The banned Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) is secretly reviving to seize power, with covert communists, including President Joko Widodo, working from within the state

Where the bogeyman comes from

The revival panic did not arise spontaneously. It was engineered by the state that grew out of the killings. Under Suharto's New Order (1967-1998), anti-communism was not merely a policy but a governing ideology, and its central teaching was the “latent danger of communism” (bahaya laten komunisme): the doctrine that communists, though crushed, are forever plotting to return, so perpetual vigilance, and perpetual suspicion, are required.

That idea was drilled into generations. Schoolchildren were taught the army's version of 1965; the state-produced film Pengkhianatan G30S/PKIwas screened annually; official history cast the PKI as a treacherous, ever-lurking enemy. The reflex to see a hidden communist behind ordinary events was deliberately built into the culture, and it outlived the regime that built it. When the New Order fell in 1998, the ban stayed on the books and the reflex stayed in people's minds.

The fear of a PKI revival was manufactured by the state and never dismantled. It is the residue of a propaganda machine, not the trace of a real party.

This is why sincere belief and cynical exploitation coexist. Many Indonesians who fear a communist return are not acting in bad faith; they absorbed a fear that a powerful state spent thirty years instilling. Explaining that origin is not the same as endorsing the claim. The belief is widespread because it was engineered to be, not because a revival is real.

The electoral weapon

The revival narrative has a rhythm, and it tracks the campaign calendar. It surged in the 2014 presidential election, when opponents spread a false story that Jokowi was of Chinese descent and secretly tied to the PKI, branding him the “communists' candidate.” The smear was a fabrication fused with anti-Chinese racism: Jokowi was born in 1961, years before the party was banned, so membership was chronologically impossible, and nothing credible links him to communism.

It returned in force in the 2019 rematchagainst Prabowo Subianto, carried by memes, doctored images, and invented “leaks.” Scholars analyzing both campaigns for the Asian Journal of Political Sciencedescribe a recurring “communist imaginary” deployed as a weapon: an accusation that is cheap to make, hard to disprove before an election, and toxic in a country where communism is both illegal and taboo.

The taboo is what makes the smear self-sealing. Because communism is banned and stigmatized, few will publicly defend anyone accused of it, and a denial can always be spun as precisely what a hidden communist would say. The social cost does the work. That is why this file reports the “Jokowi is PKI” line only as a false accusation made against him, and never as a fact about the man: to state it any other way would be to launder the very smear the evidence refutes.

The symbols, the doctored images, the hoaxes

Stripped of the electoral framing, the “evidence” for a revival is a rolling series of scares built on fabricated or misread material. The most durable is the hammer-and-sickle panic. Researchers cataloguing these episodes describe students detained over a campus drawing, vendors arrested for T-shirt logos, and unrelated imagery recast online as secret PKI insignia. The pattern is one of misidentification, hoax, and the criminalization of activists, not of an organized party signalling its return.

Indonesian fact-checkers have documented the manufacture directly. The country runs one of the world's largest collaborative fact-checking networks, coordinated through the cekfaktainitiative, and during the 2019 campaign it worked through a steady stream of “PKI” hoaxes, tracing viral claims to doctored photographs and invented context. A fabricated “23 Coincidences” narrative, for instance, stitched unrelated facts into a supposed plot by Jokowi to revive the party with Chinese help; it collapses the moment its links are checked.

The 2017 wave shows where this leads. Amid a spike of anti-communist rumor, viral hoaxes recast ordinary gatherings as covert PKI activity, and in one episode helped incite a mob that attacked a legal-aid office in Jakarta. The revival claim is not a harmless internet curiosity: it has produced real violence against real people who had nothing to do with any communist party, because there was no communist party to do anything with.

What the evidence actually shows

The simplest rebuttal is the absence at the center of the claim. There is no organized PKI. It was destroyed in 1965-66, banned in 1966, and no membership, leadership, or structure has been documented in the six decades since. A movement with no party, no members, and no evidence is not a hidden conspiracy; it is an empty set, and the “they are hiding it” rejoinder only converts that emptiness into unfalsifiable proof, which is the signature of a conspiracy theory rather than a finding.

The public does not buy it either. When the pollster SMRC surveyed the country in September 2017, about 86.8 percent of respondents said they did not believe the PKI was reviving, against roughly 12.6 percent who did. On the specific smear, 75.1 percentrejected the claim that Jokowi was linked to the party, and only 5.1 percent accepted it. SMRC's own reading was that the issue was being mobilized by particular political forces, not welling up from anything Indonesians were actually experiencing.

No party. No members. No evidence. The revival is asserted, amplified around elections, and rejected by the large majority of the public it is aimed at.

Analysts writing for ISEAS-Fulcrumreach the same conclusion by a different route, describing the revival as classic “bogeyman tactics”: a defunct enemy kept rhetorically alive because an available scapegoat is politically useful. Between the absent party, the polling, the fact-checks, and the scholarship, the systemic claim has nothing left to stand on.