REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA -- The Executive Director of the Institute for Democracy and Strategic Affairs (INDOSTRATEGIC), Ahmad Khoirul Umam, said President Joko Widodo's momentum to formally exit the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) is just waiting for time. According to Khoirul, there are many signs that Jokowi is no longer in the party that has served him two terms as president.
The latest signal is that when Maruarar Sirait said goodbye to leaving the PDIP, he said he would follow in the footsteps of President Jokowi. Which means he said that Jokowi is no longer with the PDIP.
“Maruarar Sirait or Ara said that he resigned from PDIP because he wanted to follow in Jokowi's footsteps. This Ara statement is a clue or hard code for Jokowi's formal exclusion from his membership status in the PDIP. Ara's statement is certainly no longer aimed at banging between the PDIP and Jokowi, but it really voices Jokowi's ambivalence that seems to be just waiting for time to verbally declare his plans for his departure from the PDIP,” Khoirul said on Tuesday (16/1/2024).
Khoirul explained that if the political signal delivered by Ara is correct, and the declaration of Jokowi's departure from the PDIP is made before the February 14, 2024 elections, it will be a political tsunami for the PDIP in the last seconds before the election.
The recent exit of young PDIP cadres and joining Jokowi's ranks said Khoirul also gave a message to reverse Ketum PDIP Megawati's earlier statement. Where Mega once mentioned Jokowi would be nothing without the PDIP and Jokowi was a party officer.
“Here, Jokowi seems to be about to answer Megawati's statement, maneuvering while spreading the message, what would PDIP be without Jokowi? This 2024 election has a great opportunity to be a real war of war, as well as an anticlimax for the PDIP, which at the end of Jokowi's rule will actually come face to face with the power he once held,” Khoirul said.
In addition, Khoirul continued, the signal that Jokowi will leave the PDIP is indeed becoming clearer with his partiality to the Prabowo-Gibran pair. Where the increasingly vulgar Jokowi showed pro Prabowo-Gibran by meeting the leaders of the supporting party.
Khoirul sees Jokowi's actions as a form of open defiance to the PDIP mandate that obliges its cadres to submit to party political attitudes and decisions.
“In fact, Jokowi's absence from the PDIP's sacred and ideological 51st Anniversary has also become a very hard code that he no longer wants to bear the status of party officer. By preferring to come to events to countries in Southeast Asia, Jokowi wants to re-assert himself as no longer a party officer, but now as a state officer who is not subject to the party elite that controls him,” Khoirul added.