Dogged by a controversial past: Indonesian presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto gestures to supporters during a campaign at Andi Mattalata stadium in Makasar this week.

Dogged by a controversial past: Indonesian presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto gestures to supporters during a campaign at Andi Mattalata stadium in Makasar this week. Photo: AFP

Prabowo Subianto stands on stage in his beige safari suit, pounds the podium and shouts to a 100,000-strong crowd that they are nothing more than lackeys.

"Every year the wealth of Indonesia has been flowing out … the wealth of Indonesians has been stolen, stolen, stolen from the people," bellows the man who has a real prospect of becoming the next Indonesian president.

"All of us, all of the Indonesian people, do forced labour. We're the lackeys of other countries."

Prabowo Subianto with pro-integration militiamen in East Timor.

Prabowo Subianto with pro-integration militiamen in East Timor. Photo: Susila Adib Siraj One

The fire-breathing May Day speech was typical of Prabowo on the stump: portraying a man of the people, a friend to the poor, and the scourge of foreign thieves and the "neoliberal economic system".

But the man who launched his presidential campaign with the aid of a helicopter, a $300,000 horse and the trappings of Javanese royalty, is from one of the country's richest families, with interests in the international trade in oil and gas, pulp and paper, and palm oil.

Prabowo has spent most of his adult life in the public eye, first as an army strongman and then, for the past 12 years, as a permanent candidate for Indonesia's presidency. And yet it remains unclear what exactly he stands for.

He expresses commitment to freedom of religion, but his platform says the state must "manage" religions to ensure their "purity" and his campaign has dallied with violent Islamic hardliners.

He rails against corruption, but his coalition includes a brace of corrupters – a "tactical compromise", according to billionaire brother Hashim Djojohadikusumo. And he is an international trader and business magnate who spouts anti-capitalist slogans, implying (then later denying) that he'd nationalise foreign mining companies.

What Prabowo truly believes, though, is secondary to his real pitch, which can be described by a simple Indonesian word: "tegas" – firmness.

"His political philosophy from the 1990s … to the present consists of essentially a single point," says academic John Roosa, from the University of British Columbia in Canada. "Indonesia needs a strong leader." It resonates with many Indonesians, but deeply worries those who remember Indonesia's repressive past. Australian National University academic Ed Aspinall fears Prabowo poses "a significant threat of a reversal towards authoritarianism".

Prabowo was born in 1951 to an elite family that traces its lineage back to Java's sultans. When he was seven, his father, Dutch-educated economist Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, was exiled by Indonesia's founding president, Sukarno, for collaborating with the CIA in an attempted coup.

For a decade – Prabowo's formative years – the family shifted from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, London and Zurich. When they returned under the new president, Suharto, in 1968, Prabowo was 17. He spoke fluent English, but had to apply himself to relearn his own language.

Suharto made Prabowo's father his trade minister, from which position Sumitro mentored the so-called "Berkeley Mafia" of US-trained economists. They courted the very international businesses Prabowo now decries, opening up Indonesia by auctioning off its natural resources. Prabowo himself did what ambitious youngsters did under Suharto: he joined the army.

High-born, foreign educated, intelligent and energetic, he became one of the army's brightest stars. US General Wayne Downing, who trained him at Fort Bragg in the United States, described Prabowo as one of the best he'd seen.

In 1983 Prabowo boosted his career in a less conventional way, marrying Suharto's second daughter Siti Hediati Hariyadi. Senior sources say this union accelerated his rise and encouraged a growing tendency to act outside the chain of command.

In the 1970s and '80s, ambitious young officers had plenty of separatist conflicts to cut their teeth on, from Aceh to West Papua. But it was in East Timor, where Prabowo served several tours with the notorious special forces group, Kopassus, that, according to author Joseph Nevins, he "developed his reputation as the military's most ruthless field commander".

One of the young officer's acknowledged talents was setting up and training local militias and death squads.

