Tickets praise court for eliminating runoff

Both presidential tickets, Prabowo Subianto-Hatta Rajasa and Joko “Jokowi” Widodo-Jusuf Kalla, and the General Elections Commission (KPU), welcomed Thursday’s ruling by the Constitutional Court that the presidential election will be decided in one round due to a vague article in the 2008 Presidential Election Law.

“The court’s decision is in line with what we have been preparing for. We have always believed Jokowi will win the presidency regardless of the ruling,” Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) politician Ahmad Basarah with the Jokowi-Kalla camp said.

NasDem Party politician Ferry Mursyidan Baldan, also from the same camp, said that the court “has clarified the meaning of a presidential election. Without the ruling, the presidential election could just go on without an end.”

Fadli Zon, secretary of the Prabowo-Hatta campaign said that he welcomed the court’s ruling.

“The court did what it was supposed to do, to end confusion and uncertainty,” he said.

Article 159 of the 2008 law was the cause of the “confusion”. It states: “The elected president and vice president are those candidates who gain more than 50 percent of the vote, while also garnering a minimum of 20 percent of the vote in more than half of the provinces in Indonesia,” or 17 provinces.

According to the article, if no candidates meet the criteria, the candidates must square off in a runoff election.

But the court has made it clear that the article is inapplicable for an election with only two pairs of candidates.

Article 159 was designed to accommodate an election with more than two presidential tickets, said the court’s chief justice, Hamdan Zoelva.

“It means, if there are only two candidate pairs, the elected president and vice president are the ticket that gets the most votes,” justice Muhammad Alim said.

The decision has also sent a wave of relief through the KPU, which had previously assumed a
second election would still be possible even though there were only two candidates involved in this year’s election.

KPU chairman Husni Kamil Manik said that he welcomed the ruling and that the commission would immediately follow up on it.

“We will discuss the matter internally first. Because we also don’t know the details of the decision yet,” he said, adding that it would take at least one day for the KPU to issue relevant regulations that break down the court’s ruling.

The KPU finally dropped its plan to issue a decree to regulate how the two tickets would compete again in the second round if neither Prabowo-Hatta nor Jokowi-Kalla met the electoral spread requirement.

The plan was made after both camps previously consulted with the KPU. According to KPU commissioner Hadar Nafis Gumay, the Prabowo-Hatta camp tended to favor the two-round scenario, while Jokowi-Kalla’s thought otherwise.

Separately, Law and Human Rights Minister Amir Syamsuddin said the government also welcomed the ruling. “The court has ruled what will bring more benefit to the country,” the Democratic Party politician said.

The plaintiffs consisted of 15 people with various backgrounds and professions from lawyers to lecturers.

They claimed they represented the general public, who felt that it would be unwise to require the public to vote twice for the same candidates.

Having only one election round would also save Rp 3.2 trillion (US$268.5 million) from the state budget, according to Home Minister Gamawan Fauzi.