analyst and producer of a weekly review of Indonesian politics. Robert O. Blake Jnr, who was United States ambassador to Indonesia from 2013 to 2016, tells me, “Jokowi is a very humble guy, very comfortable in his shoes. He doesn’t try to pretend he’s anything he’s not.” Besides being of the people, Widodo has a record of public service that suggests he is for the people, as well. In a country where corruption is endemic, Widodo is by all accounts squeaky clean. “We haven’t seen anything to suggest he abuses his position for his or his family’s personal gain, and for Indonesian politics that’s mind-boggling,” says O’Rourke. Seven presidents have led Indonesia since independence, in 1945. One through to six were aristocrats, generals or political elites. “And then there’s Jokowi: just a man off the street,” says Sidarto Danusubroto, a senior adviser to the president. Widodo was born in 1961 in Solo, a small city in the centre of Java. His parents had migrated from a village to improve their prospects as timber traders, according to two biographies: one by Yon Thayrun, the other by Wawan Masudi and Akhmad Ramdhon. Widodo and his three younger sisters grew up in a rented bamboo shack in a riverbank slum. He bathed in the river, hunted for duck eggs with his friends and did his homework in a small mosque because his home lacked electricity. As a teenager, he was introverted and disciplined. He excelled at school, and each day after class he helped his mother and father run their modest business. Though his parents struggled, Widodo was mentored by his uncle, a successful furniture manufacturer, and his grandfather, a village head with a reputation for principled leadership. After graduating with a forestry degree from the prestigious Gadjah Mada University, in nearby Yogyakarta, Widodo moved with his new bride, Iriana, to the jungled highlands of Aceh, on the western edge of Indonesia, to take a job in a pulp mill. Two years later, when Iriana was pregnant with their first child, the couple returned to Solo, where Widodo took out a loan to launch his own furniture manufacturing business. Before Jokowi, it was impossible to find a politician who listened. He removed the barrier between the government and regular people Akbarudin Arif Over 15 years, Widodo built a thriving company, running up to five factories and exporting furniture across the globe. He was a hardworking, hands-on manager. “I had to learn how to do everything because I started from zero,” Widodo would later say. “His experience is as a manufacturer, where you think about taking inputs and adding value to them and producing outputs. And that’s how he approaches governing, that the state should work like a business and reduce costs, make processes more efficient,” says O’Rourke. “He acts like a CEO,” says Suryodiningrat. “If there is a problem, how can we solve it? How can we get this done?” As Widodo was growing his furniture business, a tectonic shift reshaped Indonesia’s politics. In 1998, the Asian financial crisis clobbered the economy, sparking mass protests that forced President Suharto to step down. With the collapse of the general’s 31-year New Order dictatorship, power decentralised across the archipelago. In 2005, the first year of direct local elections, Widodo ran for mayor of Solo in a crowded field and won, garnering 36 per cent of the vote on the strength of his running mate, an established politician with the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P). Widodo was a radically new kind of mayor. He met with residents from all walks of life – sex workers even. He relocated thousands of unlicensed street vendors, using not force, as the previous government had attempted, but consultation and negotiation. He invited average people to lunch or dinner at the official mayor’s residence, an unprecedented gesture. He handed out the number to his personal mobile phone, which he answered day or night. “He was distinct. Before Jokowi, it was impossible to find a politician who listened. He removed the barrier between the government and regular people,” says Akbarudin Arif, a local civil society leader who met frequently with the mayor. Widodo would often tell his staff: “Democracy is learning how to listen.” Every Friday morning, the mayor rode his bike into neighbourhoods to inspect projects and hear complaints: “The storm drains are clogged. The electricity doesn’t work. The road isn’t paved.” He brought along municipal employees, who he would order to fix the problem on the spot. “How many days will it take?” he’d ask. “It better get done because I’m going to come back to check.” Under the Suharto regime, in which the state bureaucracy was essentially a criminal enterprise, civil servants demanded bribes to deliver services. Widodo’s field visits, which became known by the Javanese term blusukan , were not just a tactic for asserting bureaucratic control; they represented what was for Indonesia a new style of governing, whereby public servants actually served the public. Five years later, Widodo won re-election with 90 per cent of the vote. “He barely campaigned or spent any money. People just saw the results of his work,” says