Anyone But Jokowi

So the counting is underway, presumably. Unlike every previous election, even in the bad old days of the New Order, there have been no updates of the votes so far. Optimists will say this is no problem - after all the results aren't due to be announced until the beginning of May, so the General Elections Commission is just doing its job in completely unprecedented, but entirely legal, secrecy.

However, it is important to remember that people like Golkar leader Aburizal Bakrie and Gerindra leader Prabowo must be absolutely desperate to stop the wildly popular Jokowi from entering the presidential race because they would lose. Although the political elite in Jakarta think that the selection of the country's leader is up to them, rather than the people, in 20o9 the electorate reelected current president SBY because most people genuinely wanted him to win. This has terrified the elite, who are faced with the prospect of surrendering the choice of leader to the people. And given a choice, they are likely to pick the Indonesian Party of Struggle's (PDIP) candidate, Jokowi, in the presidential election on 9 July.

So, how to stop him? In the old days, it was just a matter of fiddling the count. However, thanks to a number of quick count results announced shortly after the legislative election polls closed, that won't be so easy. If the final vote of any of the major parties turns out to be wildly different from the quick count results, all of which are in reasonable agreement, everybody will cry foul.

In order to nominate a presidential candidate, a party must either win 25% of the popular vote in the legislative elections (none did) or control 20% of the seats in the legislature, the DPR. That would be 112 seats. Parties are allowed to join together to make up either total. Therefore to stop the PDIP nominating Jokowi, the other parties have to ensure it cannot find enough support from other parties. The easiest way to do this is for the two richest parties (with the two most desperate presidential wannabes) to simply pay off the other parties so they won't join the PDIP coalition. But...ooops. The Nasdem Party vehicle of media tycoon Suraya Paloh has announced it will back Jokowi. The total vote of the PDIP + Nasdem is around 26%, which is just enough. Surya Paloh is so rich that he'd probably prefer political power to even more money, making him immune to bribes that Golkar or Gerindra could afford. And since Nasdem has cracked, other minor parties may well feel that it's too late, and they might as well join the PDIP - except for the terminally foolish United Development Party (PPP), which has just been overruled by its leader and has backed Jokowi.

Option 2 then is to stop the PDIP (and now Nasdem) from getting their 112 seats. One way to do this would be to play games with the vote shares at the provincial level to ensure that the national share of the vote still agrees with the quick counts, but that the PDIP + Nasdem don't win, thanks to the complex way these things are worked out.

For them to get away with this, there would have to be no announcements at all about the ongoing count so they have time to fiddle things between the count being finished and the results being announced...

Now what?

So the voting has come and gone for most areas, apart from the odd mix-up. No sign of any counting so far, which is rather odd...

Nobody got the 25 percent of the vote they needed to nominate the president of their choice. The biggest surprise was the poor performance of the Indonesian Party of Struggle (PDI-P): the much talked about "Jokowi effect" - a magical rise in their fortunes as a result of nominating the popular governor of Jakarta for the presidency - didn't really happen. According to the "quick count" result, the party got around 19%, little better than in 2004, and the 33% of 1999 seems to have been an all-time high for the party. Or perhaps the Jokowi effect was little more than a minor reversal of the PDI-P''s decline.

In any case, they stuffed it up. At the start of the campaign, all the PDI-P TV ads featured party chairwoman Megawati's daughter Puan, who is little more than a thinner and slightly less stupid version of her mother. Perhaps the PDI-P looked at the results of its private polling and had a bit of a panic at the projected vote for Mussolini wannabee Prabowo's Gerindra Party vehicle, so hastily nominated Jokowi for the top job. By then it was too late, and the party didn't do nearly as well as Mega had hoped.

Meanwhile, the Islamist parties, having been written off by many (including me, ahem!) did better than expected. This may be the result of a very low turnout, with only the loyal supporters of the minor parties (including startup Nasdem) having bothered to turn out. Those who voted for the major parties last time may well have stayed at home in disgust, and the percentage of the vote (not the actual number of votes) of the small parties rose as a result.

And now who gets to run for the presidency. History tells us that the PDI-P will find an Islamist non-entity to run as vice-president alongside the nationalist Jokowi. But the PDI-P may well be tempted to sidle up to the National Awakening Party (PKB), which seems to have won around 9%, presumably mostly in its East Java stronghold. Despite not having a serious presidential candidate (singer Rhoma Irama?! Please!), 19+9=28. The PDI-P may well feel the need to recruit more widely, perhaps flirting with media tycoon Surya Paloh's Nasdem Party vehicle. That should produce some sympathetic coverage on Surya's Metro TV.

