Indonesia’s Vice-President Gibran Rakabuming Raka has told President Prabowo Subianto that he intends to resign, a senior official said, as questions over the educational documents used for his 2024 candidacy continue to draw political scrutiny.
State Secretary Prasetyo Hadi said Gibran raised the possibility during a meeting with the president in Jakarta on Tuesday 10 November. Their discussion lasted about two and a half hours and took place against the background of recent court decisions concerning the vice-president’s qualifications.
Prasetyo said reports that Prabowo had rejected the offer were not correct. He did not say the president had accepted it. The statement described an intention to resign; it did not announce that Gibran had left office.
Gibran has asked for an opportunity to establish the validity of his documents through the State Administrative Court, according to the state secretary. The vice-president later said Prabowo had advised him to continue his case and present his academic records.
Later on Tuesday, footage showed Gibran walking alongside Prabowo at the presidential palace ahead of a ceremony. Their public appearance followed the meeting and the official account of the resignation offer.
What the courts considered
Indonesian election law requires presidential and vice-presidential candidates to have completed senior high school or an equivalent education. The dispute centres on whether the records submitted in connection with Gibran’s education abroad met that requirement.
On 6 October, the Constitutional Court said the evidence before it did not convincingly establish that Gibran held a foreign qualification showing completion of education equivalent to senior high school. The court distinguished between documents demonstrating attendance and evidence that a level of education had been completed.
It did not remove him from office. The court said the people bringing the election-results petition lacked legal standing and that the matter could no longer be resolved as a dispute over the 2024 election result after the elected candidates had taken office. It said questions about the requirements fell within the remit of other authorised state institutions.
A separate Supreme Court ruling on 30 October invalidated the government-issued equivalency certificate used for Gibran’s candidacy. The two decisions should not be treated as a finding that he forged a document or as proof that he never completed secondary education.
Gibran has maintained that he meets the education requirement. After the Constitutional Court ruling, he said he had gone to university and completed a bachelor’s degree in Singapore. His request to pursue the matter through the administrative court is a proposed legal step, not a court decision in his favour.
Pressure in parliament
Some lawmakers have sought to examine Gibran’s eligibility, and parliamentary action has been discussed as a possible route towards impeachment. An inquiry, a court challenge and a completed removal from office are distinct steps. The meeting with Prabowo did not itself establish that an impeachment had taken place.
Gibran is the son of former president Joko Widodo, commonly known as Jokowi. Prabowo and Gibran won the 2024 presidential election and took office that October, after Jokowi had completed two terms as president.
Gibran’s candidacy had already been the subject of a separate legal controversy. In 2023, the Constitutional Court created an exception to the minimum age of 40 for presidential and vice-presidential candidates who had previously held elected regional office. Gibran, then mayor of Surakarta, qualified under that exception.
That earlier age decision concerned a different qualification from the education records now in dispute. For the moment, the official account leaves open both the outcome of Gibran’s stated intention to resign and the course of the legal and parliamentary questions surrounding his eligibility.
