Nine hundred street vendors in Solo’s Banjarsari Park were moved to a better site, and nobody fought about it. In Indonesia that was news. Such relocations often end in clashes between traders and security forces, and it was the success of this one that first put Joko Widodo in the public eye.
Widodo ran a furniture company before politics. In 2005, backed by the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP), he won the mayor’s office in his hometown of Solo. He also became known for dropping in unannounced on development project sites to see the work for himself. Voters gave him a second mayoral term in 2010, though he did not finish it.
Jakarta
In 2012 he was elected governor of Jakarta. A year later he took on the Tanah Abang Market, the largest wholesale centre in Southeast Asia, where street vendors and thuggery had long complicated any reform. He also broke ground on Jakarta’s first mass rapid transit line, the first in Indonesia. It began running in March 2019, after six years of construction.
The presidency
His party nominated him for the 2014 presidential race two years after he took the governor’s seat. He beat the former military strongman Prabowo Subianto.
His first term was about concrete and steel. Widodo claimed 782 kilometers (485.9 miles) of toll roads built by the end of 2018, with the total set to reach 1,854 km (1,152 miles) in 2019. He added 754.59 km (468.5 miles) of railway line and upgraded and rehabilitated 413.6 km (256.63 miles) of track. The Jatigede dam in West Java, planned back in President Sukarno’s day, was finished on his watch. Dams and reservoirs were next on the agenda.
Widodo believes strong infrastructure speeds economic growth, and he has said he wants Indonesia off the list of middle-income countries. After the April 2019 vote, early unofficial results showed him in the lead. He promised to focus on human resources and infrastructure in a second term.