Meanwhile the Golkar Party may end up getting into bed with Prabowo's Gerindra Party and a few other minnows. Insanely presidency-obsessed Prabowo may settle for the vice-presidential spot if Golkar leader Bakrie provides a cast-iron promise to support Prabowo for the presidency in 2014. Bakrie will then have 5 years to think of a way to break that promise, which should be plenty of time.

Nothing, even the turnout, is certain yet, because of the strange silence from the General Elections Commission. Unlike previous years, there have been no announcements at all about the interim count - not even from the capital, where the process should be easier. All rather odd...

What will Prabowo do Now?

Abandon Hope all ye Who Vote for Him

So it's crunch time. The nastiest man in Indonesian politics is running for the top job again via his Gerindra Party vehicle, which he established when he failed to secure the presidential nomination from the Golkar Party (Wiranto and Surya Paloh also established vehicles for the same reason).

But this vicious thug must be seething with rage, because the seemingly unstoppable Jokowi, governor of Jakarta, has been nominated by the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP). That party's ineffective leader, Megawati, seems to have realised that she could not win the presidency, having failed twice before, and having been a useless vice-president. So all Prabowo's efforts to pretend to be a friend of the farmers - presumably he didn't mention the ranch and horses he owns - may have been for nothing, because Jokowi has a track record of actually doing things from the poor even when there isn't an election coming up.

So what does Prabowo do, apart from lose. He can't really hope for the vice-presidential nomination, because nationalist parties traditionally look for Islamist VP candidates to balance things out - which is probably why Jokowi paid a visit to the head office of Muhammadiyah, Indonesia's second largest Muslim organization.

This means Prabowo can either get rid of Jokowi, or get nasty. Getting rid of Jokowi may not be easy - if anything happens to him, Prabowo will be the number one suspect - and the other parties will make sure the people know it. So that leaves getting nasty. One possible avenue for the rabidly anti-Chinese Prabowo is to remind the people of Jakarta that they will get a ethnic Chinese governor if Jokowi wins the presidency and his deputy takes over. But that's only relevant to the people of Jakarta. So what else to do? Jokowi is Muslim and always has been, and he's ethnic Javanese, so no scope for nastiness there.

Prabowo must be hoping there are some skeletons in Jokowi's closet, such as attempting a coup d'etat, kidnapping and torturing student activists or instigating riots in the capital. Oops.

Report

Name: Yudhoyono, S.B

Class: Javanese upper

Geography: His knowledge of Javanese geography enabled him to travel outside Jakarta on the day of the big demonstrations. His opportunistic traveling skills are developing well.

History: Poor performance. The recent banning of books about the 1965 army coup and Indonesia's colonization of West Papua show poor awareness of the need for truth-based history.

Economics: A good start, with the reappointment of Sri Mulyani as finance minister, but seems to have lost track of Rp6.7 trillion somewhere...

Biology: Poor awareness of animal conservation. Unable to help the defenseless anti-corruption gecko when attacked by the police crocodile.

Mathematics: Poor grasp of percentages. For example, apparently unaware that winning 60 percent of the vote in the election means there is no need for pussyfooting around.

Indonesian language: Does not really understand the meaning of words like "demokrasi", and takes criticism of him as dangerous.

Physics: Poor - appears to believe that water can be used as fuel. He was heard referring to this as "blue energy".

Overall: Yudhoyono is a promising pupil with an unfortunate tendency to become very easily distracted. His first 100 days were dominated by squabbles about corruption and a bank bailout, which meant he achieved almost nothing. Must do better.

Farewell to an Honest Politician

Abdurrahman ad-Dakhil Wahid, better known as Gus Dur, Indonesia's fourth president, died on 30 December 2009. The timing of his departure must have given those compilers of "Review of the Year" a bit of a headache as he would have missed the boat. In Indonesia, the effects were apparent in wall-to-wall TV coverage and the cancellation of a few new year fireworks displays. And of course the inevitable silly murder rumors - as if that would be worth doing now.

But he left an important legacy. Not the National Awakening Party (PKB), which resumed its civil war before he was cold in the grave, and which seems destined to shrivel away like other Indonesian political parties built around a popular figure (are you listening Megawati and SBY?). And not in any great oratory to be quoted down the years (except Gitu aja? Kok repot? [Is that all? Why such a fuss?]). Gus Dur stands out because he may have been Indonesia's only honest politician.

