Upon winning re-election in 2019, Indonesian president Joko Widodo (Jokowi) was preoccupied with one pressing question: how to avoid becoming a lame-duck president in his second term, as his predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, had been. Jokowi is an ambitious, impatient politician fired with a determination to transform Indonesia into an advanced and economically powerful nation. In his first term, he had committed himself to a significant programme of infrastructure, welfare, health and educational reforms, achieving success in many of these or making considerable progress. But he has far bigger plans for his second term, including a proposed new capital city, high-technology industrialization, and raising the quality of Indonesia's workforce and innovation capacity. As Eve Warburton has observed, Jokowi sees himself as a latter-day Soeharto, the authoritarian president who ruled Indonesia from 1966 till 1998. Just as Soeharto had a profound impact on the nation through his developmental policies and restoration of its international reputation, so too does Jokowi wish to be remembered as bringing a dramatic improvement to the lives of Indonesians and presiding over Indonesia's ascent to becoming a major global power.

With four years of his second five-year term now elapsed, Jokowi has banished any threat of political diminution. Indeed, as he prepares for his final year in office, he has become the commanding figure within the nation's politics, enjoying greater power and public approbation than any president of the post-1998 Reformasi period. He is widely regarded as having managed the Covid-19 pandemic capably, the economy is healthy, Indonesia's international profile has never been higher, and the country has been largely peaceful and stable. A measure of how highly he is regarded can be found in public opinion surveys, which for most of 2023 have shown his approval ratings in the seventy to eighty per cent range—an unprecedented level for the past twenty-five years. He has a firm grip on political processes and an ability to bend parliament and political parties to his will. His governing coalition contains seven of the nine parliamentary parties, or eighty-three per cent of seats, providing the president with a compliant legislature. His authority is such that his coalition and parliament readily endorse his legislative agenda and his appointment of loyalists to a wide range of key positions within the cabinet, the bureaucracy and the military, thereby ensuring that his wishes and interests are safeguarded by trusted figures. Most media magnates are also close to coalition parties or Jokowi, resulting in largely positive reporting of his and his government's actions.