Electoral Antagonism Matters: Rethinking Populist Politics for Popular Movement in Indonesia

The 2023–2024 presidential election reveals an acute contest between two populist articulations rooted in rival discourses from Jokowi’s second term. Prabowo-Gibran embody a Continuity Discourse that foregrounds the primacy of state authority, while the Anies Baswedan and Mahfud MD coalitions advance a Change Discourse that locates popular sovereignty as the prime mover of justice-oriented development. Electoral antagonism becomes a strategic avenue for reconsolidating segments of civil society as an increasingly counter-hegemonic force during and after the election. As an anti-Jokowi and anti-oligarchic movement, the democratic-populist articulation of the Change Discourse displays relative autonomy from the pragmatism and opportunism of its supporting parties, emerging against a backdrop of long-running crises of counter-hegemony since the early years of political liberalization. This configuration underscores the need for populism scholarship to attend more closely to both the strengths and vulnerabilities of such counter-hegemonic movements in contemporary Indonesian politics.