Despite the poor reputation of politicians, they don't lie all the time. There are three types of political lie: the factual lie (Example: Indonesian students burned down the Senen market in 1974 - it was actually the military trying to discredit protesting students); lies of opinion or belief (I really care about the people - Example: just about everything Suharto said) and lies about intentions (ditto). Of these three, in democracies, the first kind is the most risky because things get found out. If they do come to light, it's often the end of a political career (but not always). The latter two are impossible to prove either way because opinions are unprovable and because "the best laid plans of mice and men..." respectively.

But Gus Dur appears to have avoided lying almost entirely. Of course he had his flaky moments, and arguably describing the House of Representatives (DPR) as a "kindergarten" was a factual lie - they are nowhere near as well-behaved as infants - but he seems to have been honest in all he said - even if it was destined to land him in trouble.

He protested about the actions of the dictator Suharto - by direct letter on occasion. And during his presidency, he went to East Timor to apologize for Indonesia's occupation, he threw an extremist Muslim leader out of the palace halfway through an audience, he tried to have the antiquated ban on even discussing communism lifted, he visited Israel, he made Chinese New Year a public holiday and lifted the New Order racist ban on the use of Chinese characters, and he made lots of good jokes. And all the time, he said what he thought.

He paid a heavy price for speaking his mind. Not only did the Indonesian "Military" oversee his downfall from the presidency in 2002, allowing his replacement by the more malleable Megawati, but a mysterious car crash in the 1990s paralyzed his wife. Ironically, Gus Dur's own father died in a car crash - perhaps that's where the idea came from...

There are many self-serving Indonesian politicians who would do well to follow the example of Gus Dur. Don't lie about your income, origins, convictions (moral and criminal), intentions, number of wives or past. You may be surprised how much good it does you.

Bye bye Gus Dur. Indonesia is a sadder place without you.

Fux Populi

Well it's all over bar the corruption. With the bothersome necessity of the election behind them, the new faces in the House of Representatives can get down to the serious business of clawing back the money they had to spend to get there in the first place – and then some. The cash they splurged out during the election campaign was really nothing more than an interest free loan to the poor. Now it will have to be repaid in the form of bribes to the legislators funded out of services that should have been provided for the voters.

Kompas newspaper featured a scathing cartoon a few days ago. A poor boy and his father are standing amid the rubble of a post-earthquake scene. The boy asks, "why isn't your political party setting up aid posts for the victims?". "The election's over now," replies the father.

And the snouts are already nearing the trough. According to the 6 September edition of the Jakarta Globe, the inauguration of the 692 recently elected legislators will cost almost Rp35 billion, or more than Rp50 million per elected official. Of course at only Rp200 per voter, this is only the start. Mind you, it's still enough for 70 modern community health centers....

Phew!

So it's all over. The Constitutional Court decided the voters (and all the polls, before and after the vote) were right and Megawati and Jusuf Kalla and their running mates with dodgy human rights records lost.

True to past form, Megawati's supporters ran riot, starting fires in the street and causing traffic jams as is their wont whenever Mega fails to become president. Strangely Kompas newspaper failed to report the disturbances - it must have cost the PDIP - Mega's party - a fortune to keep that out of the press. Megawati herself is sulking as usual, and has said nothing beyond a grudging statement that she "understood" the verdict, which given her famously limited intellectual capacity is perhaps the most we could hope for. Her running mate Prabowo must be seething. He put so much money into the campaign (or rather his brother did) and it was all for nothing. Of course there is a chance that Prabowo will try again in 2014.

And that's not really an option for Jusuf Kalla, Megawati or Wiranto, who will be 72, 67 and 67 respectively come the next election. Kalla has said he would go back to his home town if he lost, and Mega has implied she wouldn't try again if defeated. Wiranto might have another go, but voters may scorn a two-time loser (hear that Mega?).

Given that Jusuf Kalla stood on a Golkar Party ticket against President SBY, it's possible there will be no seats for that party in SBY's new cabinet, which is presumably why current Coordinating Minister and mega-tycoon Aburizal Bakrie is frantically trying to get the party chairmanship following Kalla's resignation. After all his Epicentrum construction project is in trouble and he needs a key positon to ensure he has enough clout to keep the creditors at bay....

Meanwhile the head of the incompetent General Elections Commission (KPU), Abdul Hafiz Anshary, has refused to resign, saying that to do so would break the law as Law No. 22/2007 says KPU members only step down if they are sick, die or are fired...

