Julia Lau – Indonesian President Prabowo is choosing family loyalties over the country's unity by anointing his former father-in-law as a national hero. This is likely to spur protests on the streets.
Indonesia is not alone in its quest to name and venerate 'national heroes' and heroines (pahlawan nasional). On 10 November 2025, the Prabowo Subianto administration added ten such individuals from a long list of 49 nominees to the country's pantheon. In our region, other examples include the Philippines, which has a well-established mechanism to vet and select such persons. Countries like Thailand and Vietnam have informal but famed lists of revered monarchs, warriors, founding leaders, and pro-independence fighters. Following Benedict Anderson's scholarship on "imagined communities" and nation-building, scholar Charnvit Kasetsiri describes national heroines and heroes as "inseparable components of 'nation-ness'".
Often, governments included in such lists their countries' founders, especially in post-colonial, newly independent Southeast Asian nation-states. Thus, for Indonesia, its first President Sukarno, with his Vice President Mohammad Hatta and General Sudirman, the first commander of the War Forces of the United States of Indonesia (the Indonesian military's predecessor), sit with figures from history like the half-mythical Diponegoro (1785-1855), a Javanese prince who led a heroic but failed uprising against the Dutch. Together with many other Indonesians, Sukarno, Hatta, and Sudirman fought to end Dutch colonial rule and made unparalleled contributions to Indonesia's modern history. The three men's names grace the country's national airport, and countless roads, monuments and schools across the archipelago.
Naming national heroes is an accepted part of the practice of forging a nation-state's public memory. It is a socially and politically negotiated exercise that endures for as long as the polity does. Key questions include "Who are the heroes and who are the villains?", and "Who gets to choose which heroes?". The act of naming partly involves promoting or claiming to espouse the country's highest ideals or aspirations, to foster nationalism in successive generations of citizens. Generally, such endeavours are uncontroversial when there is a broad and clear consensus on who should be included.
Early on in a nation-state's existence, contestation of 'national memory' can happen as colonisers and the formerly colonised (who may themselves be splintered post-independence) vie for legitimacy. Sharper contestation among different segments of society can also occur, such as when a new 'national hero' has a complicated or unresolved legacy, as we now see in Suharto's case. President Prabowo has included in the latest list his former father-in-law and two of Suharto's known critics, Indonesia's fourth president, Abdurrahman Wahid, and Marsinah, a labour activist kidnapped and brutally killed by elements of Suharto's military in 1993. These are interesting choices but raise more questions about white-washing history.
The move to canonise Suharto could trigger a backlash that may have serious repercussions on Indonesia's weakened democracy, national unity and Prabowo's own popularity.
The move to canonise Suharto could trigger a backlash that may have serious repercussions on Indonesia's weakened democracy, national unity and Prabowo's own popularity. It is an established fact that Suharto was an authoritarian leader who ruled as Indonesia's second president for 32 years. He resigned in May 1998 after riots and violence rocked the country. To this day, there are people whose lives and bodies are unaccounted for and there are calls for Indonesia to fully reckon with its past. Families and advocates of those who were hurt or died in unresolved national incidents – including the Communist purges of the late 1960s to the tumultuous events that led to Suharto's ouster in the late 1990s – have had their wounds reopened. Beyond the reputational costs to Prabowo, just nominating Suharto as a potential 'hero' had already split public opinion and could normalise the unsavoury aspects of the Suharto era, on which the edifice of Indonesia's post-1998 reformasi (reform) politics was built.
This latest move comes alongside a broader effort to reinterpret or at least revisit certain episodes in Indonesia's history. The specific quest to rehabilitate Suharto is not new; a 2019 article mentioned his children's wish to do so. More than a year ago, the official groundwork was laid when Indonesia's People's Representatives Assembly (MPR) agreed to take Suharto's name off a corruption decree that was targeted at 'corruption, collusion and nepotism'. At the time, civil society condemned the move swiftly, warning that it would further undermine the country's hard-won democracy, which was already under threat after a decade of Joko Widodo's leadership. In May 2025, an international collection of human rights and other organisations jointly condemned the suggestion, calling it a "brazen insult" to the victims of Suharto's regime.
Prior to the formal announcement, news outlets like The Jakarta Post and Tempo magazine kept up a steady stream of critical op-eds?and articles on the negative reactions of civil society, including youth, to the official naming of Suharto as a national hero. The news commentaries and articles on protests involving scholars and activists calling out the "impunity" belie the Social Affairs Ministry's claim that the latest 'heroes' list was a bottom-up initiative.
Politically, the president is secure in that his large coalition will not topple him from power and there is no meaningful opposition to speak of on this issue. Past the first-year mark in his presidency, he has firmly set his own course, increasingly distancing himself from his predecessor. President Prabowo is unlikely to remove this capstone of a long-drawn effort by the 'Cendana clan' to rehabilitate Suharto's image or stop the Social Affairs Ministry's efforts to put forth its version of Indonesia's national history, due in mid-December.
On the ground, however, protests occurred last week and more are likely to occur. If further instability like what happened in late August 2025 occurs and persists, with ensuing controversies over the authorities' treatment of protestors, it may soon not be a past president's image that needs rehabilitation but the present's.
[Julia Lau is a Senior Fellow and Coordinator of the Indonesia Studies Programme, and Editor, Fulcrum at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute.]
Source: https://fulcrum.sg/indonesia-the-possible-perils-of-naming-suharto-a-national-hero