Joko Widodo

Joko Widodo (born 1961), known mononymously as Jokowi, is an Indonesian politician who served as the seventh president of Indonesia from 2014 to 2024. A furniture businessman from Surakarta who became the city's mayor and then governor of Jakarta, he was the first Indonesian president to come from outside the political and military elite, and his informal, walkabout style — the blusukan visit — reshaped Indonesian political campaigning. ^{1 2}

He was born Mulyono on 21 June 1961 at Surakarta in Central Java, the eldest of four children of a timber seller; the family was poor and at one point evicted from riverside housing. The name Joko Widodo replaced Mulyono after childhood illness, in the Javanese custom of renaming a sickly child. He studied forestry engineering at Gadjah Mada University, graduating in 1985, worked in Aceh, and then built his own furniture business in Surakarta, becoming a successful exporter. ¹

Standing for the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), he was mayor of Surakarta from 2005 to 2012, winning national attention for relocating street vendors by negotiation, reviving public spaces and insisting on direct engagement with residents. In 2012 he won the Jakarta governorship with Basuki Tjahaja Purnama as his deputy, and in two years in the capital he launched subsidised health and education cards and restarted stalled transport projects. ^{1 3}

Nominated by the PDI-P, he narrowly defeated Prabowo Subianto in the 2014 presidential election and was sworn in on 20 October 2014; he defeated Prabowo again in 2019, with the scholar Ma'ruf Amin as his vice president. His decade in office centred on infrastructure — toll roads, ports, dams and the early construction of the new capital, Nusantara, in Kalimantan — and on maritime and resource nationalism. He left office on 20 October 2024, when Prabowo succeeded him. ¹

His Muslim identity is a matter of public record — The Economist, as quoted in the English article, calls him "Muslim but broadly secular in his outlook", and The Muslim 500 has listed him among the world's influential Muslims — but none of the sources registered here names a school for him, so the museum records his faith as unknown rather than infer one. ^{1 2}

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