The election may be over (even though the fat lady hasn't sung), but politics continues...

NOT FAIR .. I want to be president!

So SBY won, as predicted. Ex general Subianto Prabowo, who owns 90 horses but has been promoting himself a champion of the poor, and who bought himself a vice-presidential ticket from Megawati Sukarnoputri has not stopped sulking since the opinion polls during the campaign showed he and his has-been sidekick were not managing to bribe their way to popularity. Then came the quick count polls on election day that showed SBY with just over 60%, Mega-Prabowo with around 37% and the joke pairing of Jusuf Kalla-Wiranto on 12%. NOT FAIR - the polls have been fixed, cried the disgraced former general. Then the results started trickling in showing similar figures. Prabowo then accused the Gneeral Election Commission of fixing the results to match the quick count polls, claiming that he had a poll showing very different numbers. And finally the General Elections Commission announced the final result: SBY with just over 60%, Mega-Prabowo with around 37% and the joke pairing of Jusuf Kalla-Wiranto on 12%.

In a sulk, Megafatty and Prabowo refused to attend the announcement of the results - at least Kalla and Wiranto turned up for that - and now both pairs of losers plan to contest the result. What does Prabowo want? The results of the poll he commissioned to be used as the official result, or a rerun of the poll? He'd take the first option if he could and does not seem to realize that he'd lose a rerun because the people are not as stupid as he hopes they are, and would rightly punish him for being such a poor loser. He does of course have Megawati to learn from in that regard. Having failed to be crowned president in 1999, she settled for the number two job until she could work with her former enemies in the military to oust poor old Gus Dur and claim the top job just like Daddy. She then did nothing for three years and was defeated in the 2004 presidential election. She didn't accept that result either and refused to speak to, yet alone congratulate her successor.

So despite the statements that all candidates were prepared to accept victory or defeat, the childish actions of the losers show them to be unfit for the jobs they failed to get. Phew!

Putting the Boot in

The election campaign is well underway, and dear me! What a bore. The problem is that all the candidates are terrified of saying anything they could be attacked for, so are sticking to safe ground. The first presidential debate was a classic example. Former (failed) president Megawati actually did rather well, saying more in one evening than she said during her who pitiful two years in the palace. Anyway after a two-minute waffle about overseas workers, President SBY actually said he "agreed with her 200%". Hmm. Hardly a war of words. Incidentally Megawati seems to be running the same campaign as her (failed) attempt to get reelected in 2004 when she went on and on about how she was the prettiest candidate (like this time, the others were all men you see). If she makes the joke ONE MORE TIME, Pemiloopy is going to feature an unkind jibe about the size of her behind.

Anyway, in the absence of any real debates, thank Dawkins there is some entertainment to be had. It's known as "black campaigning", and it's much more fun that the ordinary kind. For example, because they are too frightened to attack SBY directly because he is too popular (yes, I know how weird that sounds), his opponents have decided his mild-mannered running mate Boediono is fair game. So what have they come up with? "He's a neoliberal!" Gosh. What's that then? Well, it's something to do with the free market (you know, not subsidizing fuel for rich car owners or trying to buck the market). Presumably they sat down and thought this one up together. What has Boediono done to deserve this heinous insult? Not sure, but it seems he got a PhD from the Wharton School of Economics, which is a FOREIGN place. Even then, it doesn't add up. In the first place, when he was finance minister, Boediono was responsible for paying off lots of Indonesia's foreign debt (accumulated due to the incompetence of Kalla's Golkar Party) and twice substantially reduced inflation. And he helped invent something called Pancasila Economics, which is based on the village system and is aimed at reducing inequality.

In more "black campaigning":

• Boediono's wife is not really a Muslim, and may even be a Catholic (too silly for words)
• Megawati sold off national assets when she was president (er... true, but necessary)
• Both SBY and his running mate are Javanese (er... true but so what)
• Wiranto was involved in human rights violations in the past (see above)
• Prabowo has dual-nationality (not true, and why on earth would it matter?)
• SBY and Boediono's wives don't wear the Islamic headscarf (true, but so what?)
• Prabowo is immensely rich, but is proposing a "people's economy (OK, that one's true)
• Kalla's companies would become nepotistic and corrupt if he is elected (become?)
• Prabowo was involved in human rights violations in the past (duh...)
• SBY is a ditherer who finds it hard to make decisions (true)

You see. Much more fun that agreeing with each other 200%

The Things They Say (3)

Ex-general Wiranto guested on a chat show last week on Metro TV, a station owned by Suarya Paloh, a key figure in the Golkar Party (the vehicle of president Suharto during Indonesia's New Order military dictatorship). Wiranto is running for vice-president, despite saying he only wanted the top job (see Number Ones Only Please) - the presidential candidate is chair of er... the Golkar Party. Well, that explains the fawning and sycophantic nature of the interviewer.

