Bawaslu clears both presidential tickets

JAKARTA. An official with the Elections Monitoring Agency (Bawaslu) has said that the agency has determined that candidate pairs Joko “Joko” Widodo-Jusuf Kalla and Prabowo Subianto-Hatta Rajasa had not jumped the gun ahead of the official campaign start date set by the General Elections Commission (KPU).

“According to our legal review, what Jokowi did was not a campaign violation because he did not promote any of his programs,” Bawaslu commissioner Nelson Simanjuntak said as quoted by Antara news agency on Saturday night.

Nelson said Jokowi had explained to Bawaslu in person that he had no intention of campaigning during his speech after being assigned election number "2" at KPU headquarters on June 1.

During the event, Jokowi made a statement during his speech, after the number “2” was drawn, saying that “two was a number of balance”, and encouraged the people to vote for himself and Kalla.

Jokowi and Kalla are supported by the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), along with its coalition partners, the NasDem Party, the National Awakening Party (PKB) and the Hanura Party, which have secured a total of 39.97 percent or 207 out of the total 560 seats at the House of Representatives.

Also on Saturday, Nelson said Bawaslu had determined that candidate pair Prabowo-Hatta had also been cleared of an alleged campaign violation, when they attended a meeting with dozens of Democratic Party executives to present their programs on June 1.

“Prabowo and Hatta were not guilty because they attended a closed meeting, where they presented their ‘grand design’ for the nation’s future, not their programs,” he said.

Nelson added that both the Prabowo-Hatta team and the Democratic Party were unaware that TV One, a private TV station owned by Golkar Party chairman Aburizal Bakrie, planned to broadcast the event.

“However, Bawaslu decided that TV One had violated broadcasting regulations. We will ask the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPI) to discipline the television station according to the regulations,” he said. (gda)