Not a Downgrade, but a Fail Grade

In Defence of Professor Denny Indrayana’s Argument on the Basic Fitness of Public Officials

Introduction

In politics, a short sentence often outlives a thick legal treatise. When Joko Widodo (“Jokowi”) claimed that there was a political operation to damage the reputation of Gibran Rakabuming Raka, Professor Denny Indrayana answered with a single play on words: Gibran, he said, is not a “downgrade” but a “fail grade” *). The pun is the culmination of an argument he had been building for some time, and it deserves to be read as a sharpening of that argument rather than a mere verbal game [check out here]. This essay sets out the strongest case that Denny’s defenders can make: that questions about the basic fitness of a public official cannot be equated with an attempt to bring that person down; that questions of education touch a legal requirement applying equally to every candidate; and that a complete answer to those questions is in fact simple and lies in the hands of the very party being questioned.

The essay is deliberately an advocacy piece. It presents the argument as Denny’s supporters would frame it and, in a closing note, records the views of those who disagree, so that readers can weigh the matter for themselves. The claims about educational history in this essay are the contentions of the petitioners and their supporters, or findings reported in the media; they are not a final judgement on the truth of that history.

 

The Logic Behind the Pun

The first strength of Denny’s argument lies in the logic of the word “down”. A person can be brought down only if he was previously at some height. If someone has never met the required standard, the question put to him is not “how far have you been pushed down?” but “did you meet the requirements in the first place?” That is the difference between a downgrade and a fail grade. The first points to a fall from a legitimate position; the second asks whether the starting point was ever legitimate. With one shift of vocabulary, Denny moves the debate from the terrain of image, where the party claiming to be under attack earns sympathy, to the terrain of qualification, where everyone who seeks public office must be able to show proof.

The audience, too, is well served. The public may not follow the details of a ruling on the age limit for candidates, but everyone understands what it means to pass, to fail, and to receive a failing mark. In political communication, the ability to translate a complicated constitutional problem into the language of a school report is a strength, not a weakness. Denny’s defenders can add that the academic vocabulary is apt because the matter raised is itself academic: what a person has and has not completed in his education.

 

Education Is No Trivial Matter: It Is a Legal Requirement

It is important to stress that Denny’s criticism does not rest on taste or prejudice. Under Article 169(r) of the Elections Law, candidates for president and vice-president must have completed at least senior secondary school or its equivalent. The requirement applies to every candidate without exception and therefore forms the same fence for everyone who wishes to enter the arena. Checking whether it has been met is not a personal attack; it is an inspection of an entrance guarded by the law. That entrance exists precisely because society does not want to judge a person’s basic fitness by sympathy or antipathy.

Denny’s defenders also emphasise that the question of fitness comes before the question of performance. Assessing the performance of an official is meaningful only if the office was obtained by a route that met the requirements. If the route is in doubt, turning the debate towards policy is like discussing the contents of a house before establishing who holds the key. That is why Denny deliberately attacks the foundations of legitimacy, not the drawing room of policy. The question is not whether Gibran has made mistakes as an official, but whether the requirements for becoming an official were met in the first place.

In the hearings at the Constitutional Court, Denny and the petitioners even stated that the matter was not solely one of education. In their view, five constitutional principles had been violated, and one of their main contentions concerned an alleged manipulative defect in the issuing of Article 18(3) of General Elections Commission (KPU) Regulation No. 19 of 2023, which governs the recognition of foreign education as equivalent. In other words, the educational record is only a doorway to a larger question: whether the rules of the game were shaped honestly.

 

The Documents That Exist and Those That Do Not

It is here that Denny’s argument gains its empirical weight. According to the petitioners, the documents submitted to show Gibran’s education abroad took the form of a certificate of attendance, academic records and an explanation of grades, rather than a diploma, a certificate of completion or a degree. Denny says that what exists is a certificate of attendance and a transcript at the level of a one-year diploma, and that the hearings included discussion of a subject recorded as failed. From this arises the concentrated question he poses: how many subjects were failed, and was that failure the reason the diploma programme was not completed?