Anyway, Wiranto was asked how he came to have so much money. "I was surprised to find myself so rich", he purred. Apparently he scraped together Rp81 billion (around US$8 million) from his meager salary as Army commander to buy a few parcels of land, and inflation did the rest.

Anyway, on to the thorny question of human rights. "Are you a human rights abuser?" smiled Andy F. Noya, the friendly interviewer. Shameful as it is to report, the audience laughed!! Perhaps there is something funny about murdering people, burning their homes, pouring concrete in irrigation ditches and herding thousands of people across the border that had escaped me...

Anyway, back to the ex-general. After saying that claims made at the time of his unsuccessful 2004 presidential bid were no longer valid, he had the bare-faced cheek to claim he had never been indicted. Hmmm. Let's have a look at The Guardian dated 25 February 2003. In case any Wiranto fans are too lazy to use their right fingers for anything other than shooting unarmed civilians, allow me to reproduce the headline here:

UN indicts general for East Timor crimes
Clear enough. That makes the above quite a lie. Murdering pig.

The Nasty Party

So it's getting dirty already. Disgraced former general Prabowo Subianto, who had to settle for the running for the number two job after Indonesia refused to vote for him in large enough numbers, is starting to show his true colours. Aside from a wish list of unimaginable expense (lots of money for all those those poor people who grow the rice he eats and presumably clean out the stables inhabited by his 90 horses), he is playing the bash-the-foreigners card. Aside from his thinly-veiled attacks on the ethnic Chinese in his TV ads (also foreigners in his eyes - he can't stand them either), he and Mega have made attacks on the influence of foreign culture - which they (actually Mega doesn't say much) say is responsible for Indonesians' ignorance of traditional culture etc etc.

So if he hates foreigners so much, two questions spring to mind. Why are he and Mega using US consulting firm Rob Allyn to boost their image (although their team issued embarrassed half denials to detik.com); and why (yet alone how) does he have US$7,572,916 to his name, according to the report he made of his assets to the General Election Commission? Oh, and Rp1,579,376,223,359 of assets in Indonesian currency, reports Kompas (30/5/09). That should come in handy if he either wants to pay off the voters or buy troublemakers if the vote doesn't go his way.

In other dirty tricks: because of his appalling human rights record, Prabowo can't even get a US visa, and the civilized world presumably views the prospect of his election with horror. Prabowo is absolutely desperate for foreign politicians to attack him so he can portray himself as a victim. Sensibly nobody is falling into that trap, so there's nothing for it but to invent news of intervention by the wily and perfidious whiteys. Hence the story in detik.com today in which Manullang, a former director of Indonesian Military Intelligence (the organization that murdered Indonesian human rights activist Munir), claims that US intelligence are actively trying to ensure a victory for incumbent President SBY. If the foreigners like him, he must be BAAAAAD, goes the theory.

Given Prabowo's past - he has been accused of attempting a coup d'etat in 1998 as well as being behind the anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta earlier the same year, and has admitted kidnapping democracy activists (who were on the same side as Megawati at the time...) - if he is already playing dirty, what will he do if he loses? Or does he hope to gain power without ever gaining a parliamentary majority as another former military man did in 1933?

No Islam Please, We're Nationalists

Indonesia's electors seem to have tired of Islamic parties. In the recent legislative elections, the major Islamic parties won just under 30% of the vote, and 164 seats in the House of Representatives. In 2004, they won over 40% of the vote and 231 seats. And in the forthcoming presidential election, there are no candidates from Islamic parties - defying the conventional wisdom (as applied in 2004) that a Nationalist-Islamist mix is best.

Voters are apparently disillusioned with the Islamists for two reasons. Firstly, despite their religious credentials, they have turned out to be no less susceptible to the temptations of corruption and the flesh - or both in at least one case. Secondly in those areas where they control the local legislature, they have shown a disturbing tendency to impose variants of Islamic Shariah law. On a national level, they pushed for the Pornography Law, which threatens to outlaw harmless activities such as Balinese women wearing little above the waist and everybody doing yoga. However President SBY supported this law in the hope of gaining support from the Islamist parties and their voters. Oops. The latest demonstration of the odd obsessions of the Islamic authorities here is their ongoing debate about whether to rule against Facebook on the grounds of its immoral pictures of women, which may corrupt the morals of young men in Islamic Boarding schools (who by all accounts access as much porn as they can whenever they get their hands on an internet-equipped computer).

