ON TIKTOK PRABOWO SUBIANTO is a cute grandpa who loves his cat, Bobby, and dances terribly. This cuddly online persona helps him hoover up millions of likes. Now it has earned him tens of millions of votes. His rivals have urged Indonesians to wait for official results, but the outcome may be inescapable. Mr Prabowo has claimed victory in Indonesia’s presidential election, held on February 14th. An unofficial quick count by four Indonesian pollsters reckons he won 58% of the vote, comfortably exceeding the 50% threshold required to avoid a runoff. (Official results will not be published until March 20th.) The man who seems likely to lead the world’s third-biggest democracy is dancing around a troubling past—one that few young Indonesians either know or care about. Who is Indonesia’s presumptive president-elect and what was his route to power?

Mr Prabowo was born into a wealthy family, but spent his young life in exile. His father, one of Indonesia’s most celebrated economists, fled after he opposed Sukarno, the country’s first president. The family bounced from Britain to Singapore to Switzerland. In 1970 Mr Prabowo came home and joined the army. He rose to command Kopassus, Indonesia’s special forces.

Marrying the daughter of Suharto, Indonesia’s late dictator, in 1983 helped him build on his wealth and connections. Yet Mr Prabowo was allegedly linked to atrocities in Indonesia’s former territory of East Timor (now Timor-Leste). He is also accused of ordering the kidnapping in 1998 of more than 20 democracy activists, of whom 13 remain missing. (He denies all wrongdoing in both cases.) Mr Prabowo came with his troops to Indonesia’s capital when protests threatened Suharto’s regime, but the dictatorship still fell. The army expelled Mr Prabowo soon after; he split from his wife and again fled Indonesia.

He has described himself as a victim of reformasi, the era of democratic reform that followed Suharto’s regime. But he returned and in 2008 set up his own political party. He has run three times for the presidency and lost twice to Joko Widodo, or Jokowi, Indonesia’s wildly popular departing leader. In 2014 and 2019 Mr Prabowo falsely claimed the election was stolen from him. His supporters took to the streets to protest; eight people were killed in the ensuing riots.

Small wonder that he rebranded himself this time. The former general abandoned his dictator-chic safari suit and toned down his often hysterical speeches. For this election he wore business attire and sometimes spoke more softly—like Jokowi, who recruited him as defence minister in 2019. This new version of Mr Prabowo was a social-media hit, helping him win over many of the four-fifths of Indonesians who own smartphones.

Mr Prabowo also embraced “Jokowinomics”—infrastructure-led development and an industrial policy based on Indonesia’s huge nickel reserves—and made the president’s son his running-mate. Jokowi hopes to maintain influence through Mr Prabowo, who rode the departing president’s popularity to victory. But given the presumptive president-elect’s erratic past behaviour, it seems unlikely that he will defer to Jokowi. Mr Prabowo was also helped by a big election fund—he was estimated to have had up to 30 times more cash than his rivals.

What of his own policies? Mr Prabowo wants his country to be less reliant on imported food, having previously likened Indonesians to “starving chickens in a rice barn”. He vows to give free milk and lunches to every school pupil in an attempt to stamp out malnutrition. He also promises to raise annual economic growth from around 5% to 6-7%, though he has offered few details on how he will go about it.

Some worry that the former general could further damage Indonesian democracy, which has retreated under Jokowi. Mr Prabowo has said Indonesia needs an authoritarian leader. In the run-up to the election, rivals complained that young voters were more interested in social-media gimmicks than policies. The cute grandpa’s followers appear to have been too busy scrolling to care. ■