Constitutional Court Decision No. 01/PHPU.PRES-XXIV/2026 gives Denny’s defenders further footing. According to media reports, the Court did declare the petition inadmissible because the petitioners were judged to lack legal standing. In its reasoning, however, after studying all the evidence and the facts revealed in the hearings, the Court stated that it had found no document showing that Gibran holds a diploma, certificate or degree as proof of completing education abroad equivalent to senior secondary school, because the documents attached were a certificate of attendance and academic records. For Denny’s supporters, that reasoning is no small matter. It is a statement by the competent institution that reinforces the starting point of Denny’s question, even though the operative ruling stopped at the issue of standing. It is for this reason that Denny’s lawyer, Refly Harun, proposed the creation of an independent team to look into the educational background.

Denny’s supporters also draw attention to what they describe as oddities in the equivalence letter issued by the government in 2019. According to Refly, what ought to be recognised as equivalent is a diploma, certificate or degree, not a person’s ability, since ability is relative and hard to measure. He also asked why the letter mentions only Grade 12 in 2006, and others have pointed to the absence of verifiable documents from educational institutions in Australia. Oddities of this kind, the defenders say, naturally give rise to questions, and reasonable questions should be answered with documents, not with suspicion of the questioner.

Denny himself shows that he first tried the most courteous route. He says he wrote to the schools and related institutions in Singapore and Australia asking for proof of the validity of the education, and the answer he received from the institution in Australia, three times in a row, was that the information could not be disclosed because it is protected by privacy law. He then launched an open challenge to anyone able to produce Gibran’s senior secondary school diploma or equivalent, with a reward that, by his announcement, had risen above Rp3.6 billion. A challenge of this kind can be made only by someone who is confident of his question and prepared to lose should the answer prove satisfactory. The challenge asks for nothing but one thing: show the document.

 

A Simple Answer, and a Clear Keeper of the Key

This is what makes Denny’s position morally distinctive. He does not ask anyone to trust him; he asks the owner of the documents to produce them. In the law of evidence, the party who holds the proof and can readily provide it bears the burden of showing it. A single diploma, a full transcript or one official letter from the institution concerned would be enough to end the question. If there is no obstacle, there is no reason for delay. A senior state official plainly has a greater capacity than an ordinary citizen to gather such documents, and it is only fitting that what is open to inspection should be the most basic requirement of the office he holds.

Denny’s defenders point out that transparency in this matter is not merely a legal question but also one of the ethics of office. An official whose position is questioned over a basic document takes the most dignified path by answering with evidence rather than by describing the questioner as an attacker. Public trust, like reputation, is not lowered by others; it is built or eroded by one’s attitude towards legitimate questions.

 

Why This Is Not a Personal Attack

Defenders of Gibran may say that this criticism is too personal. Denny’s supporters reply that the vice-presidency is an office whose fitness is properly judged in the person who holds it, since the requirements for candidacy are addressed to individuals. Age, citizenship, health and education are all personal attributes regulated by law. Questioning one of them is no more personal than asking whether a candidate meets the requirements of age or citizenship. What is personal is not the question but the fact that the requirement attaches to the person.

Moreover, Denny does not stop at one individual. He links education with the whole story of how the road to power was opened: the Constitutional Court’s ruling on the age limit that cleared Gibran’s path; the chief justice, who was Gibran’s uncle and was later given a serious ethical sanction; and the ethical sanctions imposed on the election administrators. On this reading, the educational record is one knot in a wider net, and it must be examined because the other knots around it have already raised serious questions.

This sequence also accords with Denny’s criticism of volunteer politics and the personalisation of power. If office can be reached through networks, closeness and rules that adjust themselves, then the question of basic requirements becomes the last fence capable of distinguishing between an office obtained because the requirements were met and one obtained because of access. There the pun “fail grade” finds its deepest meaning: not merely a matter of a person’s marks, but of the failure of a system to guard its entrance.

