By The Diplomat | Created at 2026-10-02 08:42:10 | Updated at 2026-10-02 09:20:38
9 hours ago
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto has replaced his foreign minister with a career diplomat, in a cabinet reshuffle that saw more than a dozen other posts change hands.
In yesterday’s reshuffle, Prabowo appointed Arrmanatha Nasir, Indonesia’s former permanent representative to the United Nations in New York, as the country’s new foreign minister. The outgoing foreign minister, Sugiono, was shifted to the post of coordinating minister for human development.
In this latest change to his “Red and White Cabinet,” Prabowo appointed three new coordinating ministers and a new minister of industry. He also reshuffled a handful of deputy ministerial posts and leadership positions at major government agencies, including the National Police and the office of the Ombudsman.
The changeover at the top of Kemlu, however, was the most significant position to change hands, and the second major cabinet change in the past few weeks.
In mid-September, Prabowo removed his finance minister, Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa and replaced him with his deputy, Suahasil Nazara, amid growing investor concern about Indonesia’s economic trajectory.
Arrmanatha Nasir comes to the post with years of experience, having joined Kemlu in 1997. Since then, he has risen through the ranks, serving as the Ministry’s spokesperson between 2014 and 2019, Indonesia’s ambassador to France (2019-2021) and Indonesia’s ambassador to the U.N. (2021-2024). He was then appointed vice foreign minister when Prabowo took office.
After taking his oath of office yesterday, Arrmanatha said that his priorities included “maintaining stability in the region and promoting multilateralism,” Reuters reported.
Arrmanatha’s advent is likely to mark a significant change in the process of Indonesian foreign policymaking. His predecessor Sugiono was a political novice who came to the post with little hands-on experience in foreign affairs. While he served as the deputy head of the parliamentary commission overseeing foreign policy, his main credential was that he had served as deputy chairperson of Prabowo’s Gerindra Party.
Indeed, the appointment of such a junior figure appeared to mark a sharp break from the tenure of outgoing Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi, a career diplomat who had nearly two decades of experience in the diplomatic corps before her appointment as foreign minister in 2014.
The result has been that, in effect, if not in intention, the Foreign Ministry under Sugiono became largely subordinate to the presidential palace. As in the realm of economic policy-making, this has injected a degree of unpredictability into Jakarta’s foreign policy. As Trystanto Sanjaya, visiting fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, posted on X, “Under Sugiono’s tenure, Indonesia’s Foreign Policy has been criticized as inconsistent and there has been reports where views of Indonesian diplomats are not considered when making important foreign policy decisions.”
Perhaps the most notable of these instances was the joint statement issued during Prabowo’s visit to Beijing in late 2024, which mentioned that the two countries had “reached important common understanding on joint development in areas of overlapping claims.”
The release of the joint statement was interpreted by some South China Sea watchers as marking a (perhaps unwitting) break from a long-standing Indonesian policy, and was quickly walked back by the Foreign Ministry. At the time, I argued that the incident “may represent less a conscious shift in policy than a cautionary tale about the perils of turning a nation’s foreign relations into a political sinecure.”
Dewi Fortuna Anwar, a foreign policy analyst at Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency, told Reuters that Nasir, who was an “even-keeled” professional, would likely be more assertive in its relationship with the presidential palace. “He can be a foil to Prabowo,” she said.
Trystanto concurred that Nasir’s appointment “can be interpreted as a return to the traditional way of doing business at MoFA where the minister is appointed from within its ranks. However, will there be a return to the usual way of doing business regarding Indonesia’s Foreign Policy?” Given Prabowo’s bull-headed and unilateral style of governance, he wrote, “I am not too optimistic.”
