In the final years of Joko Widodo’s presidency, Nusantara —Indonesia’s new capital in East Kalimantan —was hailed as a bold experiment in nation-building. Conceived as a sustainable smart city meant to redistribute growth beyond Java’s overburdened plains, it was Jokowi’s grandest legacy project, his version of a national moonshot.
It promised to symbolize Indonesia’s emergence as a confident, forward-looking power, one that could reshape its geography to match its ambitions. The plans were sweeping, the renderings stunning and the speeches filled with conviction. Nusantara would be green, digital, inclusive and resilient—a new heart for a rising archipelago nation.
But as the dust of the 2024 election settled and Prabowo Subianto took the presidential oath, that dream began to lose its pulse. The cranes that once towered over the forests of East Kalimantan now stand mostly idle, the once-booming narrative of national transformation fading into bureaucratic silence.
What had been a daily headline generator under Widodo, also known as Jokowi, has slipped to a faint afterthought under Prabowo. In his first months in office, the new president has not once mentioned Nusantara in a major speech, and his administration has quietly reduced the project’s fiscal allocation to a fraction of its former size–once projected as high as 466 trillion rupiah (US$33 billion).
For a project that was meant to define Indonesia’s century, Nusantara’s quiet disappearance from the political stage is as telling as it is symbolic.
Prabowo’s priorities are fundamentally different. His presidency, shaped by decades of military thinking and nationalistic rhetoric, orbits around three imperatives: food security, energy sovereignty and defense modernization.
In his view, a strong Indonesia begins not with architectural symbols but with tangible capabilities: the ability to feed its people, power its industries and defend its borders. These goals, in his words, are the truest form of independence.
Grand projects like Nusantara, with their glossy urban visions and astronomical costs, fall far below that hierarchy.
The budget tells the story more starkly than any speech. The 2025 fiscal plan, the first under Prabowo, reduced funding for Nusantara by more than half compared to Jokowi’s final year.
Key ministries, once deeply involved in coordinating land acquisition and infrastructure development, have shifted focus to agricultural revitalization, biofuel development and military procurement.
Where Jokowi once convened cabinet meetings to track the capital’s progress, Prabowo now presides over discussions on rice self-sufficiency and drone acquisitions. The contrast could not be clearer, nor the political message more explicit: Nusantara no longer stands at the heart of Indonesia’s national project.
Even the political coalition reflects this shift in mood. The new cabinet, dominated by Gerindra party loyalists and pragmatic technocrats, treats Nusantara as an inherited obligation rather than a mission.
Puan Maharani, the speaker of the House and a senior leader in PDI-P, the party that once carried Jokowi’s vision, has remained notably silent. Once the political base for Jokowi’s dream, PDI-P has repositioned itself as a loyal opposition after the bitter 2024 election and is in no hurry to defend what has now become a politically orphaned project.
The absence of debate or defense in the legislature marks the project’s final descent into irrelevance – a silence that feels both deliberate and terminal.
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Perhaps the most ambiguous signal of all came directly from Prabowo himself. When asked whether he would continue Jokowi’s capital relocation plan, the president offered a cryptic response, saying only that Nusantara would remain a “symbolic capital.”
The phrase was so vague that it seemed to confirm what many already suspected: Prabowo had no intention of moving the government there but also no desire to publicly kill the project.
“Symbolic capital” became the perfect euphemism for indecision, a political placeholder that let the administration avoid confrontation with Jokowi’s loyalists while quietly allowing the project to fade into irrelevance. In Indonesia’s political lexicon, where ambiguity often carries strategic intent, such phrasing was equivalent to a death sentence delivered softly.
Dream without a foundationFrom an economic perspective, Nusantara was always a fragile idea wrapped in the language of equality. Jokowi’s argued that moving the capital would rebalance development, drawing growth to the neglected outer islands and easing the main island of Java’s congestion.
But economists were never convinced. Indonesia’s economic geography is stubbornly uneven. More than 80% of GDP, investment and industrial output is still concentrated in the two main islands of Java and Sumatra. The archipelago’s inter-island logistics remain costly and inefficient, making it difficult for a single new city to trigger nationwide transformation.
The logic of building a city from scratch—far from established trade routes, major universities and skilled labor pools—was always tenuous. Economic spillovers work through connectivity and market density, not distance and symbolism. By moving the capital deep into Kalimantan’s interior, Jokowi effectively bet that government presence alone could generate growth.
Yet evidence from similar projects elsewhere—Brasília, Naypyidaw, or even Egypt’s New Administrative Capital—suggests otherwise. Such cities often become administrative islands, isolated from the economic mainstream. Nusantara risked the same fate: a bureaucratic enclave in the jungle, sustained by state spending rather than organic productivity.
Private investors sensed this early. Despite Jokowi’s enthusiastic roadshows, foreign capital was slow to commit. Japanese and South Korean firms that initially expressed interest in infrastructure development eventually scaled back, citing uncertainty over land regulations, environmental standards and long-term returns.
Domestic conglomerates hesitated as well, wary of the political risks tied to leadership transition. When Prabowo’s victory became inevitable, many quietly pulled back, anticipating a shift in national priorities.