Eko Sulistyo, an NGO leader from Solo who is now Widodo’s deputy chief of staff. In 2012, Widodo ran for governor of Jakarta and came from behind to defeat an entrenched incumbent. Less than two years later, an upswell of grass-roots support vaulted him to the presidency. Suryodiningrat says, “In just 24 months, he went from an unknown small-town mayor to governor to president. Who makes that sort of leap?” He’s not guided by any ideological dogma about human rights or civil liberties. These notions are abstract for him. What he appreciates are things that are tangible Kevin O’Rourke Widodo resides at the Bogor presidential palace, a verdant, colonial-era compound in the hills 60km south of Jakarta. The palace was vacant from 1967 to 2015, when Widodo, breaking with his predecessors, moved in, because he prefers the natural setting to the bustle of downtown Jakarta. He jogs in the morning and sometimes practises archery. When he hosts high-level guests such as Barack Obama or the Saudi king, he drives them around the grounds in a golf cart, shooting the breeze and showing off the hundreds of spotted deer, whose ancestors the Dutch governor-general imported from Nepal in 1808. Widodo tends to the palace animals – feeding the koi fish, suckling goat kids and once ordering groundsmen to capture a monitor lizard that was devouring frogs, the absence of whose nightly chorus left the president feeling “moody”, reported local press. Family dynasties are common in Indonesia, and presidential kin tend to amass lucrative businesses and powerful political positions. “Jokowi’s family is simple,” Danusubroto says. “No one in his family is an oligarch.” His daughter, 27, a new mother, failed a qualifying exam for a civil service job in Solo. Widodo’s two sons, who are 31 and 24, each run a small food business chain; one sells fried bananas, the other a local pastry called martabak . Iriana, who has the bearing of a humble homemaker, is a quiet though constant presence at her husband’s campaign events. Close observers of the president describe him as a down-to-earth and pragmatic thinker, not an intellectual or a visionary. “He is a product of the late New Order, where economic development was the ideology, and nothing should stand in the way of that,” says Matthew Busch, a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute. “He’s not guided by any ideological dogma about human rights or civil liberties,” says O’Rourke. “These notions are abstract for him. What he appreciates are things that are tangible.” Human rights activists have criticised Widodo for failing to prevent or punish acts of intolerance and violence against religious minorities and LGBT communities. Widodo shows little interest in international affairs. His English is patchy, and he dislikes the formal pageantry of high-level diplomacy. He often sends his vice-president, Jusuf Kalla, to multilateral forums in his stead. Even though Indonesia holds a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, Widodo has yet to attend the UN General Assembly. He travels frequently around Indonesia, however. His staff tell me that in the past year he has visited as many as 160 of Indonesia’s 514 districts. He has a spontaneous streak that rattles his security detail – like when one recent evening he jumped aboard a packed commuter train to Bogor from Jakarta. Most of his field visits are scheduled, designed to promote and explain the government’s programmes, such as massive increases in welfare assistance and the expansion of what is now the world’s largest single-payer health care system. It’s September, Widodo is visiting a small football field in Grobogan, a central Java district quilted with rice paddies, to hand out hundreds of land certificates. Tens of millions of landholders lack proof of ownership, which results in disputes and precludes them from taking out loans on their property. Widodo’s government is distributing millions of certificates each year, for no fee, to landholders who in some cases requested them decades ago. After a ceremony to disburse the certificates, Widodo picks a volunteer to join him on stage – a 50-year-old farmer wearing a baseball cap. Widodo is not a great speechmaker, but he has mastered the impromptu Q and A. He illustrates the impact of a government programme by having a back-and-forth with a fisherman, a student, a street vendor, etc. Then for fun, he quizzes them: “Name three ministers.” “Name eight types of fish.” “Name six ethnic groups of Indonesia.” After they answer, Widodo awards them a brand-new bicycle. The crowds love it, and the sessions have become so popular that in daily life it’s common to hear someone follow up their response to a question with, “Can I have a bike now?” The farmer on stage smiles and sways as if he is on the verge of crying from joy or fainting. Widodo grills him in a playful, teacher-like tone. “Why didn’t you get the land certificate before? Because it was expensive?” “Yes, expensive,” the farmer says. Previously, local officials solicited bribes to issue the certificates. “Right now I’m so overjoyed to be here with you, sir.” Widodo chuckles. “Overjoyed. Take it easy.” “You are