Nava Nuraniyah – In a recent interview, Prabowo once again accused civil society groups and think tanks of being pawns of Western donors seeking to destabilise Indonesia through proxy mobilisation and cognitive warfare.
Foreign influence operations are a genuine security threat, including in Indonesia. But President Prabowo Subianto has turned the threat into a political weapon, using the language of foreign interference to suppress domestic dissent.
Rather than defending Indonesia's democracy from external information warfare, Prabowo borrows and amplifies Russian narratives to discredit his critics, reaching for an old trick from his New Order-era playbook.
By crying 'foreign interference' at every challenge to his authority, Prabowo risks eroding the credibility his government needs to face real external threats.
Discursive repression
In the wake of youth-led August 2025 protests, Prabowo was quick to label the protestors as 'foreign lackeys' (antek asing), a derogatory term he frequently uses against opposition activists.
The protest movement was driven by compounding grievances, including police brutality, austerity cuts, and a tone-deaf proposal to raise legislators' benefits, including housing allowances. While the government partially addressed some of those grievances, for instance by reintroducing a police reform initiative, its main strategy in response to the mass discontent has been repression and intimidation.
More than 6,700 activists were arrested and 703 remained in custody as of February 2026. An acid attack on a young activist in March 2026 revealed the involvement of military intelligence in the physical targeting of the country's pro-democracy movement. But violence is only part of the picture; stigmatising critics is another instrument in the government's authoritarian toolkit.
A key instrument of discursive repression, the 'foreign lackeys' smear exploits security vocabularies to justify the criminalisation of dissent, rather than addressing the threat itself.
Ironically, the government drew on Russian conspiracy theories to construct the stigma. In September 2025, a spokesperson for the Presidential Chief of Staff Office described the August demonstrations as 'colour revolution', suggesting it was a foreign-orchestrated effort to exploit local grievances, topple a sitting government, and install a pro-Western replacement.
This narrative was eerily similar to reporting by Sputnik, Russian state media, which claimed that the August demonstrations in Indonesia had been triggered by Prabowo's decision to join BRICS. Even before the August demonstrations, Prabowo was already reinforcing similar narratives, mixing the familiar antek asing slur with Russian-esque colour revolution framing.
Old vs new disinformation technique
As mentioned, this kind of stigmatisation is an old trick pulled from Prabowo's authoritarian playbook. Back in 1998, as the Soeharto regime crumbled, Prabowo gathered 4000 Islamist preachers at the Army's Special Forces (Kopassus) headquarters, where he issued violent diatribes against Chinese Indonesians and other 'enemies of Islam', blaming them for the economic and political crisis.
He also handed out a pamphlet titled 'A Conspiracy to Overthrow Soeharto', attributing the plot to a coalition of 'Jews, Jesuits and Mossad agents'. The conspiracy theories, conveniently supplied by the army, helped Islamists rile up their constituencies and mobilise paramilitary forces (Pam Swakarsa) to violently suppress student protestors.
Today, the disinformation strategy has been updated to suit the social media age. Instead of anonymous pamphlets, pro-government accounts have emerged across various platforms.
One Facebook page deploys memes and response videos to defend Prabowo's flagship programmes against public scrutiny. Several TikTok accounts push George Soros and 'global elite' conspiracies to smear civil society organisations, claiming they are waging a 'cognitive war operation' to turn the Indonesian public against their own government. These verbal attacks risk escalating into violent incitements if protests erupt again.
Genuine threat
It is important to note that foreign interference is a genuine security concern, but not in the way Prabowo suggests.
Academics and journalists have documented Russian propaganda on YouTube to shape Indonesia's public opinion on the Ukraine invasion. Pro-China coordinated inauthentic behaviour has also been documented in Indonesia and the Philippines, particularly in relation to the South China Sea disputes. China's disinformation campaign against French-made fighter jets was specifically directed towards Indonesia, aimed at steering the Prabowo government toward Chinese defence procurement – with mixed results.
The United States 2016 election represents a cautionary example of the damage this kind of intervention can cause, as Russian interference exploited preexisting social divisions to deepen polarisation and manipulate the electoral environment.
Indonesia, with its ethnoreligious diversity and history of central-local tensions, is particularly vulnerable to such manipulation. Moreover, domestic actors have been known to deploy cybertroopers or 'buzzers' in their campaigns.
These structural vulnerabilities, coupled with existing disinformation infrastructure, may facilitate further foreign influence operations should regional conflict or geopolitical competition over Indonesia's strategic alignment intensify.
This growing threat provided the Prabowo government with a rationale for drafting a Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Bill, although it seems more likely to aimed against Indonesia civil society critics than Russian or Chinese intervention. In any case, drafting it behind closed doors, and against the backdrop of mass arrests of activists, sparked immediate public backlash.
The president who cried wolf
Prabowo has so frequently labelled his critics as unpatriotic that the phrase 'antek asing' has become a meme and an object of mockery. Meanwhile, the real threat of foreign interference has gone unaddressed.
Activists and ordinary citizens have grown increasingly cynical, dismissing warnings about foreign interference as a government pretext rather than a legitimate security concern.
Such a rhetoric does not make Indonesia safer. It only makes it more, not less, vulnerable to external threats that are already here – even if the worst is yet to come.