 

An Allegory: The Examination at the Palace

Some ideas are easier to grasp through stories. The allegory that follows names no one and is meant as a way of picturing the argument above. In a certain kingdom, the crown prince is suddenly announced as the candidate to captain the largest ship in the land. The people ask whether he has passed navigation school, and the guards ask in return why they are so busy inspecting his report card. The people answer that it is because the ship is about to be handed to him. The guards then cry out that the people are trying to destroy his reputation.

An old teacher sweeping the quay laughs softly. How, he asks, can a man be brought down from the bell tower if he has never climbed it? The question the people are asking, he says, is not how far he has fallen, but whether he ever climbed at all. So the whole country becomes busy debating report cards. Yet history is quietly asking a different question: who checked the fitness of the would-be captain before he was given the helm? In politics, examination marks are often not the greatest problem. The greatest problem is who grants access to the examination room, who sets the conditions for passing, and who ends up sitting on the ship’s bridge.

 

A Dignified Way Out

Denny’s argument does not end with criticism. He offers a way out that can be taken calmly. The first is openness: producing verifiable educational documents, whether through the independent inquiry proposed by Refly Harun or through an official statement from the institution concerned, so that the question can be closed with evidence. The second is political repentance: if the basic question is not answered satisfactorily, resigning honourably is more dignified than clinging to office amid continuing doubt. The third is the constitutional route under Article 7A of the 1945 Constitution, which involves the House of Representatives, the Constitutional Court and the People’s Consultative Assembly, so that every step remains under the shelter of the law. Denny also reminds President Prabowo that political indebtedness should not be a reason to preserve the status quo, since the oath of office is sworn to the constitution, not to a person.

 

Conclusion

On the reading of its defenders, the strength of Denny’s argument lies in its simplicity. He does not ask anyone to believe a complicated theory. He asks only a question that everybody can understand: have the basic requirements been met, and where is the proof? The question has been put openly, through the courtroom, official letters and a public challenge, and it rests on the reasoning of a competent institution that the documents submitted were not a diploma, certificate or degree. The pun “not a downgrade, but a fail grade” is an apt summary of the whole stance: what is in question is not how far someone has fallen, but whether he stood from the start where he ought to have stood.

Meanwhile, history sits quietly in the distance, neither cheering nor applauding. It will record only whether a question this simple was answered with evidence or with accusation. In a democracy, public trust in the highest offices is built not by loud words but by a willingness to be examined.

Note:  

*) "Fail Grade" is not standard English grammar (less idiomatic), but it is easily understood as a political slogan. It plays with a similar sound:

downgrade → fail grade

Rhetorically, it is impressive because it is short and easy to remember. Native speakers will usually consider this phrase to be a play on words, not a proper academic expression.

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A Republic of Harbours, Not a Republic of Boats

In Defence of Professor Denny Indrayana’s Argument on “Volunteer Politics”

Introduction

When Joko Widodo (“Jokowi”) spoke of a “political operation” intended to damage the reputation of himself and his son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the remark sounded like the complaint of a wronged man. Professor Denny Indrayana, a professor of constitutional law and former Deputy Minister of Law and Human Rights, answered in a way that turned the complaint back on itself (here). This essay sets out the strongest case that Denny’s defenders can make: that the accusation of a political operation is aimed at the wrong target, that the decline in reputation is the product of the former president’s own decisions, and that the idea of “volunteer politics” names a real tendency in Indonesian democracy, namely the drift of the republic away from the strength of its institutions and towards the orbit of a single figure.

The essay is deliberately an advocacy piece. It presents the argument as Denny’s supporters would frame it. 

An Accusation Returned to Its Sender

The first strength of Denny’s argument lies in his simple question: at whom is this “political operation” directed? The side he represents has not been working in the dark. They went to the Constitutional Court, filed their papers, called expert witnesses and argued before nine judges in open session. On 10 September 2026, Denny and eleven other petitioners lodged a petition on the results of the 2024 presidential election, challenging whether Gibran had met the educational requirement when he registered as a vice-presidential candidate. Evidence hearings were held on 30 September and 1 October, and the ruling was delivered in public on 6 October 2026. By any definition, pursuing the constitutional route the state provides, and accepting the result in open court, is the opposite of a covert operation. A political operation works in secret and resists scrutiny; a constitutional challenge works in the open and accepts the risk of losing.

