respected finance minister and replaced her with Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa, who has called the IMF “stupid” and who told The Economist in April that the president need not worry about “developments in the global economy [or] in the global oil price”. Indonesian businessfolk are scared to speak out, perhaps because Mr Prabowo is a thin-skinned former general with a sketchy human-rights record, or perhaps because he has recently been bullying big business. Mr Prabowo appears to be insulating himself from reality. So he may not listen to sober advice. Nonetheless, here is some. His pet projects are unaffordable. Before the Iran war, spending a projected 10% of the budget on just two of them—free school meals and a network of 80,000 village co- operatives—was merely wasteful. Now, the energy crunch has wiped out any room for error. Mr Prabowo must change course or risk a crisis. He must cut spending on his pet projects, or on Indonesia’s colossal fossil- fuel subsidies, or break a law that caps the budget deficit at 3% of GDP. Each option comes with risks. To cut his pet boondoggles would make him look weak. To let energy prices rise would invite unrest. So Mr Prabowo may take the third path: letting the deficit breach its legal limit. That would be a mistake. True, the 3% limit is an arbitrary figure copy-and- pasted from Europe’s Maastricht treaty. But since the crisis of 1998 it has signalled that Indonesia’s government is serious about fiscal discipline. Now investors are jumpy. Interest payments as a share of government revenue are surging. Credit-rating agencies are eyeing a downgrade. On Mr Prabowo’s watch, $6bn in foreign capital has fled and the rupiah has sagged by 11% against the dollar to a record low. Busting the budget cap would push borrowing costs higher. Even as he makes the economy more precarious, Mr Prabowo is eroding Indonesian democracy. Legislative opposition has been all but neutered, and proposals to end direct elections for provincial governors do not bode well. Civil society is intimidated. There are few avenues for dissent, and little creative struggle between competing ideas. Far too much depends on the instincts of a single, badly advised ex-soldier.
He needs to hear unpalatable truths. Yes, cheap fuel is popular. But it encourages consumption at a time of shortages. Yes, people like free school lunches. But giving them to everyone is wasteful. Wiser to focus on pregnant mothers and toddlers in poor families, who need better nutrition to avoid stunting. Yes, Indonesian farmers were being ripped off by middlemen when buying fertiliser. But there are cheaper ways to tackle this than creating those 80,000 village co-operatives, which are likely to be graft- prone. And yes, the 3% deficit limit could well be lifted some day. But first Mr Prabowo must convince markets that Indonesia’s finances are in safe hands. Indonesia has made great advances in the past quarter-century. Under a succession of reasonably pragmatic governments, income per person has more than doubled and democracy has put down roots. Mr Prabowo is not a kleptocratic despot like his late father-in-law, but he is chipping away at the progress his country has made since the bad old days. The president must stop trying to squelch opposition in the legislature, media and civil society. Dissent that cannot find an outlet in politics will spill onto the streets, as it did during riots last year. His insistence that opposition should be “polite” is a recipe for it one day turning violent. There is hope. Mr Prabowo cares about his legacy. So he needs to realise that a huge, sprawling multi-ethnic archipelago like Indonesia cannot simply be given orders as if it were an army unit. It needs a commander-in-chief who listens to many voices, rather than surrounding himself with yes-men. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2026/05/14/indonesia-the-biggest-muslim- majority-country-is-on-a-risky-path
Mothers who cannot breastfeed have been given terrible advice Medicine has neglected mammary glands for too long May 14th 2026 MEDICINE IS A neatly sorted discipline. From head to toe, all major parts of the body have a specialism: cardiology for the heart, urology for (male) genitals, neurology for the brain, even psychiatry for the embodied mind. All, that is, but one. Mammary glands, though possessed by one half of humanity and admired by the other, lack a dedicated field. Science, too, has neglected the body’s milk-making function. This lack of “lactology” is bad for infants and mothers. More than 130m women give birth each year. Of the nearly 2bn women and girls alive today who have not yet done so, over 90% can expect to have a child at some point. Most mothers try to breastfeed, but two in five of those
who do will encounter at least some problems. For some it hurts, like being bitten by a critter you can’t swat away. For others, producing enough milk to feed their baby proves impossible. And often, the advice they receive is both painful and useless. Yet despite the vast unmet demand for better advice and treatment, scandalously little is known about the subject. A search for “low milk supply” or “low milk production” returns a meagre 14,000 academic papers on PubMed, a database of 40m medical-research papers. “Erectile dysfunction”, which afflicts perhaps 300m men (mostly minimally), elicits 32,000 studies. This neglect matters. Mothers are free to choose not to breastfeed. But most want to try, because the benefits for their babies, such as helping ward off infections, are large. A study in the Lancet, a medical journal, in 2016 found that if all babies were breastfed, 823,000 deaths of children under five would be averted each year, partly because in poor countries formula is often made with dirty water. Understanding why some women give up, and what can be done to reduce their number, is therefore of immense value. Instead, doctors often dismiss their problems, offer dubious guesswork as advice or tell mothers to switch to formula. In parts of Europe between 20% and 40% of newborns are fed powdered milk before leaving the hospital. Pregnancy care in some places scarcely mentions breastfeeding, perhaps on the assumption that it will be easy because it is natural. So is childbirth, but that does not make obstetricians redundant. The gap left by medicine is filled by non-physicians on breastfeeding helplines and “lactation consultants” who in the absence of hard facts often base their counsel on hunches. A better understanding of breasts would allow doctors to make important distinctions. Some mothers produce enough milk but have trouble releasing it. For them, the answer may be to stimulate the flow by putting the baby to a nipple more often, or by using a breastpump. For mothers who cannot produce enough, different approaches are needed. For years doctors assumed this problem was rare: that no more than 5% of mothers suffered from inadequate milk supply. Recent research, by scientists who have bothered to look, suggests that the true figure is closer to 10% or even 20%. The causes of low milk supply are often linked to complicated biological pathways beyond a new mother’s
control, as we explore in our “Weekend Intelligence” podcast. Some are genetic. Others may involve conditions like obesity, diabetes or autoimmune disorders, which expectant women cannot just wish away by willpower alone. Mothers grappling with such problems deserve a rigorous diagnosis and proven treatment from a specialist medical lactologist. Instead the standard advice is to tether themselves to a breastpump at least eight times a day and all will be fine—though such a brutal regimen is not grounded in any research. When all is not fine, women are often made to feel that the fault is theirs for a lack of effort. In fact, they have not failed their children. Rather, medicine has failed them. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2026/05/14/mothers-who-cannot-breastfeed-have- been-given-terrible-advice
Not all Donald Trump’s peacemaking boasts are empty But to end Congo’s terrible war, America must remain neutral May 14th 2026 When Donald Trump boasts about all the wars he has supposedly ended, he often mentions one in central Africa. In December he brought together the leaders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose on-again, off-again conflict has been one of the continent’s bloodiest, and persuaded them to sign a peace deal called the Washington Accords. “They’ve spent a lot of time killing each other and they’re going to spend a lot of time hugging,” he said. But there is still a lot more killing than hugging. Most of the 8m or so Congolese who have fled from their homes are too scared to return. Over the past year the battlefield has expanded in the eastern Congolese provinces of