STATE Secretary Minister Pratikno is the most brutal realization of the warning given by the man who served as German Chancellor from 1871 to 1890, Otto van Bismarck: politics ruins the character. In his two terms as minister, the former rector of Yogyakarta’s Gadjah Mada University has been ‘dancing’ with the authority of President Joko Widodo. Pratikno ascended the political stage after Jokowi was elected in the 2014 election. For almost a decade, he has served as the president’s assistant for hasty and deceitful practices.

Pratikno has an impressive academic record. He is a senior lecturer, with qualifications from a number of overseas universities. Over the course of his education at well-known universities, Pratikno studied local politics and decentralization, the politics of state finances as well as public policy and bureaucracy. He learned about ethics, transparency, social justice and legal norms.

But becoming a minister did not lead to him losing awareness that politics is a public affair. He involved himself in politics with a small ‘p’: how to keep his boss in power.

This magazine has discovered that Pratikno was the operator behind the ruling by the Constitutional Court that revised the requirements for presidential and vice-presidential candidates in the General Election Law. Pratikno arranged this ruling through Constitutional Court Chief Justice Anwar Usman so that Jokowi’s son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, could run for the vice-presidency even though he was below the required age.

Pratikno’s political maneuvering also led to other parties shifting their support to Gibran as vice-presidential candidate running with Prabowo Subianto. Before the Constitutional Court issued its ruling on October 16, 2023, the other parties all had their own candidates. But this support disappeared as soon as Gibran met the criteria to run for the vice-presidency.

Pratikno’s clearly exceeded his authority as State Secretary Minister. Presidential Regulation No. 31/2020 on the State Secretariat Ministry limits the duties and the function of the state secretary minister to providing technical assistance for the president and vice president in matters of governance. It also specifies the responsibility of “carrying out other functions as given by the president and vice president,” but this is not clearly defined by the law.

Lobbying Constitutional Court judges to open the way for the son of the president to enter politics is clearly not one of the responsibilities defined in this regulation. Persuading other political parties to accept Jokowi’s son in the presidential election coalition is also not the responsibility of a state secretary minister. Lobbying and political maneuvers are the job of politicians when they communicate the interests of the public.

What Pratikno did is not only inappropriate but also a betrayal of his own intellect as an academic. Instead of warning Jokowi not to give in to the temptation of extending his power, he became the operator that brought it about.

Pratikno and Jokowi are a dynamic duo who need each other. Jokowi relies on Pratikno as an operator with unswerving loyalty. Meanwhile, Pratikno has privileges as Jokowi’s right hand man. Like many of Jokowi’s other assistants, Pratikno subsequently became caught up in the combination of carrying out tasks for the President, personal pragmatism and the opportunity for corruption, collusion and nepotism, which is increasingly spiraling out of control.

It is no surprise that Pratikno has been mentioned in connection with the corruption case involving the construction of Internet towers in the Ministry of Communication and Informatics. An order to halt the investigation of the alleged corruption is also believed to have come from his office. That was where he met with Dito Ariotedjo, Chairman of the Indonesian Renewal Youth Front, a wing of the Golkar Party, who is now Minister of Youth and Sports, to draw up a strategy for stopping the investigation into the alleged corruption over the base transceiver stations (BTS).

Dito is often called “Pratikno’s boy” because he became a minister thanks to Pratikno’s intervention, despite Golkar nominating another candidate. If the confessions of the suspects in the BTS corruption case are true, Pratikno will not only be Jokowi’s political operator, but will have also lowered his own status from technocrat to kleptocrat.