Investigating Jokowi’s Populist Strategy for 2024 Indonesian Presidential Election: An Inquiry into Discourse and Politics

Abstract

Political discourse has had a long history as carried out under the western tradition of rhetoric since antiquity. It has also been applicable to the politics in the eastern contexts, including Indonesia. An issue that is prevalent in Indonesia at the moment is populism as an excess of democracy. Thus, there have been questions whether during President Joko Widodo’s administration, populism in Indonesia has grown to authoritarianism, or another bent feudalistic, populism. On such an account, this paper is to analyze one strand of discourse studies of politics focusing on the public statements of President Jokowi in ahead of the 2024 Presidential Election in Indonesia. So, the analysis is focused on the micro level behaviors being grasped through some verbal expressions and actions against the background of multimodal discourse analysis of some obvious semiotic resources in the context of the overturned pre-existing practices of the 2024 Presidential election. President Jokowi displayed some semiotic behaviors of being “mencla-mencle” (destructively inconsistent) and “tipu-tipu” (destructively deceptive) that are definitely constitutive of destructive politics. Under van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis such obvious behaviors show the reproduction of political power and abuse.