Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat, Jakarta – On 23 July, at the National Awakening Party's anniversary gala in Jakarta, President Prabowo Subianto told the crowd that critical journalists, analysts and NGOs were modern-day londo ireng – "black Dutchmen," a colonial-era slur for Indonesians who fought alongside Dutch forces against their own countrymen – and asked pointedly who was paying their salaries and their phone bills.
Six press organisations demanded a public apology within days. The irony was pointed: a government courting foreign capital by insisting Indonesia is open and stable was now publicly accusing its own press of secretly serving foreign masters – exactly the kind of rhetoric that press-freedom monitors and foreign correspondents log as a signal of a government's real tolerance for scrutiny.
A head of state's job includes being boring. Predictable. On-message. Careful with words that travel, because in the age of the viral clip, they all travel. Prabowo has spent the past six weeks failing that test in public, repeatedly, and the bill has already arrived in the form of a foreign government having to respond.
Start with the sequence, because the sequence is the story. On 10 June, opening a business congress in Lampung, Prabowo tried to link the date to his self-declared lucky number eight and got the arithmetic wrong on stage, announcing that 10 plus 6 equalled 17, fumbling the correction as the clip went viral and the memes piled up.
A month later, inaugurating a set of dams, he reached for "bajingan" – a Betawi word for scoundrel or crook, blunt enough to function as a swear word – to describe corrupt officials. Two days after that, at the podium for National Cooperatives Day in Jakarta, he said it again, then turned to his own education minister on stage and asked, half-joking, whether a president was even allowed to use the word. In the same speech, he warned against "uninvited guests" who arrive claiming to trade and end up, in his words, "robbing" the country.
He named no one. He did not have to. Clips tore through Chinese social media within hours, with users asking outright whether the line was aimed at Beijing, and China's foreign ministry had to call a press conference to brand the coverage "not factual" and insist the relationship remained one of mutual benefit. One speech, three viral incidents, and a foreign ministry forced onto the record because a president could not resist a punchline. Eleven days later came the "londo ireng" remark that opened this piece.
This is not a bad stretch. It is a habit. In April, Prabowo told a crowd near a nickel plant that Indonesians who disliked their own country could "just run away to Yemen" – a jab that landed, across much of the Muslim world, as a gratuitous insult to a nation with deep historical ties to Indonesia's own Hadhrami community. For two years he has also recycled the related charge that critics and NGOs are "foreign stooges" – antek asing – deployed at least seventeen times since taking office. The instinct is old. What is new, and what should worry anyone watching Indonesia from abroad, is the rate: a viral maths blunder, two swearword jokes, a colonial-slur controversy and a diplomatic incident, inside six weeks, from the man who doubles as Indonesia's chief salesman to foreign capital.
None of these lines were addressed to a foreign audience. Every one reached one anyway, because a business congress in Lampung and a state banquet in Tokyo now travel through the identical feed. This is not a communications problem a better spokesperson fixes. It is the direct cost of a foreign policy Prabowo built around his own personality – charm, presence, his word – in place of the more institutional approach of his predecessor. That bet only pays off if the man at the centre of it is read abroad as steady. He is not being read that way. Every viral moment spends down the one asset personalist diplomacy cannot function without, and foreign governments are not going to pretend otherwise, because their own publics are watching the same clips he is.
The dysfunction runs well past the President's own mouth. In March 2025, his spokesperson dismissed the delivery of a severed pig's head to a journalist's office by saying it "should simply be cooked" – a line Prabowo himself was later forced to call "careless" and "wrong". An army chief waved off critics of a military law revision as country bumpkins unfit to have an opinion. Prabowo has had to publicly scold his own cabinet, twice this year, for how badly it communicates – and his own advisers have reportedly urged him to stop speaking off-script. The government's fix was to gut the communications office and rebuild it around his own loyalists. It did not survive contact with the next news cycle.
There is a familiar excuse: this is domestic theatre, for a domestic audience, and presidents everywhere talk loosely at home. Half of that is true. None of the second half matters. Beijing did not call a press conference because it misread who the speech was for; it called one because enough of its own public decided the target was obvious, and Jakarta could not afford to let the reaction sit unanswered. A government cannot claim its domestic speeches carry no foreign weight and then dispatch its own foreign ministry to manage the fallout from one within the same news cycle.
That is the real charge here, and it is worse than "the President should watch his language." A government chasing foreign capital as hard as this one – a president who logs more overseas trips than almost any predecessor, aides who reach for investment-pledge totals every time critics raise doubts – cannot go on treating its own microphone as a free good. Every unscripted riff is now a foreign-policy input whether Jakarta likes it or not, and on the evidence of the past six weeks, nobody in Prabowo's government has grasped that yet. The next clip is presumably already being drafted.
[Dr Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is a co-author, serves as Director of the China-Indonesia Desk at CELIOS, and is also affiliated with positions at the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore, the London School of Economics' IDEAS, and Busan University of Foreign Studies.]