That the petition was declared inadmissible does not weaken the point; it reinforces it. A ruling of that kind is formal. It stops at the threshold of standing, time limits and the fact that Gibran had already been sworn in, and it is not a declaration that the conditions for his candidacy were met. Denny’s defenders can argue that the petitioners used every legal channel available, and that questions never examined on their merits in the courtroom naturally return to public debate. A person whose access to the courts has been closed, and who then speaks in the public square, is exercising a citizen’s right, not running an operation.

Where, then, is the real political operation? Denny points to a sequence of events that is hard to dismiss as coincidence. The sitting president himself once declared that he would not be neutral in the matter of succession and would involve himself, in the Indonesian phrase, through cawe-cawe, or meddling. That is not an interpretation offered by opponents; it came from the president’s own mouth. Then came Constitutional Court Decision No. 90/PUU-XXI/2023, which allowed a person under 40 to run for president or vice-president provided they had held, or were holding, office as a regional head. The decision cleared the way for Gibran, who was then 36 and Mayor of Surakarta. The Chief Justice who took part in the case, Anwar Usman, is Gibran’s uncle, and the Court’s honour council later found him guilty of a serious ethical breach and removed him as chief justice. The General Elections Commission (KPU) was in turn sanctioned by the Election Organisers’ Ethics Council (DKPP) for accepting Gibran’s registration before amending its own regulation. Denny and his supporters see in this sequence not a string of unrelated decisions but a pattern: the rules shifted, and each shift happened to favour one name.

In a series of open letters in August 2026, Denny put the pattern bluntly. Gibran, he wrote, exploited the meddling of his father and his uncle to become a contestant and to win, and Decision 90 was a “scandal” that shamed the Constitutional Court. Anyone is free to reject that conclusion, but no one can deny that its premises rest on recorded events rather than on slander. 

Reputation Is Earned, Not Handed Out

Denny’s remark that no reputation was damaged because the reputation was never deserving is often read as a jibe, yet it contains a sharp argument about how reputation works in a democracy. Political reputation is capital accumulated through a record the public can test: work completed, ideas defended, risks taken. A person whose rapid rise was made possible by a change in the rules, rather than by the accumulation of such a record, holds no capital that anyone could “seize”. What the public is questioning is not a stolen reputation but a question never answered: on what basis was an office as high as the vice-presidency reached in so short a time?

From here Denny’s argument turns to its principal target, Jokowi himself. He was once seen as a symbol of change: an ordinary man from Solo who rose without an elite pedigree and without the blessing of party oligarchs. Precisely because that symbolic capital was so large, every step that appeared to depart from it cuts more deeply. The decline in the standing of a figure once so admired is not the result of an enemy’s attack; it springs from the widening gap between the image sold and the conduct observed. In political communication this is self-inflicted damage, and it is immune to ordinary rebuttal. An opponent can be accused of lying, but a mirror cannot be accused of malice. Anyone angry at the mirror is really quarrelling with his own face.

Denny’s defenders can add that this pattern was noticed by some of the people closest to Jokowi. Reports of old friends who chose to distance themselves from him, disappointed by Gibran’s candidacy, show that the criticism did not come only from the opposing camp. When the judgement that shifts is that of former supporters, the conclusion that the foundations of a reputation changed from within becomes far harder to dismiss as conspiracy. 

Volunteer Politics: An Idea That Names a Symptom

The sharpest core of Denny’s statement is his idea of volunteer politics. He observes that Jokowi is the only figure who had volunteers when he was a candidate, when he was president, and after he had ceased to be president. The sentence neatly maps three phases in a leader’s political life and shows that in the second and third, something that ought to have ended was kept going.

