LEGALITYWITHOUTCONSENT:SENTIMENTONXANDTHEDISCURSIVE LEGITIMACYOFEDUCATIONBUDGETRATIONALISATIONFORTHEFREE NUTRITIOUS MEALPROGRAMMEINTHE2026STATEBUDGET

Abstract

Public policy can satisfy every requirement of legality and still fail to secure the expressed consent that legitimacy theory treats as constitutive of legitimate rule. This study examines that gap through Indonesia's 2026 State Budget, in which Rp223.5 trillion of the National Nutrition Agency's allocation for the Free Nutritious Meal Programme (MBG) was classified under the constitutionally mandated twenty per cent education budget — an arrangement legally grounded in Law Number 17 of 2025 yet currently the subject of a judicial review petition before the Constitutional Court. The study analyses 2,037 Indonesian language posts published on X between January 2025 and May 2026, classified using the InSet Lexicon and interpreted through Beetham's (1991) account of consent and Dryzek's (2000) account of discursive legitimacy. Negative sentiment accounts for 66.76 per cent of the corpus and retains majority status in every month of observation, intensifying rather than moderating as discourse volume expands. Word frequency analysis identifies four thematic clusters, of which the most consequential shows that criticism targets the financing mechanism rather than the nutritional objectives of the programme. Validation against manual coding returned a Cohen's Kappa of 0.0647, driven overwhelmingly by the misclassification of ironic criticism as positive sentiment; this result is reported as a substantive finding concerning the reliability of lexicon-based classification in politically charged Indonesian discourse rather than as a disclaimer. The study concludes that the observed pattern constitutes a discursive legitimacy deficit within the discourse examined, and that its persistence across time is more analytically significant than its magnitude at any single moment