special, sir. I want to try to kiss you.” The crowd explodes in laughter, as does Widodo. The farmer says he plans to use his certificate to take out a small loan to start a business raising chickens. “If you get the loan, be careful. You need to ask about the interest rate first. Do you know about that already?” “Not yet. I’m just trying my luck, sir.” “Taking a loan is not trying your luck.” “I’m ready, sir, I’m ready.” “You need to calculate whether you can pay back the principal and the interest.” “I’m ready.” “You want to take out a loan to buy eggs that become chicks, but if the chicks die what then?” Laughter from the crowd. “That’s speculation, sir,” the farmer says. “Speculation – it won’t be speculation when the chicks get a disease and you can’t pay back the loan and the bank takes your certificate.” Widodo continues to lecture him about planning for possible risks. “Yes, I’m ready, sir, I’m ready,” the farmer says. “You’re ready. What do mean you’re ready?” “The thing is, sir, I’m just waiting for a bicycle. I heard Mr Jokowi gives out bicycles, and I haven’t got one yet, but I’m hoping I’ll get one.” Widodo and the crowd break into laughter. Widodo gathers himself. “If you want a bicycle, you need to answer a question.” He asks the farmer to name five sports that were on the programme at the Asian Games, which Indonesia hosted last year. The farmer does. Still visibly overjoyed, he shakes Widodo’s hand and then kisses it. The crowd goes wild. “Fifty years old and still young,” says the president, grinning. “Go get your bicycle.” On an overcast Sunday morning, a woman’s voice rings out across the iconic Hotel Indonesia roundabout, in downtown Jakarta: “Ladies and gentlemen, please clear a path so the president can get to the stage – otherwise we’ll be here until this afternoon.” Having emerged from a subway station, Widodo is working his way through a dense crowd, shaking hands and posing for selfies while his security guards jostle to keep the mob from engulfing him. Glass-and-steel skyscrapers tower overhead. From the centre of the roundabout’s majestic fountain rises the Welcome Monument, an early-1960s statue of a man and a woman waving from atop a pedestal. The crowd has gathered to hear Widodo inaugurate the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system, Indonesia’s first subway. Greater Jakarta, a metropolis of about 30 million, suffers from some of the worst traffic jams in the world. When Widodo became the city’s governor, in 2012, he and his tough-talking deputy, Basuki Tjahaha Purnama, known as Ahok, kick-started long-delayed public transport projects, including an expansion of the bus system, an elevated light rail (the LRT), and the MRT, which was first planned in 1995 but didn’t break ground until 2013. For Widodo, the timing of the MRT’s completion – just weeks before election day – couldn’t be better. He finally makes it to the stage. Sweaty, wearing jeans and a grey long-sleeved T-shirt, the president looks out of place among the more done-up dignitaries. He takes a seat on the far edge of the stage and poses for selfies with fans as the current Jakarta governor reads a prepared statement. A slickly produced video plays on a giant screen, depicting the history of the MRT project. The pride is palpable. Finally, Indonesia – like Singapore, China and Japan – has an MRT. Widodo gives a speech – simple, brief and practical. He tells the crowd to follow the rules: one, don’t litter on the trains or in the stations. Two, queue to board. Three, wait to board until others disembark. Then he announces plans for the future. “This year, I have already instructed the governor to start construction on the east-west line of the MRT.” He points to the crowd. “You agree, or not?” “Agree!” “Those who agree, raise a finger.” Hundreds of pointers shoot up and the Jokowi! Jokowi! chant breaks out. “And we hope that at the end of this year, God willing, the LRT will come online. Who agrees we should finish the LRT?” More raised fingers and cheers. “Those who disagree with the LRT, raise a finger.” Confusion, though a few people do. “Those who disagree, please come up to the stage, I’ll give you a bicycle.” The crowd erupts in laughter. When he became president, in 2014, Widodo slashed costly fuel subsidies and launched the largest infrastructure development programme in Indonesia’s history, announcing US$415 billion in new public works projects by 2019. In 4½ years, the government has built thousands of kilometres of roads, 10 airports, 19 seaports and numerous bridges, dams and wells. To drive the length of Java island from Jakarta to Surabaya, Indonesia’s second city, could take up to 85 hours. Now, on a recently completed toll highway, it takes only 11. Clad in a hard hat, Widodo tours construction sites with his public works minister and the heads of state-owned construction companies. He asks questions and issues instructions in much the same fashion as when he was a mayor inspecting sewage drains and potholes in Solo. “In the past, the issue was the same, but there would be a problem with land acquisition, with financing, with something else, and then there would be discussion, but no one really did anything about it,” says Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, who held the same post in the previous administration. “Jokowi’s style is to say: ‘I want there to be a groundbreaking next week. I don’t want to hear about problems, I want there to be a groundbreaking.’ He’s really forcing the cabinet to work with urgency.” It took a few years for Widodo to get his government working – in part, because the knives were out for him from the moment he took office. Prabowo had challenged the result of the election and the opposition had a majority in parliament. Widodo didn’t even have control over his own party, PDI-P, whose chairwoman, Megawati Sukarnoputri, a former president and the daughter of the nation’s first president, Sukarno, had reluctantly nominated Widodo as the party’s presidential candidate. Staffers warned Widodo that a parliamentary coup was in the works; impeachment was a real threat. He has no political party, he is not a big businessman and he is not a military man. So the game is more complicated for Jokowi Andreas Harsono As an outsider still new to the capital, Widodo had few allies among the Jakarta elites who had for decades monopolised national power. “To be a normal person from Solo and become president, and to not have any of the political protections of a party apparatus, or a network, or wealth, or family, or history – any of the things that every person who has ever been a player at this level has had – that would probably be a pretty scary and high-stakes thing,” says Busch. “He has no political party, he is not a big businessman and he is not a military man,” says Human Rights Watch researcher Andreas Harsono. “So the game is more complicated for Jokowi.” In the early months of his presidency, Widodo consolidated power. He used both sticks, such as an authoritarian-era law to force internal party leadership changes, and carrots, such as seats in his cabinet, to bring opposition parties into his governing coalition. To win the support of the military, he appointed powerful retired generals to influential posts in government. This co-optive approach worked but had downsides. Some party figures who received cabinet seats were unqualified and unscrupulous; two became ensnared in corruption scandals. And with military men close to the president’s ear, the government has announced a plan to allow active-duty officers to serve simultaneously in civilian government posts, as was the practice during the dictatorship. Reforms to the bureaucracy, police and judiciary that would reduce corruption, improve service delivery and bolster legal certainty failed to materialise. “Jokowi is inexperienced when it comes to operating the levers of power and the mechanisms of government so he has delegated far too much to people with experience, and those are the people with ties to the old practices of the past,” says O’Rourke. The weapon of choice for Widodo’s political opponents is religion. Like most Indonesians, Widodo embraces a moderate, tolerant version of Islam. But thuggish hardline groups and conservative imams insinuate he is a “secular liberal” at heart. In the 2014 presidential campaign, pamphlets alleging Widodo was secretly a Chinese Christian circulated. This election, false news stories that he plans to defund religious schools and outlaw the call to prayer have flooded social media. The most dramatic salvo came in late 2016, when hundreds of thousands of Islamist demonstrators held protests in central Jakarta demanding the imprisonment of the city’s governor, Basuki, who had been Widodo’s deputy governor. Speaking at a re-election campaign event, Basuki had made an off-the-cuff remark about the Koran that hardliners alleged was blasphemous. As a Christian of Chinese descent, Basuki was a double minority. A nationwide anti-Basuki campaign based on race and religion gained so much momentum that the police opened criminal blasphemy proceedings against him. Members of the president’s staff tell me that Widodo wanted to intervene to block the criminal case against his former deputy. Basuki had been a clean, hard-charging No 2, who browbeat civil servants to get projects such as the MRT moving. “He loves Ahok. The guy delivers,” one aide tells me. The protesters in Jakarta were seeking not just to oust Basuki, however, but to exploit an opportunity to weaken the president. Many of the demonstrators had come from outside the capital, and Widodo’s administration was convinced opposition leaders were orchestrating the action. If Widodo intervened to protect Basuki, the hardliners could allege he supported blasphemy and turn the movement against the president. In the end, Widodo stood aside as a panel of judges sentenced Basuki to two years in prison . Months later, when it came time for Widodo to choose a running mate for his re-election campaign, appeasing Islamic elements in his coalition was a top consideration. In a decision that was more his coalition’s than his own, Widodo named the distinctly uncharismatic septuagenarian cleric Ma’ruf Amin as his No 2. Amin is a conservative, who as the leader of an influential clerics council had issued fatwa calling