Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s leader, is often compared to Barack Obama. Like the US president, Mr Widodo rose from obscurity to seize the highest office in the land. Like Mr Obama, he is an outsider with little experience of national politics but an agenda for change. Like Mr Obama, expectations are riding so high he is almost bound to disappoint.
The story of how Mr Widodo came to be president of Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, is as remarkable as that of Mr Obama. Universally known as “Jokowi”, he started out as a member of what he describes as a “poor family on the riverbank” in central Java. Following in his father’s footsteps, he went into the furniture business – a position from which, in his 40s, he launched his political career by becoming mayor of Solo, a midsized Javanese city. Under his practical, folksy leadership, Solo’s fortunes improved and he gained national attention. In 2012 he became governor of Jakarta, the capital, an arena from which he made an unlikely, but ultimately successful, tilt at the presidency. He assumed office formally last week.
Whether or not Mr Widodo lives up to the hype will be critical for one of Asia’s most important emerging powers. Mr Widodo is the first directly elected president to take the keys of power from a democratically chosen predecessor since the fall of the dictator, Suharto, in 1998. If he gets it right Indonesia will have gone a long way towards establishing itself as a stable democracy – no mean achievement for the largest Muslim-majority country, whose 250m people are strung out over an archipelago of nearly 1,000 inhabited islands.