59 ATTITUDE, SOLIDARITY, AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN INDONESIAN PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE 2019 Chrisdianto Wibowo Kamandoko, Sukarno, Ikwan Setiawan Linguistic Department, Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Jember, Indonesia Jalan Kalimantan No.37, Tegal Boto Lor, Sumbersari, Jember, Indonesia Corresponding Author: chrisdiantowibowo@gmail.com Article History: Submitted: 4 December 2020; Revised: 7 October 2021 Accepted: 23 January 2022 DOI: 10.26858/retorika.v15i1.16412 RETORIKA: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra dan Pengajarannya under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. ISSN: 2614-2716 (print), ISSN: 2301-4768 (online) http://ojs.unm.ac.id/retorika Abstract: The research aimed to identify the solidarity and social change represented by the presidents’ attitudes in the debates. The research applied positive discourse analysis purposed by Martin (2004) and the appraisal framework, especially the attitude system purposed by Martin and White (2005). The results showed that Prabowo used more attitudes in his argument than Jokowi. Prabowo tended to use more judgements and appreciations to show his attitudes. On the other hand, Jokowi preferred to use affect, which is desire and trust, to express his attitude. Solidarities were performed in their attitudes by means of concern toward audiences and by means of respect between appraisers. Thus solidarities are responsible for bringing social changes such as habits, behavior, mindset, value, and norms, and also in terms of the developments of technology and transportation. Keywords: debates, ideology, positive discourse Political debate contains other purposes besides winning or losing in giving an opposing argument. In political debate, the speaker can seek attention to the audiences to get their vote in the context of the presidential election. Moreover, the role of language in political speech becomes a device to convince their audiences (Fayyadh, 2014). The speaker uses a certain linguistic strategy to overcome the opponent and to persuade the audiences simultaneously, for instance using political rhetoric, politeness strategies, and propaganda language (Amanda, 2017). As its function to overcome the opponent, power is negotiated by the speaker. As its function to overcome the opponent, power is negotiated by the speaker (van Dijk, 1993). In this case, the speaker was considered as a powerful participant because the speaker can control the plot of the debate by giving an argument. The terms of powerful and less powerful participants were introduced by Fairclough, (1996:46). The relationship of subject and power is frequently under the domain of critical discourse analysis, where the discursive sources of power, dominance, inequality, and bias are examined. Further, ideology sometimes is imposed on critical