Political Communication in 2024
Politicians should understand that one of the principles of communication is irreversible. Statements that hurt the feelings of many people, may be forgiven but impossible to forget.
-
Speculation about the possibility of postponing the 2024 general elections ended with a consensus to hold the legislative election on 14 Feb. 2024 and the regional elections on 27 Nov. 2024.
The consensus was reached between Commission II of the House of Representatives, the Home Ministry, the General Elections Commission (KPU) and the General Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu), which convened at a joint meeting on 24 Jan. 2022. All political elements are ready to follow the official schedule of the 2024 general elections (Pemilu 2024).
Article 167, Paragraph (6) of Law No.7/2017 on general elections (UU Pemilu) stipulates that the preparations for a general election start 20 months before voting day. This means that early 2022 will be the decisive phase on the journey to the 2024 electoral arena.
One of the decisive factors for all elements taking part in the contest is optimal communication to strengthen synergy, increase the chance of gaining support, bridge various differences and mitigate the potential for destruction.
Managing communication
Political communication plays a significant role. The politics of our electoral stage is now becoming covered extensively in many media, conventional as well as new ones. An abundance of information is exposed to the public within a short time, spreading easily across economic, educational, regional and even generational strata. Various statements from the political elite are being easily produced, reproduced, distributed and consumed by society.
In terms of political communication, it is important to note that the stages of Pemilu 2024 should begin with qualitative and quantitative improvements in community-oriented public communication. Political parties as well as presidential and vice-presidential candidates should intensely monitor their actual performance in society. One-way promotion of their image alone is not enough to raise their level of public acceptance, popularity and electability.
Also read:
> Criticism and Retrogression of Democracy
Intense communication through various initiatives in concrete performance is the main priority. It has been proven so far that massive billboards promoting candidates’ image using a variety of narratives are not effective in boosting the electability of either political parties or presidential and vice-presidential hopefuls.
Billboards may increase popularity, but at the same time, the level of public preference and acceptance of political parties and candidates may decline. This is even more so if such billboards significantly disturb public order, the urban esthetic, or violate ethics for exploiting a situation when the people are struggling.
The community-oriented approach encompasses community services, community empowerment and community relations.
Concrete performance to deal with the problems in society, if managed with good communication, will strengthen iboth nternal and external public participation in the relevant political party or political figures. One thing that deserves criticism is that today, our general elections are very much determined by a popular regime that erodes the ideas, programs and concrete performance of candidates. The presence of politicians offering services and empowering society, if properly managed, will make their presence stronger and more deeply rooted.
Modern politics also demands politicians to be capable of organizational reflexivity. There is an interesting note by Poole, Seibold and McPhee in Communication and Group Decision Making (Hirokawa, R.Y. & M.S. Poole, 1986), that reflexivity basically refers to the politicians’ capacity to evaluate their own conduct and behavior.
-
The past experience of an individual or a group of people is important to improving the present situation and condition, as well as to organize future elections. There should be a new method and approach that understands social trends. Any unawareness or wide gap in communication will erode candidates’ chances in Pemilu 2024.
The considerable change in voter behavior necessitates a more adaptive communication strategy. Therefore, communication protocols for present and future political developments are needed.
It is important to maintain the communication protocols so communication management is more measured, appropriate and targeted. There are at least 12 important standards of communication protocols, which are context, purpose, reference, primary narrative, the role of information, communication activities, the parties involved, the channels used, the targeted community, the expected results as well as guidelines on what is allowed and not allowed to be done or conveyed.
With communication protocols, the parties and politicians that are contesting Pemilu 2024 will have a more defined mechanism for managing communication during the electoral season.
Communication privacy management
Another important thing to note is managing public opinion and discourse. Political parties and presidential/vice-presidential candidates are not in a vacuum, but interact with the public. For this reason, they need public opinion management, issues management, conflict management, and crisis communication to manage crises that could damage the public’s positive perception of political parties and politicians.
Politicians need to be proficient in managing their public statements through more controlled communication privacy management. Referring to the book Boundaries of Privacy: Dialectics of Disclosure (2002) by Sandra Petronio, communication privacy management is to do with considering and choosing what to reveal and what to conceal from the public. Politicians consider and arrange the messages they produce and share with the public based on criteria regarding their importance or unimportance.
Also read:
> Preparing for the Great 2024 election
As an example, we can learn the importance of communication privacy management from the recent cases of Arteria Dahlan, a Sundanese politician from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), and Edy Mulyadi, a journalist and former legislative candidate of the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) as regards the people of Kalimantan. Both encountered problems because the statements they made were seen to offend the local people’s ethnicity and regional citizens.