"The concept of militia, the concept of local self-defence forces is an age-old concept," Prabowo told the ABC in 2009. "That's a part of the Indonesian national defence concept."

In 1978, he was involved in the capture and killing of Fretilin leader Nicolau Lobato. In 1983, Prabowo was said to have been a commander at the massacre of 530 or more people around Kraras, since known as "the village of widows". However, hard evidence of his involvement is thin and Prabowo calls the stories "unproven allegations, innuendos and third-hand reports". The same year, at 32, he was promoted from captain to major.

In the separatist province of West Papua in 1996, Prabowo, by now a general, personally led a controversial military mission, strafing a village using a Red Cross helicopter, to save a group of Western hostages. Eight villagers were killed and all but two of the hostages rescued.

This history is little known within Indonesia, but Prabowo is infamous for other things: his fiery, sometimes violent, temper and his role in events surrounding the downfall of Suharto in 1998. Details are murky and have never been subject to an open judicial process, but the stories persist.

Prabowo is accused of, and denies, using civil militias to foment anti-Chinese riots in which perhaps 1000 died and 168 women were raped. He likewise denies a story that he attempted a coup against Suharto's successor, B.J. Habibie.

He admits, though, that during student protests, his unit "detained" nine pro-democracy activists (the more commonly used word "kidnapped" angers him) and tortured them. Thirteen other activists disappeared and one died during the unrest, but Prabowo denies any knowledge of them.

Of the nine, Prabowo denies ordering their torture and insists he was only following orders. His line has been undermined, however, by the recent leak of the military inquiry decision into the abductions, which concluded he was to blame and, in fact, was guilty of indiscipline and failing to follow orders.

In August 1998, a military commission sacked him and he went to live in Jordan. Two years later, Prabowo became the first person denied entry into the United States under the UN Convention on Torture. That ban still stands, though the US ambassador has made it clear that, should Prabowo become Indonesia's president, it would be reversed.

In 2001, he divorced Suharto's daughter and has been single since. Politics, though, was harder to let go. Watching Indonesia's fledgling democracy from afar in 2002, Prabowo decided that the country needed saving and that he was the man for the job.

Twelve years later, there is no doubting his determination. Rejected as a candidate by the Golkar party in 2004, Prabowo set up his own, Gerindra, from scratch. He remade himself as a populist, likening himself to the Kennedys: "They come also from a very rich family, but they were always fighting for the poor"; and to Nelson Mandela: "blacklisted from the US at one time – am I not in good company?".

The July 9 presidential election is Prabowo's best and last chance. His pitch is mainstream economic nationalism with a lacing of xenophobia. He promises a strong, better managed, protectionist economy, the end of corruption and to redistribute wealth from the rich and the central to the poor and the remote.

The pace of his campaign has been furious, its messages focused and its funding enormous, care of his brother, two media moguls and other Indonesian tycoons. His less-articulate opponent Joko Widodo has been caught flat-footed and has also been damaged by a well-organised "black" campaign of racial and religious slurs that resembles the "birther" movement against Barack Obama.

Joko's lead of more than 20 points in the polls earlier this year had, by last week, narrowed to single digits. ANU's Aspinall thinks Prabowo may win.

Questions over his human rights record and evidence of his explosive temper – such as being caught on video seemingly punching a man outside the election commission – seem only to have added to his strongman image.

But his record is something Prabowo remains acutely sensitive about. He was visibly irritated when asked about it in a presidential debate.

"Do you think the Indonesian people are stupid?" he has said. "I've been campaigning … for 15 years; this is my third general election. Let the Indonesian people … scrutinise the past. Let them decide."

One important figure from his past has very publicly done just that. General Luhut Pandjaitan, Prabowo's commanding officer for six years in the 1980s and subsequently his business partner, is now working hard for his opponent, Joko.

"It's based on my experience [of Prabowo] … over many years," Luhut said. "I think he is not fit to be president."