Election Commission awards Jakarta governor
the win, but Prabowo says no
Although
Jakarta Governor Joko Widodo has officially won Indonesia’s presidential
election in the bitterest race in the country’s young democratic history, a
challenge by his opponent, Prabowo Subianto, could put the election in limbo
until mid-August.
The
race has been described as the biggest test of Indonesia’s democratic system
since the first race in 1999 following the downfall of the strongman Suharto –
Prabowo’s onetime father-in-law. If Joko prevails, and most analysts believe he
will, it will be a political earthquake, an enormous contrast to the regimes
that have run the country since independence.
Assuming
Prabowo’s challenge fails, Jokowi will first have to put together a formidable
team to straighten out the government tender process, clean up the tax regime,
mend a court system in which few decisions are reached on their merits, and
reform the national police and attorney general’s office, both of which are
among the country’s most corrupt institutions. He is certain to face serious
opposition from entrenched interests.
He
faces an elected legislature that regularly delivers up a platoon or so of
members to be prosecuted for corruption by the country’s formidable Corruption
Eradication Commission. To accomplish many of the reforms he envisions, he will
have to push them through a body that historically has been for sale to the
highest bidder and which passes only a handful of bills each year.
First
he must take office. Although the General Election Commission ruled today (July
22) that Joko and his running mate, Jusuf Kalla, had won the July 6 poll with
53.16 percent of the vote against 46.48 percent for his opponent, the
62-year-old former Special Forces general has refused to concede.
Prabowo’s
followers are expected to file an ethics charge against the Jakarta branch of
the elections commission and also file criminal charges against the commission
itself, in addition to challenging the results themselves in the country’s
Constitutional Court in an effort to in effect delegitimize the electoral
process. Protracted delay raises concerns that confidence in the economy,
Southeast Asia’s biggest, could fall, with international investors watching
closely.
But
political analysts in Jakarta say the magnitude of the win, amounting at least
6 million of the 130 million-odd votes cast, makes it unlikely that Prabowo’s
challenge would succeed. Past recounts have only reversed a few thousand votes.
Most expect Jokowi, as he is universally known, to take power after the process
shakes out.
Nonetheless,
there are fears that Prabowo’s supporters could turn violent. Some have
threatened to rally outside the electoral commission offices in central Jakarta
although no problems have materialized. As many as 250,000 police have been
deployed across the sprawling archipelago nation to attempt to keep order in a
country where violence has often flared.
On
Monday, after it became clear that Joko and Kalla officially had a commanding
lead, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who leaves office on Oct. 20,
obliquely told Prabowo to sit down and shut up, telling reporters that
“accepting defeat is noble.” Later, he urged the loser to “go peacefully the
constitutional route.”
However,
the worry all along has been that if the outcome was relatively close, the
mercurial Prabowo would pull out all the stops in challenging the decision. He
now has three days to deliver his challenge and the evidence backing it up to
the Constitutional Court, which has 14 working days to decide if the challenge
is valid, prolonging the stalemate to as long as Aug. 21, with attendant
political tension. However, as political analysts have pointed out, thousands
of volunteer poll-watchers kept an eye on almost every ballot counted, making
it questionable where Prabowo will find his evidence.
There
has rarely been a clearer choice across Asia between the two, Jokowi a
soft-spoken onetime furniture salesman who ascended swiftly up the electoral
ladder, first as mayor of the relatively small city of Solo before taking on
the governorship just less than two years ago. Prabowo is an echo of his
old-guard former father-in-law, a fiery nationalist who still bears the scars
of his tenure as a special forces general, having been credibly accused of a
wide range of human rights violations. Despite his divorce from Suharto’s
daughter Siti Hediati Hariyadi, better known as Titiek, he remains tied to the
Suharto interests, who are believed to have stolen anywhere from US$15 billion
to US$35 billion from the treasury. The family is still prominent and
un-arrested in Jakarta.
Once
installed in power – assuming he is – Jokowi faces an enormous job, of
transforming a country whose longstanding predilection towards corruption
defeated Yudhoyono’s fledgling reformasi efforts and stirred concerns that even
members of his family could face prosecution. Yudhoyono’s first term was marked
by considerable promise, concluding a peace deal with the intractable
separatists in Aceh and, through his finance minister, Sri Mulyani Indrawati,
putting the country on a sound fiscal base. But in his second term he allowed
Aburizal Bakrie, the tycoon who heads Golkar, to push Sri Mulyani out of the
government, bringing reform to a stop. His Democratic Party fell into a mire of
corruption, with some of its most promising young reformers eventually charged
with corruption on a massive scale.
By
contrast Jokowi, from the time he took office as mayor of Solo, has been
something so rare in Asian politics as to seem exotic, an outsider with no
machine connections to deliver him to power. In his stints as a public official
in both Solo and Jakarta, he has been a quite capable public official, making
inroads in Jakarta’s chaotic traffic and pollution, something his predecessor,
place-sitter (and Yudhoyono ally) Fauzi Bowo appeared never to have tried,
instituting a public health plan and forcing civil servants to actually come to
work.
His
economic policies remain vague. He faces a current account deficit expected to
exceed 3 percent of GDP, driving the urgency for a cut in the country’s massive
fuel subsidies.In meetings with fund managers, he has said he would cut the
subsidies, pour funds into the country’s creaking infrastructure, reform the
education system and encourage investment in energy to propel the flagging
power grid.
But
Indonesia has been in the grip of economic nationalism that has actively
discouraged eager international investors, with a heavy crackdown supervised by
Prabowo’s running mate, Hatta Rajasa, on the resources extraction sector. A
measure to ban shipments of a wide variety of ores has caused havoc, for
instance, in China’s nickel procurement process, forcing factory owners to go
far abroad into Africa to look for substitute supplies. At this point it is
unknown where Jokowi’s preferences lie.
Nonetheless
the markets have greeted the announcement with relief. The Jakarta Composite
Index has risen by 1.1 percent over the past two days. But they could now stall
out until it is certain that Jokowi’s victory is assured.
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