Although SBY was at pains to point out the Islamic faith of his running mate in the lavish declaration of his candidacy, partly to pacify the Islamic parties in his coalition who were sulking because one of their number was not recruited for the number two job, nobody seems to mind. We can expect to see high-profile visits to mosques and other demonstrations of piety by candidates (by the way, aren't crimes against humanity against Islamic law?), but it looks as if politics and Islam are going their separate ways. Good.

Counting...Counting...Gone!

Beginning shortly after the polls closed on April 9, the General Elections Commission's (KPU) website was updated with the latest votes counted for each party nationally. News portal detik.com had their own count, which displayed pretty much the same numbers. For a few days the KPU website was updated almost hourly. Then on April 29 1t 12:39pm the site announced that the updates had stopped with 14,739,196 votes counted . Shortly after that the special website went offline. Then a few days later, on May 5, the detik.com site resumed, with 80,231,512 votes counted. Since than the total has climbed to 100,028, 285 in fits and starts, with an update or two every day.

Meanwhile, on May 4, a new section of the KPU website appeared with detailed election results from the individual electoral regions, of which there are 77. Strangely the results for Aceh showed a vote of 0 for all six of the local parties (Aceh is the only province where local parties were allowed to stand). Pemiloopy was able to save the results as they appeared - the totals were downloadable in PDF. However once the results from three of East Java's 11 electoral regions posted, the updating stopped, and that section of the KPU website has also disappeared. East Java is the province where there were widespread allegations of fraud in the gubernatorial election last year. It is also the stronghold of the divided National Awakening Party and a region where the Gerindra vehicle of disgraced former general Prabowo was hoping to trick farmers into voting for him.

So, with one day remaining for the KPU to announce the final result, as required by Article 201 (1) of the Law No. 10/2008, the earlier transparency has gone, and it is by no means certain the increasingly incompetent Commission will even get this right. We shall see tomorrow...

STOP PRESS: The KPU has said, nay confirmed, that the final results of the elections will be announced at 7:30PM on Saturday May 9, in line with the legally mandated schedule, according to detik.com. Of the 77 electoral regions, the counting has been finished in all but two. The invitations have gone out and all parties will be present for the big event at the KPU building.

All Stop. Full Steam Ahead

For some reason the counting of the legislative election results seems to have stopped completely. At least that's according the the General Election Commission (KPU) website, where the total cotes counted has been stuck at 14,484,189 for 24 hours. Have they given up trying to meet the deadline, or are they just not telling anyone what they're up to? On top of all the cockups by the KPU (chaos over the electoral roll, eligible voters not listed and therefore disenfranchised, the campaign schedule having to be changed after the campaign was already underway, ballot papers sent to the wrong provinces), this latest oddity is hardly likely to inspire confidence.

Meanwhile former president Megawati Sukarnoputri and her two new friends, the Hanura Party's former general (and indicted war criminal) Wiranto and former general (and human rights abuser) Prabowo are toying with the idea of boycotting the presidential election - not because they don't think they can won - perish the though! No, it's dur to the widepsread "fraud" in the election. Prabowo even went so far as to claim that instead of his apparent measly 5% of the vote, the fact that so many of his supporters were disenfranchised means that he actually shoul have 10%. OK, but in that case, unless the KPU is far cleverer than it looks, all parties would have suffered equally, so their vote percentages should be doubles as well. That should lead to a turnout of well over 100% - rather like the elections Indonesia's New Order used to run (with the support of people like Wiranto and Prabowo).

And poor old Jusuf Kalla still doesn't know what to do. President SBY doesn't want him, and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) even threatened to have nothing to do with his Democratic Party if he runs with JK. So Kalla is frantically looking for enough politcal dregs to scrape together to get enough votes to nominate himself. Him and Megawati running against each other should see SBY safely back to the Palace. This is assuming the boycott doesn't happen - and it does seem unlikely that the parties will all put self-interest last and support it. If the boycott did work, it would mean the presidential election would be delayed until the president issued a decree in lieu of law to change the preconditions for nomination, and a long delay could see Indonesia without a president until it's all sorted out.

