Gibran Rakabuming Raka is no longer prepared to fight for his job. Indonesia’s 39-year-old vice president walked into the parliament complex in Jakarta on Thursday morning carrying a white folder and handed his resignation letter to Ahmad Muzani, the speaker of the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR). He left again a few minutes later without saying a word to reporters. President Prabowo Subianto is reported to have received the same letter on Wednesday evening.
Only two days earlier the picture looked very different. On Tuesday Gibran had vowed to take his case to the administrative court and lay out every certificate he had earned, from primary school to university. The government’s top legal minister, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, poured cold water on that idea, saying the rulings against him were final.
At the heart of the dispute is a 2019 certificate that treated Gibran’s schooling in Singapore and Australia as equal to an Indonesian high-school diploma, the minimum qualification the law sets for a vice president. The Supreme Court struck the document down in October, finding no proof that he had completed that level of education. Once its full judgment came out, 120 lawmakers from all eight parties in the house, including eleven from Prabowo’s Gerindra, backed a motion that could have led to impeachment.
The resignation also tells a story about power. Gibran is the eldest son of former president Joko Widodo, and his place on the 2024 ticket sealed the pact between Jokowi and Prabowo, once bitter rivals. That pact has been fraying: last week Prabowo’s chief of staff, seen as a Jokowi loyalist, was arrested on suspicion of wiretapping the president and dismissed a day later.
Under the constitution Prabowo now names two candidates, and the assembly has 60 days to pick one. Analyst Laura Schwartz of Verisk Maplecroft expects coalition heavyweights to “scramble for influence” over the choice, at a time when the rupiah is sliding and students are back on the streets.
