James Massola, Jakarta – With just 10 days until Indonesians vote in the 2019 presidential election, both President Joko Widodo and his challenger Prabowo Subianto are campaigning right across the country.
Earlier in the week Mr Joko, who is widely known as Jokowi, addressed thousands of people at rallies in Ngawi, in East Java and Sragen, in Central Java.
The president explained in his understated style his government's achievements (infrastructure investments in road and rail has been a key feature of his first term) and how they would continue if Indonesians chose to give him a second term.
In a sign that hubris is perhaps starting to creep into his campaign, Jokowi told a group of farmers that he would meet them at the presidential palace to further discuss the challenges to their livelihoods, after the April 17 poll.
Jokowi has reason to be confident that he will win a second and final term. He has a lead in most opinion polls that stretches to double digits. However, polls can be unreliable in Indonesia, and a Roy Morgan poll released last week did show the race is tightening in urban areas.
Jokowi is also popular with ordinary voters, and his opponent, Prabowo, is widely-judged to be campaigning less dynamically this time around, compared to 2014 when he narrowly lost to the now-president.
But if election 2019 is a re-run of the 2014 poll and a foregone conclusion – right down to the same candidates pushing the same campaign themes – someone forgot to tell perhaps 150,000 Prabowo supporters who turned up at the Gelora Bung Karno, Indonesia's national stadium, in south Jakarta on Sunday.
While the crowd did not come close to the promised million-plus mark that organisers had promised, people came from all over this sprawling metropolis and beyond, arriving from 4am to participate in a mass morning prayer and then listen to the candidate and his running mate Sandiaga Uno ask for – no, demand – their support.
Some of the theatre of 2014 has been dialled back – the horse-loving candidate, this time around, did not ride around the stadium on one of his favourite steeds. Nevertheless, Sunday's rally represented Prabowo in his element.
"We are here because you want to make a statement that you want change, you want improvements. Indonesians don't want to be lied to again," he thundered to the crowd, who filled the stands and packed the field which usually plays host to the Persija Jakarta football club.
"We are fed up with corruption, with injustice, and we cannot accept any more that we are ridiculed and insulted... Indonesians understand, Indonesians are not stupid."
"God willing, if we are given a chance, we will defend the people, we will fight injustice, we will fight the leaders who cheat the people.
"I am standing up here because I think our country is sick, our country is being raped, that our wealth is continuously taken away. People's rights are taken away."
Time and again, Prabowo returned to the nativist themes and nationalistic debating points that have characterised both this campaign and the one he ran in 2014.
Indonesia, he argued, was losing trillions in tax revenue and investment which was flowing out of the country. Ordinary Indonesians are not benefiting from the country's vast natural wealth, and corruption in Indonesia is so severe that it is like stage four cancer.
"A lot of people don't even have clean water. Some people are starving. What kind of a country is this, 73 years after independence, where the people are starving and we cannot feed them?"
He also criticised the high cost of some of Jokowi's infrastructure projects.
The crowd loved every minute of Prabowo's populist stylings, with his promises to make Indonesia great (the name of his party, Gerindra, translates as the Greater Indonesia movement – it predated Trump's Make America Great slogan by several years). He says he can make it more independent and more consequential in the world.
Already, though, Prabowo's team has alleged that some 17.5 million "ghost voters" are on the country's electoral roll (an issue raised again by the candidate on Sunday) and they have warned that if they lose the election, both a challenge to the result in the Constitutional Court will be launched and mass street protests will begin.
For a candidate and a movement that projects such confidence about having the right solutions to solve Indonesia's myriad problems, it's a curious sort of pre-emptive insurance policy to take out – and one that hints that the campaign is not as confident as it makes out that the 2019 presidential election will deliver victory.
It also hints at a more fundamental question which, on the evidence to date, Prabowo and his team have not quite been able to comprehensively answer. Why should Indonesians elect him President?
Prabowo's diagnosis of Indonesia's problems is, up to a point, accurate. But there is a discordance in how he presents himself as the man to solve the nation's problems.
He is the strong man candidate who will make things better by caring for the weak; the millionaire who cares for the little people; the former Army general who champions democracy; the leader who will rally the nation and bind it together, but who seeks support by pitching to conservative Muslim voters and other interest groups in a nation long-proud of its pluralism and religious tolerance.
At its heart, Prabowo's pitch is to the significant cohort of Indonesians who are insecure, both about their nation's place in the world and in their own daily lives.
Prabowo may well win the presidency on April 17. But if he does not, part of the blame for the loss will lie with his inability to explain to voters some of these stark contradictions.