Talking Indonesia

Cast your minds back to February 2024, in the campaign lull before Indonesians hit the ballot box, a documentary unceremoniously dropped on youtube. Now, documentaries on electoral campaigning are legion, and generally they attract a pretty narrow audience. By contrast, Dirty Vote, directed by acclaimed Indonesian investigative journalist, Dhandy Dwi Laksono, garnered 6.4 million eyeballs in the first 48 hours, over the week Dirty vote attracted half a million tweet on twitter, trending worldwide. Overall Dirty Vote had over 30 million viewers. So to say Dirty Vote went viral would be putting it mildly. And yet Dirty Vote was anything but ephemeral. In a large warehouse, against what was a essentially a giant power-point deck, three nationally renowned Constitutional lawyers, Bivitri Susanti, Feri Amsari and Zainal Arifin Mochtar systematically laid out the case for a critical double take on how key figures, principally then- President Jokowi, were using all the instruments of the state to ensure t