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At first glance, it looked like so many other photos posted on social media, the kind taken by excited travelers en route. The wing of a plane, juxtaposed against fluffy white clouds, with the sun streaming through. The caption read: “U.S.A. here we go.”
On board that August flight from Jakarta to Los Angeles were Kaesang Pangarep, the younger son of President Joko Widodo of Indonesia, and Mr. Kaesang’s wife, Erina Gudono. Details of the trip trickled out on Ms. Erina’s social media accounts: a $1,500 stroller for their soon-to-be-born baby and a $25 lobster roll for lunch. Her posts were seen as tone deaf and led to an uproar at home because most Indonesians cannot afford luxury items.
But what made many furious was the fact that the couple traveled on a private jet. It was the antithesis of the Everyman image Mr. Joko has long projected. The plane was linked to Shopee, the operator of an online mall. The company had planned to construct a new building in the city of Solo, where Mr. Joko began his political career and where until recently the mayor was his older son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka.
“If Kaesang wasn’t the mayor’s brother who had signed an agreement with Shopee, would he really have been able to fly on Shopee’s private jet?” said Boyamin Saiman, the coordinator of the Indonesian Anti-Corruption Community, a watchdog group, which filed a complaint over the matter.
Mr. Kaesang has denied wrongdoing, saying he “hitchhiked” on a friend’s plane while not disclosing who the friend is.
The nation’s graft-fighting body, the Corruption Eradication Commission, is now investigating whether the flight constituted a bribe. The probe is still undergoing an “internal administration process,” according to a spokesman from the commission. It’s unclear who owns the jet now, but it was once the property of Garena Online, which has the same corporate parent as Shopee: Singapore-based SEA Limited. Garena did not respond to a request for comment.
For some opponents of Mr. Joko, there was another element to the episode that made it even more galling.
About a year earlier, Indonesia’s Constitution was revised — critics say at the behest of Mr. Joko — to lower the age requirement for the vice presidency. That paved the way for Mr. Gibran to join the race on the ticket of Mr. Joko’s chosen successor, Prabowo Subianto, who won the election and was inaugurated on Sunday.
While Mr. Kaesang and Ms. Erina were traveling to the United States, Mr. Joko’s allies were trying to change a law to allow the 29-year-old Mr. Kaesang to run in local elections next month that will select governors, mayors and other posts. Thousands of protesters took to the streets, with some tearing down a gate of the Parliament complex.
Parliament backed off on the measure, but the episode was another blow to Mr. Joko’s carefully shaped image as a humble politician. The first Indonesian president who was not a general or from the political elite, Mr. Joko was supposed to be a break from the nation’s kleptocratic past (in contrast with the dictator Suharto and his children, who siphoned billions of dollars during his 31 years in office).
While Mr. Joko was a transformative leader who eliminated extreme poverty in Indonesia, he was also polarizing.
Critics say Mr. Joko was like Indonesia’s previous leaders because he wanted to establish a political dynasty of his own. His only daughter, Kahiyang Ayu, is married to Bobby Nasution, the mayor of the city of Medan. (Mr. Nasution also courted controversy by flying on a private jet.)
During his tenure, Mr. Joko pushed through a sweeping raft of deregulation in pursuit of economic growth. And he weakened the once formidable anti-corruption commission.
When Mr. Joko took office in 2014, he pledged to end the graft that has long plagued the country. But as he stepped down a decade later, Indonesia ranks 115th out of 180 nations in Transparency International’s 2023 corruption perception index, and its score stands at 34 of 100 points.
After Mr. Joko became president, both of his sons’ businesses began to get support from venture capitalists and rich businessmen, according to a New York Times review of corporate records.
In 2022, Ubedillah Badrun, a scholar at the State University of Jakarta, filed a graft complaint against Mr. Joko and his sons. He wanted the agency to look into what he said were the close ties that Mr. Gibran and Mr. Kaesang had developed with three relatives of Gandi Sulistiyanto Suherman, the former managing director of Sinar Mas, one of Indonesia’s largest conglomerates.
Mr. Ubedillah noted that Sinar Mas had not been penalized by regulators even though its subsidiaries had been implicated in forest fires in Indonesia in 2019. He questioned whether this was because Mr. Joko’s sons were close to Mr. Gandi’s sons and son-in-law. (Mr. Joko appointed Mr. Gandi as Indonesia’s ambassador to South Korea in 2021. Mr. Gandi did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)
Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission had previously punished children of midlevel officials for accepting gifts. But Mr. Ubedillah was rebuffed.
“They said, ‘We are under the president,’” he said of the agency. “That was essentially the main obstacle.”
A spokesman for the anti-graft agency said Mr. Ubedillah’s complaint was still “a matter of internal administrative procedures” and that it was not aware of any difficulties in pursuing the case.
After Mr. Kaesang’s trip on the private jet, Mr. Ubedillah urged the agency to reconsider his original complaint.
Mr. Boyamin, of the Indonesian Anti-Corruption Community, said the private jet ride was no different from a guitar given to Mr. Joko by the heavy metal band Metallica in 2013 that was confiscated by Indonesia’s anti-corruption agency.
Five years later, Mr. Joko received a rare Metallica album as a gift from the Danish prime minister at the time. He reported the gift and paid $800 to the anti-corruption agency, which praised him as setting an example for all civil servants to “prevent corruption starting from the smallest things.”
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