President Prabowo Subianto and Vice President Gibran Rakabuming Raka arriving for a group photo with newly appointed cabinet ministers, at the State Palace in Jakarta on Oct 21, 2024. - Reuters
JAKARTA: Newly inaugurated President Prabowo Subianto has sworn in his Red and White Cabinet consisting of more than 100 officials, the largest the country has seen in decades since first President Sukarno formed in 1966 the second Dwikora Cabinet with a line-up of 132 ministers, but which only lasted for a month.
The current greatly expanded cabinet was made possible after the House of Representatives removed the 34-minister limit mandated previously through the 2008 State Ministers Law.
On Monday (Oct 21), a day after taking the oath as the nation’s eighth president, Prabowo officiated 48 ministers, 56 deputy ministers and five heads of ministerial-level agencies, featuring a mix of his loyalists and appointees from the administration of his predecessor Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, the father of Prabowo’s Vice President Gibran Rakabuming Raka.
Prabowo’s move to form such a fat cabinet has raised many eyebrows as it is seen as an apparent attempt to distribute “a slice of the pie” to everyone, despite the warnings of significant budget strain and a potential increase in bureaucratic hurdles.
Nonetheless this is not the first time the country has seen such a bloated cabinet of over 100 ministers.
President Sukarno formed an administration of 110 ministers and ministerial-level officials, dubbed the Dwikora Cabinet, in 1964 in the hope of implementing the government policy he had announced through his Independence Day speech titled "The Year of Living Dangerously".
Later in 1966, Sukarno reshuffled the cabinet and announced the formation of the second Dwikora Cabinet, a refinement of the previous cabinet, which consisted of 132 ministers, against the backdrop of an extremely tense political situation after the failed 1965 coup.
The new cabinet lasted only a month when the politically weakened Sukarno was forced to transfer power to then-Army general, and commander of the Restoration of Order and Security (Kopkamtib), Soeharto through the March 11 Indonesian Presidential Executive Order (Supersemar).
As to whether Prabowo’s cabinet will face the same fate as Sukarno’s, Airlangga Pribadi, a political expert from Airlangga University in East Java, pointed out that the two cabinets were formed under two different circumstances.
“Sukarno’s Dwikora cabinet was formed when he was dealing with a political crisis, in which serious political divisions led toward civil war. Thus, his efforts to build unity and consolidation were to accommodate various forces and turn them into the greatest possible political forces,” Airlangga said.
“Meanwhile, Prabowo is trying to build a fat cabinet, by including so many of Jokowi’s circle and other political forces, to ensure the political continuity of the Jokowi era. Prabowo might think that accommodating or giving concessions to various forces will ensure a harmonious government”.
Airlangga noted, however, that Prabowo might face several “unintended consequences” of having a bloated cabinet, including seeing it turn into a lame-duck cabinet at the beginning of his first term.
Aside from the potential budget surge, “Prabowo may face potential internal rivalries or clashes between different groups or alliances within the cabinet that could make the government dysfunctional”.
Noting the large number of political forces that Prabowo has accommodated in the cabinet, Airlangga pointed out the possibility of political blockages in budget allocations, given that “political elites who are recruited often rely on initial paybacks for the political or business alliances of which they are part.”
Prabowo was urged to take rational steps toward change in the first half of his first term, if such concerns turn into reality. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
