Critical Discourse Analysis of the 2019 Indonesian Presidential Election News in Asahi Newspaper

Abstract

This study aimed to examine how the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun represented presidential candidates, democracy, and political stability during Indonesia’s 2019 presidential election. A qualitative critical discourse analysis was conducted on a purposively selected corpus of four Japanese-language news articles and editorial texts published in April 2019, comprising 4,286 Japanese characters. The analysis integrated Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework of textual analysis, discursive practice, and social practice, with particular attention to transitivity, evaluative language, lexical choices, metaphors, and source selection. The findings revealed that Joko Widodo was portrayed both as an accessible, reform-oriented political figure and as a leader facing criticism over coercive political practices. In contrast, Prabowo Subianto was associated with continuity from Indonesia’s military-dominated political past and concerns about potential democratic regression. The newspaper’s commentary linked electoral tolerance, religious pluralism, and domestic political stability to Japanese economic interests and broader regional considerations. References to experts and business representatives further reinforced an institutional and technocratic framing of Indonesia’s electoral dynamics. These findings reflected the representations identified in the selected texts rather than the perspectives of Japanese media or society as a whole. The analysis demonstrated how media representations of Indonesian democracy could integrate normative democratic concerns with considerations of regional stability and investment conditions. However, the limited corpus size, purposive sampling strategy, and interpretive nature of critical discourse analysis constrained the generalizability of the findings and precluded causal conclusions regarding editorial intentions. The interpretations were grounded in the lexical, evaluative, and contextual characteristics of the selected journalistic texts rather than assumed newspaper-wide reporting patterns.