Recognising the People in President Prabowo's Speeches: Object of Suffering or Subject of Development?

Since first contesting the presidential election in 2009, President Prabowo Subianto has never forgotten to mention the people in his speeches. Not only when campaigning to gather votes, but now that he governs as president, the people remain a familiar part of his vocabulary. Prabowo positions himself as the defender and protector of the people in his addresses. Most of these claims are expressed explicitly. “I joined the military wanting to guard this country, wanting to defend this country, wanting to defend my people,” he said during a speech to workers commemorating International Labour Day on 1 May 2026. “I will never give up, especially if my people are threatened,” he stated during a speech at the Building Indonesia’s Future Generations Through Nutrition event in Sentul on 3 June 2026.

Political communication observers view this as part of populist rhetoric. Most studies on Prabowo indeed classify him as a leader who uses populism as a strategy to gain public support. Prabowo’s communication style fully meets the criteria of a populist leader. Presenting oneself as close to the people, and if necessary dressing and using unconventional language, is a method employed by populist leaders, wrote Mudde & Kaltwasser, as cited by Fridolon Edwin Moke and Salvatore Simarmata (2024) in their study Analysis of Prabowo Subianto’s Populist Communication Style in the 2024 Presidential Election Campaign.

Uttering the word ‘people’ in every speech is a habit of President Prabowo. A study conducted by Alwi Dahlan Ritonga & Fernanda Putra Adela (2019) shows that the theme of populism in Prabowo’s speeches is generally conveyed from three perspectives. Firstly, Prabowo expresses his sympathy for the people through verbal and non-verbal expressions, such as banging the table during a speech. Secondly, he stirs the people’s emotions by describing the condition of a ‘suffering people’ or ‘Indonesia is a rich country but its people are poor.’ Thirdly, Prabowo consistently contrasts the people versus the elite, positioning the elite as the party that greatly harms the people.

Ritonga and Adela, who presented their study in the article Examining Prabowo’s Populism as a Form of Discursive Style During the Political Campaign for the 2019 Presidential Election, concluded that Prabowo uses populism as rhetoric or a discursive style, not as an ideology. The ideology filling his populism can change and is adjusted to the development of public opinion. Ihsan Ilmaz et al. (2024) term this type of populism as ‘fluctuating populism’. In their study, they show Prabowo has changed the theme of his populism from one presidential election to the next. In 2024, he adopted a technocratic populism theme, appearing as a patriotic servant of the people, but with a technocratic and institutional approach. Whereas in previous election campaigns, Prabowo positioned himself as an outsider trying to save the country from democratic decline.

Although the populism he carries fluctuates in theme, one constant is his claim to be the defender, protector, and servant of the people. Prabowo consistently, articulately, and with increasing mastery plays this role on stage. He often appears very emotional when speaking about the people, imagining them as suffering. The people in Prabowo’s speeches are poor, struggling, deceived, cheated, their money stolen by the elite, and neglected by those who should care for them. This consistency of perspective deserves appreciation; standing on this footing for nearly two decades shows his concern for the marginalised is authentic.

Nevertheless, there is a recurring issue in Prabowo’s speeches that may go unnoticed. A dissection of his political communication texts finds a consistent sentence pattern: the people are placed as the object. This linguistic positioning is certainly not born of ill intent; it is likely an instinctive reflex of a paternalistic leadership style, reflecting a sense of full responsibility as a protector and liberator. However, this linguistic phenomenon is important to recognise. Prabowo’s speeches need to be examined to see how the agency of citizens is framed in the mind of the leader. From this understanding, constructive feedback can be provided for future improvement. To understand why this pattern is continuously produced, I examined it through the concept of message features proposed by Shen and Bigsby (2013). In their study, they explain that message features in a text—such as sentence structure, vocabulary choice, and language style—directly control the cognitive and affective processes of the audience. Knowing one’s choice of vocabulary and language style is to know their way of thinking. I used these message features to dissect Prabowo’s speech texts with a coding method based on the keyword ‘people’. The result, as previously stated, is that the people are dominantly placed as the object of suffering. Phrases like ‘We struggle for the people’ or ‘Everything for the people’s prosperity’ are examples. This is an active-transitive message feature that places the elite as the primary driving actor (subject) and the people as the recipient of action (object). I found phrases with this tone in five of Prabowo’s speeches in the last three months, but it is likely a consistent pattern throughout his political career.