Political language and fake news

ABSTRACT

This article outlines political symbolism and language in the 2019 election in Indonesia and aims to situate fake news narratives within them. By analysing official election campaign posters (spanduk), it is argued that Islam and nationalism are the only ideological references and are applied by both camps, leaving no room for other forms of ideological contestation. The article suggests understanding this phenomenon as a hegemonic, Gramscian ‘common sense’ which creates a notion of unity of the nation. This unity, however, is disturbed by hoaxes as in fake news. But instead of referring to hoaxes only as a threat to Indonesian politics, we argue that hoaxes are an integral part of the ‘common sense’. Hoaxes are a means to make the ideological framework of Islam and nationalism accessible for the popular masses, applying a kasar (rough) approach, contradicting the halus (soft) language of the political elite. They are also inevitably a means to create the impression that the camps are distinct. As hoaxes refer to the constitutive outside of the nationalism-Islam complex (as Islamists suggest that Jokowi has ties to the outlawed Communist Party or that Prabowo aims to establish an Islamic state, for instance), they serve the function of maintaining the ideological order in post-New Order Indonesia.

KEYWORDS:

• Gramscian common sense
• election campaign banners
• fake news
• Indonesian elections
• political language

Acknowledgements

We want to thank two anonymous reviewers of Indonesia and the Malay World for their helpful comments and remarks.

Notes on contributors

Timo Duile is a researcher at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Bonn, Germany. Email: [email protected]

Sukri Tamma is a political scientist and lecturer at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Hasanuddin University, Makassar, Indonesia. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 The signifier rakyat was a widely applied term during the Sukarno era when it was used by leftist parties. Under Sukarno’s depoliticising New Order, it was replaced by the apolitical term masyarakat. The term rakyat is now more common again, but rather than referring to the commoners, the notion of rakyat now points to the unity of the nation and the ordinary people as a part of it.

2 This term was originally introduced by John Furnival (1967: 446–459) to describe the late colonial society of the Netherlands Indies to denote a society under a single political unit but with distinct social groups which only meet in the market place but do not develop common political demands.

3 On the term ‘constitutive outside’, see Thomassen (2005: 110).