A phenomenal thing is occurring in Indonesia’s young democracy. Politicians who are actually interested in propagating good governance and addressing the needs of their constituents are coming to power across the archipelago in increasing numbers. These fresh faces bring with them a pragmatic style of leadership that balks the trend of poor governance set by their distant, corrupt, and bureaucratic predecessors. Unsurprisingly, they have been lauded as the heroes of the people and the products of a maturing democratic regime. The foreign media, in particular, seem convinced that the people’s power, as expressed through democracy, is the driving force behind the rise of such “new breed” leaders. A closer look at the Central Java gubernatorial elections, however, reveals a more complex picture. Through the use of a critical pluralist framework, this paper aims to shed light on the reality of how power is organized between oligarch and non-oligarch actors in the Indonesian polity. In the process, we also build a systematic framework that can be applied to other cases of “new breed” leaders coming to office, so that in the future, a more comprehensive comparative analyses on the topic can be done.