Abstract

Prabowo Subianto has won the 2024–2029 Indonesian presidential election. Responding to this, Prabowo delivered a victory speech that showed the tendency of his sociopolitical capital formation efforts. This article is a study of political speech acts that analyzes Prabowo Subianto’s speech acts using Searle’s pragmatic theory, which is then linked to Putnam’s sociological theory of political social capital. This study aims to identify Prabowo Subianto’s tendency to build political social capital through speech acts. Data were collected by transcribing YouTube video recordings of Prabowo Subianto’s victory speech as primary data. The collected data will be analyzed as a corpus to determine the tendency of speech act types. The analysis showed that Prabowo Subianto used five types of speech acts in his speech: expressive (34.35%), directive (31.70%), commissive (19.61%), assertive (11.08%), and declarative (3.26%). The dominance of expressive and directive speech acts showed the tendency of Prabowo Subianto to form political social capital. Prabowo did not entirely abandon his image as a leader known for directive speech. Instead, he strengthened his public reputation by complementing it with more frequent use of expressive speech acts that conveyed gratitude, humility, and emotional connection with his audience. Prabowo Subianto, who previously had (1) the structural dimension and (2) the cognitive dimension as a leader, wanted to accelerate (3) the relational dimension by increasing his reputational behavior.