The one thing the politicians ignored when composing their statements was that the words they used were provocative, inciting an emotional response and triggering collective resistance to them.
The impact of their statements was not solely sociological or cultural, but could also have political implications. Arteria’s statement, for instance, while offending the pride of the Sundanese people, also has the potential to impact the PDI-P’s electability in West Java because of the political association between him and the party to which he belongs. Although the nature of his statement was personal, his identity as a PDI-P politician is inseparable in the perception of the West Java public.
In fact, West Java is the largest constituency in Indonesia. West Java’s permanent voters list (DPT) for Pemilu 2019 consisted of 33,276,905 people, the largest number of voters, followed by East Java (31,011,960) and Central Java (27,896,902).
Besides, the experience of several elections also showed the interesting fact that voters in West Java tend to be very fluid, as evidenced in the fluctuating votes gained by the parties that won the elections. In Pemilu 2014, the PDI-P won with 4,159,404 votes (19.63 percent), followed by the Golkar Party with 3,540,629 votes (16.71 percent) and then the Gerindra Party with 2,378.762 votes (11.22 percent).
A different condition marked Pemilu 2019. Gerindra came first with 4,320,050 votes, followed by the PDI-P with 3,510,525 votes. The party that won the third largest number of votes was PKS, with 3,286,606 votes.
-
The constantly changing trend among voters sends a clear message that there is no guarantee of a permanent victory in West Java. The situational context also affects the ups and downs in vote gains. If the communication strategy used to control the damage caused by Arteria’s statement is unsuitable or even aggravating, it will likely harm the PDI-P’s vote gain in Pemilu 2024.
Edy Mulyadi also made a statement that employed neither rhetoric nor sensitive communication. Inappropriate word choice and verbal aggression were expressed when he commented on East Kalimantan as the location of the Nusantara capital city (IKN).
He should have focused his criticism on substantive matters like the budget, the readiness of infrastructure, security and environmental impacts. His judgment was off and even turned into a communication disaster for offending the feelings of the Kalimantan people.
Politicians should understand that one of the principles of communication, as Larry A. Samovar and Richard E. Porter indicated in Communication Between Cultures (2102), is that it is irreversible. This means that an individual cannot retract a message it has been communicated. A statement that hurts the feelings of many people may be forgiven, but impossible to forget. Politicians need to be cautious and introspective in their communication.
Decisive stage
Especially as regards the potential rivalry between the 2024 presidential and vice-presidential candidates, the 2022 political stage is beginning to be decisive. Referring to Judith Trent, Robert Friendenberg and Robert E. Denton, Jr’s Political Campaign Communication Principles and Practices (2015), this year can be called the first political stage of “surfacing”, to be followed by the next three stages of the primaries, nomination and general election.
During the surfacing stage, whoever is interested in standing as the presidential or vice-presidential contender will be considerably affected by the quality of their interaction with two main forces, which are the voting public and the political parties that will support them. At this surfacing stage, political communication will be very decisive in whether or not the figures seeking to run in the 2024 presidential election can secure their legitimacy and gain widespread public support for their bid.
Their high popularity, acceptability and electability can create a significant prospect for their consideration by parties or electoral coalitions.
The primaries have to do with the process of internally selecting a candidate among political parties. The process is very complex and can often produce surprising results. Candidate Selection in Comparative Perspective: The Secret Garden of Politics (1998), edited by Michael Gallagher and Michael Marsh, indicates that the candidate selection stage is like the secret garden of politics.
The nomination stage is when parties or a group of parties, through a series of procedures involving many political interests, formally nominate their candidate pairs who will contest the 2024 presidential election.
Also read:
> 270 Regions to be Led by Acting Officials
The election stage is the determinant stage, through which the Indonesian people’s mandate of power will be transferred on 14 February 2024.
Two factors will be decisive in political communication from the surfacing stage to the nomination stage. First, there are no issues that can destroy a candidate’s chance, such as entanglement in legal cases, especially in relation to the public position they currently hold.
The second factor is the communication strategy they employ to influence the political environment to strengthen their positions as the candidates with the most potential among their rivals in vying for the presidential ticket. Political communication is the key to whether the contestants will thrive or wither and fade.
Gun Gun Heryanto
Gun Gun Heryanto, Executive Director of the Political Literacy Institute and Political Communication Lecturer at Jakarta State Islamic University
This article was translated byAris Prawira.
