President Jokowi and the Obor Rakyat Controversy in Indonesia

During the 2014 presidential election in Indonesia two diametrically opposed candidates appeared to abide by an informal set of rules whereby neither candidate challenged the other’s integrity in public. Privately, however, campaign advisors devised ways to attack their opponents, primarily by using media contacts to spread rumors and allegations. As a result, the 2014 presidential race in the world’s third largest democracy became in many ways the most negative and polarizing witnessed since the fall of Suharto’s authoritarian regime in 1998. We argue that the Obor Rakyat media scandal, a major political event in 2014 that remains understudied, represents a new manifestation of rumor politics and smear campaigning that might also reveal some half-truths about President Jokowi, who is widely hailed as a novel reformist politician because of his relatively clean record and lack of direct association with the Indonesian political establishment. The Obor Rakyat reports contain serious allegations against Jokowi, and for the purposes of this article we will focus on the three most prominent allegations: (1) Jokowi is a bad Muslim, (2) he is a puppet president, and (3) he is in the pocket of Chinese financiers known as cukong.