Assuming Mega is too stubborn to stand down and she and Kalla each find somebody seen as suitable to run with, the presidential election may go to a run off, presenting the KPU with two more chances to make a dog's dinner of things. Time, or perhaps money, will tell.

Jakarta, we have a problem

As of 11pm today, a week after election day, the General Elections Commission (KPU) has counted eleven million votes from 57,792 polling stations. While this may sound like a splendid effort, these figures are worrying. The problem is that there are 171,265,442 Indonesians who have the right to vote and on election day there were a total of 519,920 polling stations, each with one ballot box (Kompas, 11/4/09 page 2). Each polling station caters for a maximum of 500 voters, as laid down in Article 150 of Indonesia's Law No.10/2008. If the turnout was 100%, then 10% of ballot boxes counted would mean 10% of the maximum possible votes counted. However, while 11.1% of ballot boxes have been opened, the votes counted only amount to 6.5% of the electorate. Assuming this ratio remains consistent, this means the turnout will only be 58.4%. This means something has gone wrong somewhere. Are Indonesians really that disillusioned, or did the KPU make such a mess of the election that millions of Indonesians were deprived of their right to vote? Either way, expect complaints from the (bad) losers.

Meanwhile the count goes on, but the rate the votes are being counted at is actually slowing (as shown in the graph). Tracking the results coming in today at the official General Election Website, at the current rate, they'll need another 10 weeks to finish the job.

So it looks like the KPU are pretty incompetent. Even the president has starting blaming them. However, the 64 million Rupiah question is: was the "incompetence" systematic (favoring one particular party, such as the president's Democratic Party for instance...) or was it just bog-standard incompetence. Indonesia's voters need to know...

The Things They Say (2)

• Charman of the Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle (PDIP) Advisory Council, and husband of party leader Megawati, Taufik Kiemas:"Hanura is definite, Gerindra is definite, PPP is also definite [for a coalition with the PDIP]"

• United Development Party (PPP) secretary general Irgan Chairul Mahfiz: "The figure of SBY is more dominant and it would be very naive if the PPP did not see the tendency of the people to support SBY"

Well, the PPP - never a party to put a bargepole between itself and opportunism - seems uncertain which sinking ship to desert. It is doing fairly well so far in the count, and seems to be keeping its options open. We shall see.

Meanwhile, 4.5 million votes counted so far...

Coalitionism

You've got to feel sorry for Vice-president and Golkar chairman Jusuf Kalla. He's got a tough choice to make. It's looking like Golkar won't make the 20% of votes needed to be able to nominate their presidential candidate, i.e. Jusuf Kalla. So he has two options: try and form a coalition with one or more other parties, or crawl back to President SBY and ask if he can be VP again (not president, and he is 68). The thing is, the first option means he may end up with nothing, and the second means he will almost certainly get his old job back. So what's it to be, JK?

The other parties are also in a bit of a fix. Traditionally (well OK, in 2004) the thinking is that the president and vice-president should be a nationalist-Islam pairing. So where does Megawati's PDI-P look for a VP to keep Mega company? Golkar is nationalist, so are Gerindra and Hanura. The best bet for Golkar and the PDI-P would be the squeaky clean Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), but unless President SBY is a complete fool, he will team up with the PKS (and run on an anti-corruption ticket). Among the Islamist parties, there is the United Development Party (PPP), but it's in decline and is looking increasingly tired and, frankly, old hat. What about the National Awakening Party (now without Mega's enemy Gus Dur)? The combined PDIP and PKB vote might just be enough to make the 20% , but both are very Java-centric parties, and may not carry the non-Java vote. And the National Mandate Party (PAN) has such an elitist and over-critical image that any pairing with Golkar (the New Order party that PAN opposed during the reform euphoria of the late 90s) or the PDI-P would be such breathtaking opportunism that Indonesia's voters might well see right through them.

So where does that leave Gerindra and Hanura? Leaving aside the fact that Indonesians may not want a war criminal as president, both parties may find themselves out of friends, or fighting tooth and nail (party leaders Prabowo and Wiranto hate each other) to attract enough parties to cobble together a coalition.

Whatever happens, there will be lots of humbug, hypocrisy, legal challenges to the election result and squabbles over the few months until the presidential election. Watch this space.

