When Public Anger Over Corruption Turns Into a Joke

There is something bleak when I look back at photos of the student demonstrations in June 2026. Thousands of young people filled the Bundaran HI in Jakarta, marched towards the State Palace, and stood for hours under the sun, carrying posters written partly in anger and partly in humour. They demanded action on increasingly unaffordable staple food prices, questioned the rise in non-subsidised fuel prices, protested wasteful state budgeting, and asked the government to review various strategic projects deemed unresponsive to the people’s daily hardships.

But when I see those photos, what emerges first is not anger. It is sadness. Not because the demonstrations were wrong, nor because their demands were unreasonable. The sadness comes from feeling that I have seen this exact scene many times before. Years change. Presidents change. Ministers change. Hashtags change. Yet the expressions on the students’ faces, the tone of their demands, and their frustration feel so familiar. It is as if this nation is repeating the same conversation with itself for decades.

I was born and raised in an Indonesia that always has a reason to be angry. The older generation was angry at New Order corruption. The generation after was angry at various post-Reformasi scandals. We get angry when officials are arrested by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK). We get angry when social assistance funds are embezzled. We get angry when taxes are misappropriated. We get angry when we see the luxurious lifestyles of officials that do not match their incomes. Then, a few months later, a new case emerges. We get angry again. Then another case appears. We get angry again.

Until we reached a point that I find both fascinating and alarming: we started joking. Corruption became a meme. Abuse of power became punchline material. Scandals became TikTok content. The names of suspects became jokes in WhatsApp groups. We still talk about it, but we are no longer shocked. We still comment on it, but we no longer truly believe anything will change.

In my view, this shift from anger to joking is a psychological symptom far more important to observe than the corruption cases themselves. Because humans do not always cry when they are hurt. Sometimes, humans laugh. In psychology, there is a concept called learned helplessness, a state where a person has experienced failure to change a situation so often that they eventually stop believing their efforts have any effect. At first, a person will fight. Then they try again. And try again. But when the result is always the same, their psychological energy slowly depletes. They no longer fight with conviction. They start to be sarcastic. They become cynical. They start saying, ‘Well, that’s just how it is.’

I often feel that Indonesia is moving into this dangerous psychological territory. Look at how the public responds to various issues. Staple food prices rise, people complain. Fuel prices rise, people complain. Corruption is exposed, people complain. But a few days later, the social media algorithm shifts our attention to the next topic. Anger is replaced by entertainment. Disappointment is replaced by distraction. We never truly resolve that anger. We just move from one anger to the next.

Perhaps that is why the June 2026 student demonstrations felt important. Not merely because of the five demands they carried, but because they reminded us that there are still some citizens who refuse to consider this situation normal. Because what is truly being questioned is not just the price of rice, fuel, or national strategic projects. What is being questioned is the growing distance between the daily lives of the people and the way the state determines its priorities. When a mother has to recalculate her kitchen budget because staple food prices have risen, discussions about projects worth hundreds of trillions of rupiah sound very distant. When a young worker has to think about increased transport costs due to fuel price hikes, narratives about macroeconomic growth often feel completely detached from their lived experience. Economic figures may show stability, but the human body does not live inside statistics. The body lives in the market, at the food stall, at the petrol station, and at the dinner table.

At this point, I am reminded of Jeffrey Winters. He argued that modern democracy often gives us the illusion that every citizen has equal influence over the direction of the country. We vote. We voice our aspirations. Yet at the same time, there exists a structure of economic power that is far more stable and far more difficult for everyday democratic processes to touch. The problem is not that democracy is absent. The problem is precisely that we too often assume democracy automatically produces justice. Vedi Hadiz and Richard Robison later brought this reflection to Indonesia. They showed that the 1998 Reformasi did indeed change many political institutions, but it did not automatically change the distribution of power behind those institutions. Many old actors adapted to the new system. Many old interests found new political vehicles. As a result, democracy runs, elections are held, power changes hands, but most of the structures of influence remain intact.

I suspect this is what many citizens feel quietly, even if they have never read political science books. They do not use the term oligarchy. They simply say, ‘Why is it always the same people who profit?’ That simple sentence actually contains a very deep political intuition. Meanwhile, the Prabowo-Gibran administration faces no light challenge.