<![CDATA[This study analyses the construction of political meaning in Oke Gas Prabowo Gibran Paling Pas, a campaign music video used in Indonesia’s 2024 presidential election. Using a descriptive-interpretative qualitative approach, the study applies Roland Barthes’s semiotic framework of denotation, connotation, and myth to 24 purposively selected scenes, focusing exclusively on lyrics and visual elements. The analysis shows that denotative representations of political figures, popular-cultural symbols, bodily performances, and campaign slogans acquire connotative meanings associated with familiarity, resilience, transformation, and collective legitimacy. These recurring connotative patterns generate four overarching political myths: joyful and relatable leadership; resilient and morally legitimate leadership; transformative leadership; and popular legitimacy and historical inevitability. The myths function strategically as political communication through three interconnected mechanisms: naturalizing ideological meanings through popular culture, legitimating political identities through symbolic association, and reframing potentially negative meanings through humor, appropriation, and semantic reversal. The findings further demonstrate that myth and ironic counter-signification operate simultaneously within the same campaign text: desirable political and identity-related meanings are naturalized as self-evident, while potentially negative meanings are reworked through humor and semantic reversal. The study contributes to political media semiotics by extending Barthesian analysis beyond ideological naturalization to demonstrate how naturalizing myth and ironic counter-signification can coexist within a single campaign text. This contribution provides a more nuanced account of ideological meaning-making in Indonesia’s digital political communication and extends international political media research to an underrepresented Southeast Asian context.]]>
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