for the criminalisation of LGBT activities and curbs on rights of religious minorities. But the fatwa he was best known for was the one he issued in 2016 that declared Basuki guilty of blasphemy, igniting the movement that sent Widodo’s trusted former deputy to prison. The nomination of Amin dismayed liberals. Novelist Eka Kurniawan wrote in a New York Times op-ed: “No matter who ends up being president, conservative Islamic groups, backed by radical groups, will win – have already won – this election.” Nonetheless, if polls are to be believed and the Widodo-Amin ticket wins, Widodo will enter his second term with a grip on the three loci of power in Indonesia – the military, Islam and the parties – no small feat for a regular guy. “Jokowi has done a remarkable job consolidating his political position and co-opting and binding a huge span of the political elite to him. He has made himself more politically secure than I think people expected, and that’s impressive,” says Busch. “But this has come with costs.” Government has become more responsive since Jokowi emerged. In the past, you had to pay bribes if you wanted officials to provide the services they were supposed to provide. Now, it’s not rare that they do their jobs Endy Bayuni Prabowo, whose bulky frame, aggressive tone and penchant for bombast present a stark contrast to Widodo, warned in a December speech that if he lost the election, “this nation may go extinct. Because the Indonesian elite always disappoint, always fail to fulfil the trust of the Indonesian people.” His aggrieved rhetoric resembles that of Donald Trump; Prabowo rails against foreigners, attacks the media and floated the slogan “Make Indonesia Great Again”. Widodo has framed this election as a contest between two visions of Indonesia’s future: optimism vs pessimism. “There are those who say Indonesia will break apart, that Indonesia will go extinct,” Widodo said in a town hall two months after Prabowo’s speech. “Yeah, go break apart yourself, go extinct yourself. Don’t invite us along with you.” At the recent campaign rally in Yogyakarta he told the crowd, “The most important thing for a leader is to present an optimistic vision. Don’t give in to fear-mongering.” Despite his champion-of-the-people rhetoric, Prabowo comes from a world alien to the average Indonesian. The son of a renowned government economist, he attended private schools in Zurich and London and was married to a daughter of the dictator Suharto. He has a fortune wrapped up in opaque companies and vast landholdings. When Prabowo campaigns in a crowd, he rides in a slow-moving SUV, standing up through the sunroof and reaching down to shake the hands of the people in the street below him. Widodo is almost always on the ground, comfortable among ordinary people because he comes from ordinary people. He was the first national leader to rise up from the local level – and he will not be the last. Politicians across the country are using Widodo’s template, delivering services to constituents and going on impromptu field visits. “Government has become more responsive since Jokowi emerged,” says Endy Bayuni, former editor-in-chief of The Jakarta Post . “In the past, you had to pay bribes if you wanted officials to provide the services they were supposed to provide. Now, it’s not rare that they do their jobs.” Widodo wants to improve the productivity of the labour force, which means, among other things, fixing the underperforming education system. This will test the president’s businessman-like style of simplifying a problem in pursuit of a quantifiable result. “The approach will need to be different from that of building infrastructure,” says Indrawati. “When you talk about building roads you can see, OK, this week we built 1km, next week 10km. You can see the physical progress. When you talk about education or vocational training, you can send a million people to school and then you have to wait, even though the result you get really translates into productivity.” Moreover, “much depends on the bureaucracy, on technocrats, on ministries and institutions to turn investment into an effective result.” Two years ago, Widodo spoke to junior school students in Pekanbaru, a city in Sumatra. He asked for a volunteer to join him on stage, and dozens of hands shot up. He chose a round-faced sixth-grader with bright eyes and a red backpack who told the president he goes by the name Rafi. “What are your dreams, Rafi? What do you want to be?” Widodo asked him. “I want to be a YouTuber, sir!” Widodo’s composed face broke into surprised laughter. “Rafi, why do you want to be a YouTuber?” “Because if a YouTuber gets lots of subscribers he can make lots of money, sir!” More laughter. Widodo then said, “Listen, kids, everyone can follow their dreams. If you want to be a successful farmer … you can! If you want to be a good doctor … you can! If you want to be a successful businessman … you can! If you want to be president …” The kids screamed: “You can!” Never before had that been true. As Rafi began to walk off the stage the president extended a lanky arm. “Wait, Rafi. Because you came up and answered my questions, you get a prize. A bicycle!”