Calculating Politicians

The results are trickling in. Unless the General Elections Commission (KPU) gets a move on, at the current rate of counting, and allowing for a 72% turnout, the final results will be announced in late January 2011. Let's hope the counting rate improves by a factor of 21 so the KPU can meet the 30-day deadline. However the fact that their online results page has been showing the same vote tally since 9:35am on 10 April is perhaps not a good sign. Neither is the fact that the KPU homepage hasn't been updated since the day before polling day. And they haven't managed to organize the service whereby interested voters can obtain the latest results by sending an SMS text message to a special phone number. In fact it's only down to the heroic efforts of news portal detik.com that Pemiloopy is able to track the count at all. Well done guys.

Of course fans of detik.com are able to follow the count, and all the TV stations have the numbers scrolling along the bottom of the screen, but might Pemiloopy venture to point out that the national percentages are not the key figures? To show what I mean, take the "quick count" results from a previous post. If people had voted in these proportions across the nation (yes I know - they didn't), the two parties headed by the ex-generals with dubious human rights records, Gerindra and Hanura, would win no seats at all, despite garnering 4.4% and 3.6% of the vote respectively. Indonesia's voting system, which brilliantly combines the district and proportional representation systems in a way that ensures the disadvantages of both dominate, means that they would win no seats in the first round of counting (where seats are awarded based on the number of seats in the electoral regions), and none in the second (seats awarded on the remainder of the votes). In East Java, where Gerindra fondly hopes to pick up votes from disillusioned fans of Gus Dur, 4.4% (or 5.1% of the valid vote) is not enough to pick up any first round seats, and is only just enough to be in with a chance of second round seats.

So the intriguing possibility now is that despite all that money, Prabowo and Wiranto may have blown it after all.

And the winner is... Golput!

The polls have closed and the count is presumably underway. According to the official General Elections Commission (KPU) website, everybody is still on zero votes, but these things take time.

There is a chance that abstentions, known here in Indonesia as "Golput", may be the overall winner. Polling stations Pemiloopy saw today had piles of unused ballot papers, and there were many people walking around Jakarta without the indelible ink on their pinkies, which is used to stop people voting twice. The fact that this is a long weekend probably further reduced participation: train tickets are sold out and it was almost impossible to get flights to Bali. And many people may have decided either to stay in bed recovering from watching the football last night. It remains to be seen whether voter confusion and apathy mean a record low turnout.

Anyway, four polling organizations have released the results of their "quick count surveys. The average of the four polls:

• Democratic Party: 24.66%
• Indonesian Democratic Party - Struggle (PDIP): 14.96%
• Golkar: 14.04%
• Prosperous Justice Party (PKS): 7.64%
• National Mandate Party (PAN): 5.77%
• National Awakening Party (PKB): 5.37%
• United Development Party (PPP): 5.22%
• Gerindra: 4.4%
• Hanura: 3.56%
• Everybody else - less than the 2.5% threshold

PAN seems to be doing surprisingly well, as does the PKS, but I still think they may end up lower in the rankings as polls may be underestimating the contribution of the less educated isolated voters. We shall see...

Predictions

I suppose I should put my money where my keyboard is and come up with some sort of prediction of what will happen as a result of the legislative election today.

I think incumbent President SBY's Democratic Party will come out with the largest share of the vote, largely because of the incumbent advantage. They've consistently had around 20% of the vote in the unrigged opinion polls, and this would translate into around a third of seats in the House of Representatives. That's enough to qualify for the right to nominate SBY as president again. I reckon a coalition with the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) is on the cards for the presidential vote - possibly with Tifatul Sembiring as the running mate.

I think Megawati's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle and VP Jusuf Kalla's Golkar will each get about 15% - and just under a quarter of the seats in the House, meaning they'll have to join forces (but both want to be president!) or team up with an Islamist party each for the presidential race - possibly the United Development Party (PPP), who may still come fourth despite an incredibly low profile campaign.

There may well be enough National Awakening Party (PKB) voters in East Java to win fifth place for the party, followed by the PKS in the vote tally.

Then there are the vehicles of dubious former generals Prabowo (Gerindra Party) and Wiranto (Hanura Party). Due to the sheer flood of glossy TV ads with promises of cash to farmers and fisherman and the not-so-subtle playing of the anti-ethnic-Chinese card, Gerindra may come in seventh, or possibly fifth or sixth on name recognition alone, given the confusing array of 38 parties on the king-sized ballot paper. As for Hanura, well their recent ads have focused less on policies and more on how to find the party symbol on the ballot paper, so their being first on the list may help them to eighth place. They may still lose out to the fading National Mandate Party (PAN) though.

All in all, Pemiloopy beleives that only eight, or possibly nine, parties will pass the threshold of 2.5% necessary to be awarded seats in the legislature. Then the fun and games will really start...