Internal documents reveal Soros-linked funding behind Indonesia's protests

Nationwide protests that shook Indonesia from late August to early September this year are now at the centre of a fierce new battle over foreign influence, with internal documents shared with The Sunday Guardian revealing how a George Soros-funded network has been bankrolling organisations that supported activists at the heart of the unrest.

- ABHINANDAN MISHRA

Until now, however, those charges have rested largely on rhetoric, geopolitics and conspiracy-minded speculation.

The 25 August-9 September demonstrations—now officially recorded as the “August 2025 Indonesian protests”—began as public outrage against a massive housing allowance and perks for Members of Parliament in the world’s third-largest democracy. As food prices, education costs and taxes climbed, students, gig workers and labour unions flooded the streets of Jakarta, Surabaya, Medan and dozens of provincial capitals.

Clashes with police escalated into riots: government buildings were torched in Kediri and Surabaya, public transport infrastructure was burned, and solidarity protests broke out as far away as Germany and Australia. President Prabowo Subianto—a former general accused of past human-rights abuses who won the 2024 election on a populist, law-and-order, free-meal and “food estate” agenda—was forced to cancel an overseas trip as the domestic crisis deepened.

A cache of internal agreements, grant proposals and emergency funding contracts between the Jakartabased Kurawal Foundation and its partners-seen by The Sunday Guardianshows, for the first time, how money originating in George Soros' Open Society Foundations (OSF) has moved through an Indonesian intermediary to organisations that were directly involved in, or immediately protecting, networks at the centre of the AugustSeptember unrest, as well as to activist hubs mobilising resistance to President Prabowo's flagship policies in Papua.