Who is Prabowo Subianto, the former general who’s Indonesia’s next president?

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — A wealthy ex-general with ties to both Indonesia’s popular outgoing president and its dictatorial past looks set to be its next president, after unofficial tallies showed him taking a clear majority in the first round of voting.

Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto presented himself as heir to the immensely popular sitting President Joko Widodo, vowing to continue the modernization agenda that’s brought rapid growth and vaunted Indonesia into the ranks of middle-income countries.

“We should not be arrogant. We should not be proud. We should not be euphoric. We still have to be humble. This victory must be a victory for all Indonesian people,” Subianto said in a speech broadcast on national television from a sports stadium on the night of the election.

But Subianto will enter office with unresolved questions about the costs of extraction-driven growth for the environment and traditional communities, as well as his own links to torture, disappearances and other human rights abuses in the final years of the brutal Suharto dictatorship, which he served as a lieutenant general.

A former rival of Widodo who lost two presidential races to him, Subianto embraced the popular leader to run as his heir, even choosing Widodo’s son as his running mate, a choice that ran up against constitutional age limits and has activists worried about an emerging political dynasty in the 25-year-old democracy.

Subianto’s win is not yet official. His two rivals have not yet conceded and the official results could take up to a month to be tabulated, but election night “quick counts” showed him taking over 55% of the vote in a three-way race. Those counts, conducted by polling agencies and based on millions of ballots sampled from