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Asia Research Institute
Working Paper SeriesNo. 45
Performing in the 2004 Indonesian elections
Dr. Jennifer Lindsay
Asia Research Institute National University of Singaporearijml@nus.edu.sg
 
July 2005
 
The
ARI Working Paper Series
is published electronically by the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore.© Copyright is held by the author or authors of each Working Paper.ARI Working Papers cannot be republished, reprinted, or reproduced in any format without the permission of the paper’s author or authors.
Note
: The views expressed in each paper are those of the author or authors of the paper. They donot necessarily represent or reflect the views of the Asia Research Institute, its EditorialCommittee or of the National University of Singapore.Citations of this electronic publication should be made in the following manner: Author, “Title,”ARI Working Paper, No. #, Date, www.nus.ari.edu.sg/pub/wps.htm. For instance, Smith, John,“Ethnic Relations in Singapore,” ARI Working Paper, No. 1, June 2003,www.ari.nus.edu.sg/pub/wps.htm.
Asia Research Institute Editorial Committee
Geoffrey WadeLois Verbrugge Ng Kian BoonJiang NaManjit Kaur 
Asia Research Institute
 National University of SingaporeShaw Foundation Building, Block AS7, Level 45 Arts Link, Singapore 117570Tel: (65) 6874 3810Fax: (65) 6779 1428Website:www.ari.nus.edu.sgEmail:arisec@nus.edu.sg 
The Asia Research Institute (ARI)
was established as a university-level institute in July 2001 asone of the strategic initiatives of the National University of Singapore (NUS). The mission of theInstitute is to provide a world-class focus and resource for research on the Asian region, locatedat one of its communications hubs. ARI engages the social sciences broadly defined, andespecially interdisciplinary frontiers between and beyond disciplines. Through frequent provisionof short-term research appointments it seeks to be a place of encounters between the region andthe world. Within NUS it works particularly with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,Business, Law and Design, to support conferences, lectures, and graduate study at the highestlevel.
 
ARI Working Paper No. 45 Asia Research Institute
●
Singapore
Performing in the 2004 Indonesian elections
i
 Jennifer Lindsay
Late June-early July 2004 was an exciting time in Indonesia. The final stages of three major competitive events were being played out concurrently on national television. On 2 July, two of the remaining eleven candidates in
 Indonesia Idol
 
were voted out in the
babak spektakuler 
 (“spectacular phase”) based on viewers’ votes sent in by phone text messages.
ii
At midnight on 4July, the Euro Cup football final – an unexpected encounter between two outsider teams – was broadcast live, with Greece narrowly defeating Portugal. Then early the following day, on 5 July,the polls opened for Indonesians to make their choice between five presidential/vice-presidentialteams in the first round of the country’s first-ever direct presidential election. The last round of the elections would take place later in September. All these events had stars, winners and losers,and were truly media events, as Dayan and Katz describe them (1992; 1999), designed for and bythe media.The worlds of popular culture and politics in Indonesia crossed more intensively than ever beforein the build-up to the July 5 presidential election, and the mass media was central to this process.
 
Much of the election campaigning took place in the broadcast media, in talk shows, messages and party advertisements, as had previously been the case in the 1999 and 2004 legislative electionswhen viewers and voters celebrated post New Order airing of difference (Lindsay 2002). But the2004 presidential election saw something new, namely a marked increase in the participation of national pop culture artists – called “
selebritis
” and known to Indonesian audiences via television – in the campaigning. The declared participation of “
selebritis
” in politics had been on theincrease since 1999, with a number of “personalities” standing as legislative candidates in April2004. But in the July presidential campaign, this participation suddenly exploded as a trend, withwide print and broadcast media coverage of celebrities’ choices, and celebrities vying for publicairtime to display their support for their favoured presidential candidate. At the same time, the presidential candidates themselves increasingly presented themselves competitively as performer-celebrities.This paper examines this phenomenon in the context of the
 
established Indonesian practice of artist involvement in election campaigns. Looking at the 2004 elections in particular, the paper asks two questions: firstly, how does the new celebrity participation in politics differ from andalter earlier practices of performer participation in election campaigns in Indonesia? Secondly,
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