Indonesia’s president-elect Prabowo Subianto has tossed his country’s hat into the Olympic rings to host the 2036 Summer Games, but experts warn economic and geopolitical pitfalls challenges may hinder this ambitious bid.
Prabowo was in France last week, where he attended the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympics in Paris alongside Minister of State-Owned Enterprises Erick Thohir, who has been a key proponent of bringing major sporting events to Indonesia.
During the visit, the pair met International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach to reaffirm Indonesia’s ambition to host the games.
“Mr. Prabowo’s love for sports makes him want to see Indonesia becoming the stage for world-class events,” Erick wrote on Instagram.
This is not the first time Jakarta has set its sights on hosting the Olympics. In 2019, incumbent President Joko Widodo submitted a bid to host the 2032 Games, but lost out to Brisbane, Australia.
Widodo’s proposal included hosting the sporting spectacle in Indonesia’s planned new capital city of Nusantara on the island of Borneo. This seemingly addressed concerns from critics who doubted Jakarta’s ability to accommodate the event due to its notorious traffic, but raised fresh concerns whether the new capital would be ready in time.
Widodo’s vision for the US$32 billion new capital involves transforming 2,560 sq km of land in East Kalimantan into a functional green smart city. While it might appear to be a perfect setting for the Olympics, experts say Nusantara appears far from ready to host a large-scale event.
Progress on the Nusantara project has been sluggish, and analysts have expressed concerns that Prabowo’s incoming administration may shift focus away from continuing Widodo’s flagship initiative in favour of prioritising the new leader’s own campaign commitments instead.
These uncertainties have sown doubts among investors and deterred foreign companies from committing funds. Widodo in November acknowledged that while there had been letters of intent from Singapore, China, and Japan, there had been “no real investment” made thus far.
Indonesia’s latest Olympic bid could be a “public relations move” to reassure investors of its commitment to developing Nusantara, according to Yohanes Sulaiman, a political analyst at the University of Jenderal Achmad Yani in West Java.
“I’m far more inclined to think this is just what the government is saying to make people think we are going to move to the new capital soon,” Yohanes said.
“But there is already a low probability that we would get chosen because the place is simply unprepared,” he added.
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Indonesia passes law to relocate capital from Jakarta to Borneo
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Hefty price tag
Indonesia has hosted many international sporting events in recent years, including last year’s Fifa Men’s Under-17 World Cup and the Fiba Men’s Basketball World Cup in Jakarta.
In 2018, the Asian Games were jointly held in Jakarta and Palembang, the capital of South Sumatra province. More than 11,000 athletes from 45 countries took part in the event, which was reported to have cost around US$3.2 billion.
Minister Erick, who also chairs the Soccer Association of Indonesia, led the organising committee for the Asian Games.
“[Erick] has an eagerness to make Indonesia more active in the global arena through sports,” said Ahmad Rizky Umar, a lecturer at the School of Political Science and International Studies at Australia’s University of Queensland.
Umar noted that Indonesia could leverage its experience hosting the Asian Games, as well as its existing facilities in Jakarta and Palembang, to bolster its Olympic bid – a more cost-effective and viable strategy, he said, than hosting the games in Nusantara.
“There is no guarantee that Nusantara will be completed by 2036,” he said, adding that this is a consideration the IOC will make when they decide who wins the bid, which will not be made for another two years.
Analysts have questioned whether Indonesia possesses the budget capacity to undertake the high-cost endeavour, warning that hosting the Olympics typically generates little to no profit for the host country, and could strain national finances.
When Prabowo takes office in October, he has pledged to implement a pricey scheme to provide free meals to 83 million Indonesian schoolchildren – a programme expected to cost 71 trillion rupiah (US$4.4 billion) in 2025 and up to US$27 billion annually when fully implemented by 2029.
Fifa fiasco
Indonesia’s Olympic bid will also face another major hurdle – its strained political ties with Israel.
In March of last year, Indonesia was stripped of hosting rights for the Fifa Men’s Under-20 World Cup over a political controversy created by high-level politicians opposing Israel’s participation.
The cancellation caused grief and anger across football-crazy Indonesia. The country had been hoping to use its host status to restore its image among the global sports community following a deadly stampede at a football stadium in 2022 that killed at least 125 people.
But experts said that the Israel controversy illustrated how difficult it was for the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation to separate sports from politics, particularly with the ongoing conflict in Gaza.
“Do not mix politics and sports,” Erick stated in an interview with This Week in Asia last year when asked for his reflections from the controversy.
According to Umar, Indonesia has allowed the participation of Israeli athletes under special circumstances, “but there is always the risk in the future given there is no diplomatic relationship between the two countries.”
“Indonesia will have to be careful on how it approaches this as it is a sensitive issue for the government and for the public,” he added.