In the vacuum that followed, Chinese state-linked companies stepped forward, offering technology and financing packages for smart-city infrastructure, surveillance systems and energy grids. But their involvement only deepened public unease.
Critics saw Nusantara’s increasing dependence on Chinese technology as a strategic vulnerability. The perception that Indonesia’s supposed “independent” capital was being built on Chinese digital infrastructure clashed sharply with nationalist sentiment. In the public imagination, Nusantara began to look less like a symbol of sovereignty and more like a monument to dependency.
By the time Prabowo assumed office, fiscal fatigue, investor withdrawal and nationalist skepticism had hollowed out the project’s momentum. Cutting its budget was not just fiscally prudent – it was politically safe. Few Indonesians protested; many, in fact, quietly approved. Redirecting funds from futuristic skyscrapers to rice fields and refineries resonated with a population weary of grand promises that rarely reached their lives.
Geography of vulnerabilityBeyond economics lies geography, the unforgiving factor that no political rhetoric can erase. Nusantara’s location, carved out of the forests between Balikpapan and Samarinda, was meant to represent Indonesia’s geographic center, a metaphor for national unity.
In practice, however, it placed the capital far from the demographic and industrial heartlands. More than 60% of Indonesia’s 280 million people live on Java, another 20% on Sumatra. Kalimantan, by contrast, is sparsely populated, with limited infrastructure and poor connectivity to major ports and supply chains.
The logistical cost of governing from such a location would be immense. Ministers, businesses, journalists and diplomats would face a constant challenge of distance. The environmental toll of building a megacity in one of the world’s most biodiverse regions would only add to the burden.
The symbolism of moving “to the center” began to crumble under the weight of practicality. In many ways, Nusantara was a metaphor that geography refused to cooperate with.
Security considerations further complicated the picture. Prabowo, a soldier by training, understands the strategic vulnerabilities of Kalimantan better than most. During World War II, Japan invaded Tarakan in 1942, quickly seizing its oil facilities and using them as a springboard for control over the rest of Borneo.
The lesson was clear then and remains relevant now: the island’s vast, porous terrain is difficult to defend. Indonesia shares borders with Malaysia and maritime boundaries with the Philippines, making the region geopolitically exposed.
For a president obsessed with strategic autonomy, the idea of relocating the country’s command center to such a location likely seemed dangerously naive. Even in an era of advanced communication systems, distance dilutes control. A capital should project power, not retreat from it.
In this sense, Nusantara’s location, designed to embody inclusiveness, may instead represent vulnerability. Prabowo’s pivot away from the project reflects not just fiscal realism but also a military instinct, the understanding that national strength is best anchored where the state’s logistical, demographic and industrial muscles are strongest.
Politics of forgettingNusantara’s quiet demise also reveals something deeper about Indonesia’s political culture: a preference for erasing rather than confronting. No decree has canceled the project. No official statement has declared it dead.
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Instead, it has been allowed to fade through neglect–a method of political burial that avoids accountability. This pattern is familiar in Indonesia’s developmental history: projects born in one era rarely survive the next, especially when they carry the signature of a rival president.
For Prabowo, this passive disengagement serves multiple purposes. It allows him to redefine Indonesia’s priorities without directly antagonizing Jokowi, whose residual influence still lingers. It also signals to the political elite that his presidency will be guided not by symbolism but by strategic pragmatism.
By turning away from the capital project, Prabowo asserts that national greatness cannot be built from blueprints alone. It must be cultivated through resilience, productivity and self-reliance. Yet, for all its pragmatism, the retreat from Nusantara leaves behind a void.
The site, half-built and half-forgotten, stands as a cautionary monument to the volatility of political ambition. What began as a dream of equality and modernity has become a case study in impermanence.
The forests cleared for progress now stand partly barren, the concrete foundations slowly eroding under tropical rain. It is an unfinished sentence in Indonesia’s national story, one written in haste and abandoned mid-thought.
Still, Nusantara’s story is not merely one of failure, but of exposure. It has revealed the limits of presidential will in a democracy where power shifts can reorder national priorities overnight.
It shows that while visions may inspire, they do not endure without economic logic and political consensus. And it has demonstrated, perhaps most poignantly, that the idea of moving Indonesia’s capital was less about geography than psychology—a desire to escape the weight of Java’s dominance—only to discover that geography cannot be escaped by decree.
Jokowi’s Nusantara was born out of hope, but also out of impatience—the belief that transformation could be engineered by relocation. Prabowo’s Indonesia, in contrast, is governed by caution and calculation, by the conviction that sovereignty begins in the soil and the barracks, not in architecture. Between these two visions lies the distance between imagination and endurance.
Nusantara, once envisioned as the city of the future, now stands as a relic of the recent past—a reminder that even the grandest dreams can be undone by the quiet gravity of pragmatism. And in that sense, it has indeed become what Prabowo inadvertently called it: a symbolic capital, not of Indonesia’s future, but of its political forgetting.
Ronny P Sasmita is senior analyst at Indonesia Strategic and Economics Action Institution; Antoni Putra is lecturer at Andalas University, West Sumatra, Indonesia.
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