Indonesian Court Rejects Election Challenge, Clearing Way for Joko Presidency

International New York Times | 21 August 2014

Indonesian police fired tear gas as they dispersed supporters of the losing presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto during a protest on Thursday in Jakarta. Credit Beawiharta/Reuters

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesia’s Constitutional Court on Thursday rejected claims by Prabowo Subianto, who lost the July presidential election, that the voting had been rigged, a widely expected ruling that cleared the way for the populist governor of Jakarta, Joko Widodo, to become the country’s next leader.

The court ruled that Mr. Prabowo, a former army general, had failed to produce evidence backing his claim that the election was marred by “massive, structured and systematic fraud.”

Mr. Joko, who just two years ago was the mayor of a midsize city in Central Java, is to be sworn in as president on Oct. 20. He defeated Mr. Prabowo by 53 percent to 47 percent in the July 9 vote, Indonesia’s third direct presidential election since its transition to democracy following the ouster of the authoritarian president Suharto in 1998.

Before the ruling on Thursday, thousands of police officers, some wearing riot gear, surrounded the Constitutional Court building in Central Jakarta amid fears of violence by angry supporters of Mr. Prabowo, a former commander of Indonesia’s Special Forces. The police at one point clashed with protesters trying to march to the court building in the afternoon, firing tear gas and shooting water cannons, which ultimately dispersed them.

Over all, more than 40,000 police and military personnel were deployed in and around the Indonesian capital on Thursday, specifically to provide security for the court’s ruling. Authorities advised city residents to avoid traveling near the court building, and some schools and businesses closed early.

Mr. Prabowo, a former son-in-law of Suharto who has been accused of human rights abuses during his military career, had said there were massive irregularities in both the casting and the counting of ballots in July. He said that the number of voters exceeded official voter rolls at 52,000 polling stations across the sprawling archipelago, rendering some 21 million votes suspect.

However, the Constitutional Court, the sole and final adjudicator of election disputes in Indonesia, rejected Mr. Prabowo’s claims, saying his legal team had failed to submit any credible evidence of fraud or other violations of the country’s electoral laws.

"Based on this determination, the Constitutional Court rejects all the appeals of the applicant,” said Hamdan Zoelva, the court’s chief justice.

The judges had been widely expected to reject Mr. Prabowo’s appeal, given that the country’s General Elections Commission and independent election observers had dismissed his claims, as had many political analysts.

The ruling Thursday affirmed the startling rise of Mr. Joko, 53, who was born and raised in a slum area in the city of Surakarta, also known as Solo, in Central Java Province. He grew up to be a carpenter and later a furniture exporter before entering politics in 2005. He was twice elected mayor of his hometown, then governor of Jakarta in 2012, a role in which he gained national attention for his common touch.

Mr. Joko, widely known as Jokowi, will be Indonesia’s seventh president and the first not to have emerged from the country’s political elite or to have been an army general. He has promised to focus on the needs of ordinary people in a country that, while a member of the Group of 20 major economies, has more than 100 million people living on $2 a day or less.

His agenda includes ridding the national bureaucracy of inefficiency and corruption through electronic budgeting, purchasing and audits; increasing infrastructure spending; eliminating energy subsidies that cost tens of billions of dollars annually; and addressing economic inequality.

While Mr. Joko has been widely seen as bringing new excitement to Indonesia’s political scene, which for decades has been ruled by aloof members of the elite, the new president could face formidable obstacles the moment he is sworn in.

The coalition of parties that backed Mr. Prabowo’s campaign will hold 68 percent of the seats in the incoming House of Representatives, which was elected in April and convenes in early October. Mr. Joko’s Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle came in first with 20 percent of the seats, but other large parties supported Mr. Prabowo in July. Chief among them was the Golkar party, Mr. Suharto’s political vehicle for 32 years, which came in second in the April legislative election.

Mr. Prabowo has pledged to keep the coalition together in order to, among other things, challenge Mr. Joko’s legitimacy as president regardless of the Constitutional Court’s ruling.

“If Prabowo can really keep his majority coalition together after the rejection of his bid by the Constitutional Court, Jokowi would face years of political resistance to his agenda,” Donald K. Emmerson, director of the Southeast Asia Forum at Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, said before the ruling.

Yet there have been signs in recent days that Mr. Prabowo’s coalition was cracking. Eva Sundari, a lawmaker from Mr. Joko’s party, said two parties had approached the Joko campaign about switching sides, including the departing governing party of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who is constitutionally barred from seeking a third five-year term. There has been much speculation that Golkar, which has been a member of every democratically elected governing coalition since 1999, will also abandon Mr. Prabowo.

“These parties follow the sources of money and power, generally, and clearly both of those are now on the other side,” said John Kurtz, head of Asia for the consulting firm A.T. Kearney and a longtime Indonesia political analyst. “Interestingly, the president-elect’s camp has quietly made room for some of the major money players that were most ready to change coats and join the other camp.”

While openly welcoming parties from Mr. Prabowo’s camp into his fold since he was declared the winner last month, Mr. Joko has nonetheless vowed not to trade political support for posts in his administration. He also said he would appoint as many apolitical technocrats as possible to his cabinet.

But Burhanuddin Muhtadi, executive director of Indikator Politik, a prominent Indonesian polling organization, said he expected about 40 percent of Mr. Joko’s cabinet posts to go to political appointees, given the political realities of Indonesia’s emerging democracy.

“Jokowi is likely to appoint a majority of technocrats and professionals, but still, even they have support from political parties,” Mr. Burhanuddin said. “But they likely will be the kind that are sort of linked to their respective parties but have no official affiliation, which is better.”