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More than a month after the vote, the General Election Commission confirmed the results of the presidential elections in Indonesia, the large South-East Asian country with over 270 million inhabitants. The new president will be former general Prabowo Subianto, outgoing defense minister, who had a big lead in the polls both before and after the vote. The candidacy of right-wing Prabowo Subianto was also supported by outgoing president Joko Widodo, despite his (centre-left) Indonesian Democratic Struggle Party having proposed another candidate.
Prabowo Subianto obtained 58.6 percent of the votes, more than double the second most voted candidate, the former governor of Jakarta Anies Baswedan, who was stuck at 24.9 percent. Anies Baswedan had also been minister of education and rector of an Islamic university: he obtained a large majority in the northwestern province of Aceh, which is particularly religious. The third most voted candidate was Ganjar Pranowo, from Widodo’s party, who took 16.5 percent. In Indonesia the counting is very slow: although it was known that the official results of the elections would be announced on March 20, Prabowo Subianto had already declared himself the winner immediately afterwards.
Both Ganjar Pranowo and Anies Baswedan spoke of “structural, systemic and mass fraud” in Indonesia’s electoral system, but provided no evidence to support the accusation. Both had already said that they would appeal to the Supreme Court: to do so, however, they had to wait for the announcement of the official results, and now they have three days to do so.
Prabowo Subianto, 72, is part of the nationalist and right-wing Greater Indonesia Movement Party. He is very close to the country’s more traditional elite, is supported by radical Islamic groups who often act as a sort of morality police and is the ex-husband of the daughter of General Suharto, dictator of Indonesia for three decades between 1965 and 1988. He is also a former army general, who during his time as a soldier had been accused of human rights violations committed during the years of the dictatorship: in East Timor, fighting to free itself from Indonesian occupation, and in particular from massacre occurred in 1983 in the city of Kraras, when hundreds of people were killed.
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Together with Prabowo, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the eldest son of outgoing president Joko Widodo, was elected as vice president. The mechanism by which this was made possible has created many concerns about the health of democracy in Indonesia: last October the country’s highest court, presided over by Widodo’s brother-in-law, had changed the eligibility rules for the vice presidency to adapt them to the president’s son, that without these changes he would not have been able to run because he was too young. The court had in fact lowered the minimum age to 35 if the candidate had been mayor for at least one term: this is exactly the case of Gibran Rakabuming Raka.
Widodo has already been elected for two terms, and could not run again. Theoretically, presidents should remain neutral and not support any candidate during the election campaign. According to many, with his actions Joko Widodo, who is quite popular, would have expressed a preference for Prabowo Subianto, albeit veiled.