Tjahjo Kumolo


Tjahjo Kumolo is an Indonesian politician and the currently-appointed Minister of Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform. He previously served as Minister of Home Affairs in President Joko Widodo's 2014-2019 Working Cabinet.
He is a longtime loyalist of former president Megawati Sukarnoputri and a senior member of her Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle. He was Secretary General of PDI-P between 2010 and 2015, and was a member of the People's Representative Council between 1999 and 2014 during which time he was the speaker of his party's faction until his replacement by later fellow minister Puan Maharani. During the New Order regime of former president Suharto, he served two terms in the DPR between 1987 and 1997.

Personal life

Early life and education

Kumolo was born in Surakarta on 1 December 1957. He attended school for 12 years in the larger city of Semarang and lived in the Mlatiharjo administrative village on the eastern side of the city. His father, Bambang Soebandiono, was a lieutenant in the Indonesian Army. Both his father and his mother Toeti Slemoon had at some point sat in the People's Representative Council, the former having served five terms.
After graduating from high school, he studied law at Diponegoro University, graduating in 1985. During this period, he was elected leader of :id:KNPI|KNPI's Central Java chapter. He also studied at the :id:Lembaga Ketahanan Nasional|National Defense Body until 1994.

Family

He married Erni Guntarti and the couple has three children. His wife and first children are both doctors, with his second child working as an actress and the third as a flight attendant.

Career

Prior to his tenure for the KNPI, he had worked as a reporter for a daily paper in Central Java. Kumolo first became a member of the People's Representative Council in 1985, which necessitated him to move to Jakarta. Initially he was a member of Golkar, and had worked in the second and third commissions of the parliament in addition to the interparliamentary partnership body. Following the fall of Suharto, he moved to PDI-P and was elected back into the parliament in 1999. In this term, he acted as deputy speaker of the faction until 2002, followed by being a faction secretary until 2003.
He ran once more in the 2004 elections and remained in the parliament, this time as the speaker of the PDI-P faction until another election in 2009, when he once more secured his seat. He was also chosen as the Secretary General of PDI-P in 2010 by party leader Megawati Soekarnoputri. Later, his faction speaker position would be taken in 2012 by Puan Maharani and his secretary general position in 2015 by Hasto Kristiyanto.
Following Joko Widodo's election victory over Prabowo Subianto in 2014, he was selected as Minister of Home Affairs in the Working Cabinet and was officially sworn in on 27 October 2014.
During the blasphemy accusations against Basuki Tjahaja Purnama in 2017, Kumolo refused to suspend the Chinese Indonesian governor of Jakarta. Later in the same year, he disbanded the Indonesian branch of Hizbut Tahrir.