The sequence is well understood in democratic tradition. A candidate is naturally supported by volunteers, for he is seeking to win trust. Once sworn in, he becomes president of all the people, including those who did not vote for him, and should therefore stand above the ranks of his supporters. A former president customarily sheds the machinery of mobilisation and becomes a statesman whose voice is respected because it is no longer partisan. Denny contends that Jokowi did not make that transition. The identity of a leader sustained by volunteers has been kept alive, and reports that he has toured the regions wearing a party’s colours since leaving office are consistent with that assessment.

It must be stressed, and Denny’s defenders always stress it, that what is criticised is not volunteers as people. It is the carrying of volunteer logic into the conduct of the state. Political science distinguishes institutional politics, built on parties, parliaments, constitutions and bureaucracies, from personalist politics, built on figures, loyalty and informal networks. Denny argues that Jokowi’s politics has moved from the first pole to the second. When loyalty to a leader outweighs loyalty to rules, we are witnessing what scholars call the personalisation of power: the figure becomes the centre of gravity, and institutions revolve around him.

The word “volunteer” is chosen with care because its meaning has changed. Between 2012 and 2019, Jokowi’s volunteers were the face of citizen participation: a grassroots movement that stood against the old elite. That image was a noble one, and precisely because it was noble, its drift is the sadder. When a movement born as an expression of citizens’ independence turns into a network guarding power, it loses the quality that made it valuable. Denny is reminding us that the nobility of a movement is guaranteed not by its origins but by what it does after it has won.

The idea becomes more persuasive in comparative perspective. In the United States, Barack Obama’s volunteers were the backbone of his campaign, yet the state was run through parties, Congress, the bureaucracy and state institutions, and the volunteers remained outside government. In France, Emmanuel Macron turned his volunteer movement into a formal political organisation, so that volunteers were institutionalised and could be held accountable. The lesson of both cases is the same: volunteers may win power, but they must not become power’s permanent identity. In India under Narendra Modi, critics read a network of supporters that works far beyond election season as a symptom of personalisation, and in the Latin America of Hugo Chávez and Juan Perón, mass support grew into something larger than the party. Loyalty to the leader overrode loyalty to programmes and institutions. While the leader was strong, the system looked stable; when he departed, it was shaken, because its foundation was a person, not an institution. Denny, in other words, has not invented a worry. He carries a warning that the history of many countries has recorded again and again.

That warning accords with a work Denny himself cites, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die. Democracies seldom collapse in a single dramatic blow. They erode slowly when the gatekeepers of politics stop guarding the gate: when rules are bent one by one, when the legal is used to serve the improper, and when every bending is justified on the ground that no law has been broken. 

From Critique to Remedy: Political Repentance

Denny’s argument does not stop at diagnosis. He offers a way out that anyone can understand: that Gibran resign as vice-president as an act of political repentance by the Jokowi family. His supporters point out that this is the most peaceful and least costly course for the nation. It requires no long political struggle, demands that no one be prosecuted, and gives the parties a chance to correct a wrong with dignity. In a political culture that values humility, resigning out of a recognition that one’s path to office is ethically contested is an honourable act, not a defeat.

Denny also closes the door on the excuse most often used to preserve the status quo, namely political indebtedness. The current president may have reason to feel indebted to Jokowi, but, Denny says, ethics in practical politics is not a receipt to be paid for ever. Public office is built on an oath to the constitution, not to a person. He also reminds readers that the constitution itself provides a mechanism, through Article 7A of the 1945 Constitution, so that his appeal is not an invitation to chaos but a call to procedures that already exist. The route to removal is admittedly long and winding, involving the House of Representatives, the Constitutional Court and the People’s Consultative Assembly, but that is precisely why it is legitimate: every step proceeds under the shelter of the law. 

