Social media platforms are flooded with a striking Indonesia’s ‘Emergency Warning’ poster featuring the Garuda Pancasila emblem against a bold blue background. This sudden wave of online activity comes in the wake of the House of Representatives’ Legislative Body (Baleg DPR) approving the controversial Regional Elections Bill (RUU Pilkada), sparking widespread public outcry. But what exactly triggered this intense reaction?
The widely circulated Indonesia’s ‘Emergency Warning’ poster originated from a video uploaded by the YouTube account EAS Indonesia Concept, which works on similar concepts as the U.S. Emergency Alert System. The EAS is a United States national system put in place for broadcasting important messages over television and radio.
However, the EAS Indonesia Concept channel takes these formats and turns them into terrible, fictional stories within a subset of the genre that has gained freelance use online, usually called analog horror, and has gained a lot of attention.
This Indonesia’s ‘Emergency Warning’ poster has been popularly utilized by society to express its rejection of the DPR’s legalization of the RUU Pilkada. On Wednesday, 21 August, the Baleg DPR officially passed the law after several months of controversy, total rejection, and opposition from many sectors of society over the RUU Pilkada.
The source of the controversy was the sense that the new legislation would clash with the Constitutional Court’s recent rulings, where specifically pointed out, decisions No. 60/PUU-XXII/2024 and 70/PUU-XXII/2024.
Critics say the bill lacks serious efforts to accommodate the Constitutional Court’s directives, especially on the minimum age requirements of gubernatorial and deputy gubernatorial candidates as they are defined in Article 7.
Read also: 88 Cases of Monkeypox Found in Indonesia, Majority from Jakarta!
The Baleg DPR instead settled for compatibility with the Supreme Court ruling which provides age limit as defined by the candidate’s age at the moment he/she is inaugurated, which clearly contradicted the earlier Constitutional Court ruling.
Adding fuel to the fire, the DPR also approved a provision that the nomination threshold criteria for regional elections be revised. These changes in the rules, however, would apply only to political parties that do not occupy any seats in the Regional Legislative Council. Where parties represented by the DPRD would still have to meet the 20% seat requirement or 25% of the vote in the previous election, a move that many interpreted as undemocratic and affirmative for established parties.
Deputy Chairman of the Legislative Body Achmad Baidowi, in his defense of the bill, sought to clarify the motivations for which the Regional Elections Law revision was done. He said that the revision of the law was specially designed to accommodate a sentence of the Constitutional Court, which gave non-parliamentary parties the right to recommend a regional head.
“The most important thing in the ruling of the Constitutional Court is that non-parliamentary parties should be able to propose a candidate,” said Baidowi, commonly known as Awiek, on the day of the bill’s passage at the Parliament Complex in Senayan, Jakarta.
However, despite these clarifications, the public’s perception of the move remains very much abhorrent. The ‘Emergency Warning’ poster has thus symbolized this widespread and collective frustration and fear of many Indonesians to the current changes in the legislative. The poster, to very many of them, appears to encapsulate correctly just how serious Indonesia’s present political landscape is and has taken like wildlife, spreading ceaselessly through social media platforms.
The power of amplification of such digital activism hence brings out the fact that the government is increasingly alienating from its own people who now share their frustration within the online space and try to pressurize the government into a state of accountability. There is a deeper sense of agitation and perception of implications of recent legislative moves as undermining of processes of democracy in the country associated with the wide circulation of the ‘Emergency Warning’ poster.
As the Indonesian government struggles to deal with the new implication of the Regional Elections Bill, heated online debate underlines the power digital platforms have in shaping public discourse and mobilizing collective action.
How to get out of the political crisis and regain trust in the country’s democratic institutions greatly depends on a government that can address such concerns and get into a serious dialogue with the public.
