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Poll results in divided House
Jakarta Post - May 10, 2014
The Elections Monitoring Agency (Bawaslu) and the Constitutional Court, however, will have to bear the huge burden of settling complaints from political parties. The two state agencies have stated their readiness to resolve any disputes.
The official vote count showed on Friday that the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) secured 18.95 percent of the vote, which is in line with most quick counts.
The Golkar Party came close behind with 14.75 percent, while the Gerindra Party came third with 11.81 percent.
The official national vote tally appears to reflect a highly divided House of Representatives with no single political party in a dominant position. The KPU is slated to announce the composition of the House's seats on Sunday.
Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) political observer Siti Zuhro said on Friday that this year's election resulted in a more even distribution of power in the House, which could undermine the future government.
"The leadership [of our future president] has to be strong so that parties in the coalition cannot easily rebel [against the ruling party]," she said, citing the case of the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), which often took a different stance to that of other parties in the current government coalition.
Likewise, National Awakening Party (PKB) election team head Syaifullah Maksum said that the future political landscape could be prone to disharmony due to the fact that there was not a single dominant power.
"This will make each party carefully determine its political will when deciding on a coalition in the legislature and the government," he said. "So there might be 'pebbles' in the legislature if it is not supported [by a strong and solid coalition]."
In terms of legislative seats, there will not be a single dominant party from this year's election, unlike the 2009 election, which saw the ruling Democratic Party secure 150 seats out of the total 560 seats at the House.
The party with the largest number of seats in the 2014 election, the PDI-P, is estimated to garner only 109 seats, up from 95 seats in 2009. Second and third places went to Golkar and Gerindra, with 91 seats and 73 seats, respectively.
While the number of seats garnered by Golkar is estimated to have only dipped slightly from 107 seats in 2009, Gerindra is estimated to have soared from only 26 seats in 2009. Coming fourth was the ruling Democratic Party, which fell from its heyday in the 2009 election with 150 seats to an estimated 61 seats.
Political parties are all prepared to challenge the official results.
Syaifullah said the PKB would contest the vote tally through the Constitutional Court with the expectation that it could secure more seats.
"We have some notes in some electoral districts, in which we did not have a chance to revise the results in the districts where we suspect some violations occurred so that our votes dwindled," he said. "It resulted in a diminished number of seats for the PKB."
Syaifullah said that the PKB would contest the results in six districts, namely East Java V, Bengkulu, South Sumatra I, Central Java IV and West Nusa Tenggara (NTB) I and II.
The Democratic Party, for instance, planned to contest the results of the election in West Java electoral districts III and VI, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) I and II, North Maluku and North Sumatra I, according to the party's election witness for the national vote tally, Imelda Sari.
The NasDem Party is also prepared to contest the results at the Constitutional Court, alleging that they had been rigged. NasDem deputy secretary-general Willy Aditya said the party had prepared 50 lawyers for the lawsuit. After coming under intense scrutiny due to the vote count, which triggered concerns that the KPU would miss the deadline, the commission finally wrapped up the vote count in all 34 provinces on Friday.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had drafted a regulation in lieu of law to legalize a delay in the announcement of the election results, which should be made within 30 days after election day.
According to the KPU, the count moved at snail's pace because the commission was trying to accommodate all complaints and input regarding administrative errors and vote-rigging allegations by political parties.
On the last day of the tally, the KPU finished the vote count in seven provinces, namely West Java, West Sulawesi, North Sulawesi, South Sulawesi, NTT, Bengkulu and North Maluku.
The last day's vote count, however, did not go as smoothly as planned as some political parties still attempted to contest the data presented by the KPU's provincial branches.
The Hanura Party's witness for the vote-count plenary hearing, Miryam S. Haryani, for example, argued that 1,206 votes initially obtained by a Hanura legislative candidate were being transferred to the party.
"The seat was not missing, but the candidate's votes moved to those of the party," she said.
Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2014/05/10/poll-results-divided-house.html.
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