The Struggle over a Legacy

Why does Denny’s statement matter beyond the question of Gibran? Because it speaks to three things that will shape the republic. The first is the Constitutional Court’s decision: if the institution that guards the constitution can be bent by family ties, what is left of the idea of a state governed by law? The second is political dynasty: the real question is not whether what is legal is valid, but whether what is legal is automatically proper. Law may permit while propriety may restrain, and a healthy democracy needs both. The third is the struggle over narrative after the election: what is now being contested is not a seat but a legacy. Will Jokowi be remembered as a statesman who built roads, bridges and hope, or as the architect of a family’s politics? Denny offers a way in which that answer can still be chosen: correction today, before history records it without compromise. 

Three Fables That Explain

Some ideas are easier to grasp through stories. The three allegories below name no one and are meant as a way of picturing the argument above.

In the first, there stands a Tower of Reputation, and at its summit reigns a Carpenter King who was once praised for building long bridges and roads that cut through mountains. When cracks appeared in the tower’s walls, he cried that he was under attack, and his guards agreed: there was a conspiracy, there were hidden hands. An old traveller brought a mirror and said gently that perhaps it was not the wall that was cracked but the foundation. The old stones, inscribed with neutrality, statesmanship and distance from the family, were slowly being replaced by new ones inscribed with kinship, loyalty and the continuation of the family. The tower was not shaken by a storm. It leant because its foundation had changed. And as is the way of power, when the mirror shows a stain on the face, it is often the maker of the mirror who is blamed, though a mirror creates no wrinkle; it only shows it.

In the second, a Carpenter King came to the throne helped by thousands of volunteers carrying torches. After he won, the people said the torches might be put out, for the sun had risen. But the torch-bearers did not go home. They stood in the palace courtyard, even in the glare of noon, and whenever there was criticism they cried that there were enemies and infiltrators. The traveller asked why they still carried torches, and they replied that they loved the King. The traveller smiled and said that that was the problem, for torches are made to light the road, not to light the King. Volunteers are noble when they guard an ideal, but when what they guard is the person and not the ideal, they slowly become the shadows of power.

The third compares two countries. The Land of Harbours built harbours; its people loved their captain but loved their harbour more, so that when the captain retired, other ships came and the rules went on. The Land of Boats built boats; its people loved their captain so much that they forgot to build harbours, and every sail was adorned with his face. The boat sped along very fast, until one day a terrifying question arose: if the captain steps down, who will steer the ship? At that moment they realised that what they had been building was a vehicle, not a system. In the end, Denny’s critique is a warning that Indonesia must not drift from a Republic of Harbours to a Republic of Boats. 

Conclusion

On the reading of Denny’s defenders, the strength of the argument lies in the unity of its three layers. At the level of events, it rests on a chain of recorded facts: the declaration of meddling, Decision 90, and the ethical sanctions imposed on a judge and on the election administrators. At the conceptual level, it names a phenomenon known to political science, the personalisation of power. At the moral level, it offers a way of correction that is peaceful, constitutional and honourable. It has also been pursued openly: through the courtroom, through open letters, and through arguments that anyone is free to answer.

Meanwhile, history sits quietly in the distance, recording without applause and without cheers. It will weigh not who was loudest today but what remains when the torch-bearers have gone home and the captains have stepped down. The question Denny puts to every generation is one that democracy must never cease to ask: which should be greater, the man or the institution?

A Note on Other Views

For the sake of completeness, it should be recorded that Denny’s argument is seriously contested. Supporters of Jokowi and Gibran maintain that Decision 90 is valid and binding as the ruling of a competent institution, that the Prabowo–Gibran ticket won the election democratically, and that the existence of volunteers is a common expression of citizen participation in many countries, not proof that statesmanship has been lost. They also hold that Jokowi’s high public approval towards the end of his term sits uneasily with the claim that his reputation has declined, and the Secretary-General of the Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI) described Denny’s petition as an uncivilised political manoeuvre. The Constitutional Court itself did not grant the petition of Denny and his co-petitioners on 6 October 2026. Readers are encouraged to weigh both sides and to consult the primary sources themselves.

Note: The account of events draws on media reports up to mid-October 2026. Details of the case and subsequent political developments are still evolving and should be checked against official sources.

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