Playing with fire
President Jokowi and his advisers are heading on the wrong path. The optics of a group of government insiders actively carrying out underground movements in order to keep Jokowi’s administration in power for another five years are not good.
If the propaganda persists, Indonesia’s economy, social cohesiveness, and politics may be jeopardized. Indonesia is about to embark on a perilous journey into uncharted territory, rife with political and leadership issues.
The underground maneuver will engender at least three adverse effects. First, the government will lose its focus in working to overcome economic problems and health recovery brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. This is dangerous for the government itself.
Second, civic society will lead popular unrest against the government’s authoritarian tendencies. Protests will be organized by university student executive bodies (BEM) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) around the country. In fact, the upheaval in civil society has already begun.
Hundreds of demonstrators from the Indonesian Student Executive Board (BEM SI) held a demonstration around the Presidential Palace in Jakarta on Friday (1/4). They asked Jokowi to state his position no later than S u n d a y (3/4). Jokowi never responded to the students’ requests. The Indonesian Student Alliance (AMI) will stage a major protest in mid-April to protest the election’s postponement and the expansion of the presidential term to three terms. Bayu Satria Utomo, an AMI delegate and chairman of the University of Indonesia Student Executive Board (BEM UI), predicted that the demonstration would draw an even bigger crowd.
Third, the government will stoke political dissent among the coalition’s leaders and ministers from professional circles. As a result, the coalition government is less stable and more likely to fall apart.
These economic, social and political problems are the last things we need in our efforts to create the necessary stability for economic recovery. Instead, they will only create new instability that will heap more hardship on the already struggling people.
If the president is a statesman, he must stop whoever is carrying out the underground manuever and focus on accomplishing the mandate given to his administration until 2024.
An expert in psychological manipulation
The debate over postponing the 2024 elections and extending the presidential term has sparked widespread outrage. President Joko Widodo finally issued his public statement on Saturday (5/3), in which he urged all parties to obey and conform to the 1945 Constitution.
However, the President did not prevent members of his cabinet and leaders of his coalition parties from expressing their views on the idea, despite the fact that it is clearly a constitutional coup. Because we live in a democracy, anyone can propose a discourse, according to Jokowi.
President Jokowi has stated publicly four times that he will follow the 1945 Constitution. In 2022, however, he made a different statement when he should have stuck to his message from 2021, when he said that those who want a three-term presidency have three sinister motives: first, they want to humiliate him; second, they want to curry favor; and third, they want to lead him astray to his ruin.
Because President Jokowi’s statements tended to be normative, his advisers were encouraged to keep doing so. It could also be a sign that Jokowi wants to stay in power for another term. The president’s bias makes the public wonder if it fits the pattern of his other ever-changing statements, such as when he promised not to incur more debts while the country’s external debts grew during his term, on top of other inconsistencies like when he said the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway project would not use state funds but it did, and many others.
President Jokowi is an expert at manipulating public opinion. Jokowi’s approach would alter if the populace began to protest. Does this imply that he cannot remain true?
Based on these facts, it is understandable that the public is skeptical of President Jokowi’s statement that he will obey the Constitution while behind the screen his aides are allowed to continue maneuvering. This is indeed inconsistent!
Furthermore, Cabinet Secretary Pramono Anung insisted that there was no budget allocated to sustain the discourse to extent President Jokowi’s term. But we cannot help but ask how these declarations were funded.
The Palace’s statement indicated that there were donations to finance the campaign. If it is not taken from the state budget (APBN), it can only mean that the declarations were funded by private sector. This indication confirms that there are large donors from the business sector who support the President who have been sponsoring him.