Reading Symbolic Identity Smear Campaign on Presidential Candidates Billboards in Indonesia’s Post-Truth Era: The 2019 Election

The 2019 election Indonesia can arguably be seen as an intriguing election. Not only is it due to the virulent claim contestation between the presidential candidates’ camps – Jokowi’s and Prabowo’s – especially towards the contested versions of the election results based on the real count (the process has not met its end result) and the quick count (Jokowi’s votes outnumbered Prabowo), but that the contestation itself represents the long-drawn-out contention that stemmed from the synthesis as well as cleavage of discursive ideological political strands of Nationalist/Islamic(/-st?). The smear campaign regarding politics of identity (questioning their Islamic credentials, leadership capability and political platforms) propagated by both camps has perennially circulated and proliferated not only since the 2014 Presidential election, but that it also accumulated since the 2012 Gubernatorial election of DKI province. The latter contested the obscure synthesis and/versus polarization of Nationalist/Islamic(-st?) strands represented by the incumbent, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (SinoIndonesian Christian DKI's former Governor, Jokowi’s Vice Governor) versus Anies baswedan (Indonesian Yemen Descent, Jokowi's former Minister of Education and Culture). The aforementioned phenomenon foregrounds the presidential candidates’ billboard advertisements. This paper investigates the scopes the presidential candidates’ billboards represent the symbolic identity smear campaign in Indonesia’s post-truth era, deploying social semiotic and language evaluation theories. The preliminary finding demonstrates that from the six billboards investigated (two billboards represent each camp – deploying stratified purposeful sampling), both written and visual texts of the presidential candidates’ billboards not only represent the discursive contestation of Nationalist/Islamic(/-st?) strands, but that they also reflect the relativization of each camp’s beliefs through the supremacy of softening messages aiming at shortcircuiting the voters’ critical, analytical senses (in this case in the form of textual contradiction) in Indonesia’s post-truth era.