Why Asia’s social media strongmen are so popular

By Karishma Vaswani

The jeans and the hairstyles are back, and so is some of the music. The 1990s have become so much of a part of Gen Z’s conversations that there is an entire collection of hashtags and accounts referencing that era, from @90sanxiety to #Y2K. Still, one aspect of ‘90s history is particularly troubling: This generation’s affection — particularly in Asia — for strongmen politicians, fueled in part by social media strategies that have helped to erase their pasts, and remake their image for an entertainment-and-meme hungry youth.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Indonesia — which has just held a watershed election — and in the Philippines presidential poll in 2022. Both contests saw strongmen politicians harking from a previous time winning; Prabowo Subianto, Indonesia’s president-elect, is a former general from the dictator Suharto’s era. In Manila, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, son of the former autocrat Ferdinand Marcos, put his clan back into Malacañang Palace 36 years after his father fled the country.

The ‘90s in parts of Asia was an epoch of strongmen, characterised by economic stability but also authoritarian rule. In Indonesia, the nation I call home, that meant regularly receiving copies of news magazines with huge swathes of text blacked out, the offending words about President Suharto erased so no one could read or be influenced by them. Books of literary giants like Pramoedya Ananta Toer were banned, among scores of novels and other writing by authors linked to what the regime saw as leftist groups. These included social science texts, historical studies, literary works, and memoirs.

This led to an effective erasure of the past from the minds of Indonesians of that time. Control the narrative, and you control the people. A similar phenomenon is happening now, but this time through the use of social media, and in an environment where the youth may have access to information, but perhaps not the desire to consume or understand it.

”I am disappointed with our younger generation,” Harkristuti Harkrisnowo, professor of law at the University of Indonesia, told me. “They see this presidential election as just another entertaining event, rather than a way to decide what kind of country they will live in.”

The election campaign was pretty entertaining, particularly the events that Prabowo and his vice presidential candidate, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the eldest son of current leader Joko Widodo, held for the masses. Giant cartoon balloons of their images were strewn across stadium grounds, and families took photographs near life-sized images of them, dancing along to the catchy tune that became their anthem. People I met at the rallies were quick to dismiss decades-old allegations of human rights violations against Prabowo, telling me they were focused on the future, not the past.

It was the same rhetoric I heard in the Philippines in May 2022 during the country’s presidential elections. One woman said she was convinced Bongbong Marcos would bring back the gold stolen by his father, because she had seen a video about it on YouTube. Another family in one of Manila’s many slums was convinced that jobs would be aplenty, because the Marcoses “know money is important.” This social media bonanza rewrote history about the dictatorship and painted it as a golden era, which helped his campaign — although he denied any connection to the posts. Never mind that his father’s regime saw thousands killed, tortured, or disappeared under martial law. The internet had rebranded Marcos Jr, and for Filipinos, he was the right man for the job.

Rumours were aplenty that the same PR team that had helped Marcos repeated their success with Prabowo. These could not be verified. At the time of writing, neither camp had responded to questions about to the speculation. If true, the strategy has worked. Recent research published by the institute also looked at the appeal of the take-charge image in Prabowo’s victory. Around 54 per cent of the respondents who liked him did so because of his “strongman” image, the data showed, highlighting attributes like firm, authoritative, tough and disciplined. They were seemingly unfazed about the possibility of an authoritarian running the country.

That’s because the majority of the people voting in Indonesia don’t remember the ‘90s, notes Michael Vatikiotis, a longtime Southeast Asia observer and author of Blood & Silk: Power & Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia. “It’s about continuity for the youth, a message of positivity,” he said. “They want socio-economic stability, and they believe that the Prabowo-Gibran team can give it to them.”

It’s true that, in Indonesia at least, the ‘90s were characterized by a strong economic growth rate — only to see that destroyed by mismanagement, corruption, debt and the Asian Financial Crisis. Bring back the fashion, the music — even Jennifer Anniston’s haircut, sure. But some things from the ‘90s should stay right where they are — in the history books.