Will Indonesia’s National Mandate Party Move Further Away from Its Religious Roots?

The National Mandate Party (PAN), currently Indonesia’s eighth largest party in terms of popular vote share, is seeking to double its electoral gains from 7.24 per cent of the vote in the 2024 legislative election to 15 per cent in 2029. If realised, the new target, set out in its national working meeting last November, will put the party on par with the country’s three largest parties in parliament: the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra), and the Golkar Party.

It is difficult to say, however, whether the party can escape the curse of being a “middle party” (in the Indonesian context, the term refers to a party with a popular vote share ranging between 5 and 10 per cent). The question hinges on many things, one of which is whether the party should move further away from its religious, modernist Islam roots and become an inclusive party.

Recent developments indicate the party is going in that direction.

While it has never been an ideologically Islamic party, like the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) and the United Development Party (PPP), PAN has always portrayed itself as a “religious nationalist” party. Established shortly after the downfall of Soeharto, the party was closely associated with Muhammadiyah, Indonesia’s second largest Islamic organisation. This is because the party was co-founded and led by Muhammadiyah’s then chairman, Amien Rais, an influential figure in the reformasi movement that brought down the former president.  

But this strategy has put PAN in direct competition with major nationalist parties such as the PDI-P, Golkar and Gerindra, which also claim to be “religious nationalists”. Election results in the past two decades have shown that PAN is unable to compete with them.

Thus, PAN has now aggressively rebranded itself as the party of the youth. This strategy was made official ahead of the 2024 general elections, in which Gen Z voters voted for the first time, making young Indonesians (Gen Z and Millennials, together accounting for about 55–56 per cent of total eligible voters) the largest voting bloc. 

The transition has been quite smooth for PAN, which has recruited young celebrities – including actor and singer Verrel Bramasta, who has about 24.7 million followers on Instagram – as its legislative candidates to secure youth votes. This strategy earned it the moniker partai artis (the celebrity party). In August 2021, PAN appointed a group of Gen Z politicians as spokespersons. A year later, during its national working meeting in Jakarta, the party organised a concert featuring Vierratale, an Indonesian power pop band popular among Gen Zs. In August 2023, months away from the 2024 elections, PAN chairman Zulkifli Hasan declared the party to be “the party of the youth”.   

PAN has also gone to great lengths to expand its Muslim voter base beyond Muhammadiyah. In February 2023, the party organised a symposium commemorating a century of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), in an apparent attempt to win votes from members of the traditionalist Islam movement widely regarded as pluralist and inclusive. As Ahmad Najib Burhani writes, this step was unusual, given PAN’s long association with the modernist Islamic group Muhammadiyah.

The symposium demonstrated that PAN has effectively distanced itself from its historical ties with Muhammadiyah. Amien, for his part, has long broken his ties with PAN, establishing the Ummat Party, an Islamic populist party, in 2020 as his new political vehicle to garner votes from members of Muhammadiyah. For PAN, there is no strategic value in competing with Amien’s new party for Muhammadiyah votes.

PAN’s strategy of distancing itself from Muhammadiyah and rebranding itself as a youth party seems to have paid off.

PAN’s strategy of distancing itself from Muhammadiyah and rebranding itself as a youth party seems to have paid off. The party received its largest number of votes ever in the 2024 legislative election (10,984,003, or 7.24 per cent of the total vote). An exit poll by Indikator during the 2024 legislative elections found that none of those who claimed to have voted for PAN said they did so because of its affiliation with any religious organisation, including Muhammadiyah. In fact, 20.8 per cent of them claimed they voted for the party because they believed its programmes were “the most convincing”.

PAN, no doubt, cannot rely on ideas alone to survive Indonesia’s oligarchic politics. Thus, even though the 2029 elections are three years away, the party has pledged its support for President Prabowo Subianto’s re-election to benefit from the “coattail effect”. This early support for Prabowo guarantees its access to state power and resources ahead of 2029. PAN was already granted six ministerial and two deputy-ministerial positions in Prabowo’s Red and White cabinet – more cabinet positions than the National Awakening Party (one ministerial and two deputy-ministerial seats) and the Democratic Party (four ministerial and two deputy-ministerial seats), even though both performed better than PAN in the last elections, with 10.4 per cent and 7.43 per cent of the vote, respectively.      

The party has also welcomed many powerful businesspeople to lead at the local and national levels. Businessman Sakti Wahyu Trenggono, a key ally of former president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and the current maritime and fisheries minister, now serves as chairman of PAN’s Central Java chapter. South Kalimantan (Kalsel) Governor Muhidin, a prominent local coal miner, is leading the party’s provincial chapter.  

With sufficient resources and the easing of the political polarisation that had fuelled Islamic populism between 2014 and 2019, PAN is now well positioned to expand its voter base, offering a politics more palatable to younger Indonesian voters, who are concerned about social inequality, unemployment and climate change. PAN, in fact, had already begun championing job creation as one of its main programmes to attract young voters ahead of the 2024 polls.  

Whether PAN can successfully transform itself into a youth party is not clear. But it is interesting to see that, as the Islamic parties face a bleak future, PAN, once seen as the “Muhammadiyah party”, has chosen a different path.

The next elections will decide whether it has taken the right one.

2026/29