Jakarta. A legal challenge by lawyer and Crescent Star Party (PBB) head Yusril Ihza Mahendra that threatened to turn Indonesia’s presidential election on its head was rejected on Thursday by the country’s Constitutional Court.
“With respect to the content of the articles and sections contained in the law that has been examined, there can be no further appeal.” Harjono, a justice at the Constitutional Court, said while reading out the verdict.
Yusril, a law professor at the University of Indonesia and a key aide to former president Suharto before the transition toreformasi, filed a challenge against the 2008 Presidential Election Law with the Constitutional Court in an attempt to enable him to run for the presidency without the PBB first passing the legislative threshold.
The 2008 law mandated that parties may field a presidential candidate only if they secured either 20 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives (DPR) or 25 percent of the popular vote.
Indonesia votes on April 9 for 560 seats in the House and 132 in the Regional Representatives Council (DPD). The outcome of these elections will determine who can run in the July 9 presidential race — the third direct presidential election in Indonesia’s history.
Question of stability
“It’s against the 1945 Constitution,” Yusril, a former minister of justice and human rights in Megawati Sukarnoputri’s government, said at the court’s preliminary hearing in January. “There are 12 political parties in the 2014 election: these 12 parties therefore have the right to nominate their candidates for president and vice president.”
People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR) speaker Sidharto Danusubroto said at the preliminary hearing that such a profound jolt to Indonesia’s electoral system would have a destabilizing effect.
“This rule was prepared for 2019,” he said in January. “If it were implemented this year it would be chaotic.”
The 2019 presidential election will be held in conjunction with the legislative election, but this year’s vote will proceed as planned as per the court’s ruling in March, 2013, the court’s chief justice Hamdan Zoleva said.
“The argument given by the appellant has no legal grounds,” Hamdan said.
Yusril, a prolific lawyer and former defender of Suharto’s son, Tommy, launched the challenge to enable him to run for president on his party’s ticket. The PBB, an Islamist bloc that grew out of the banned Masyumi Party in the 1960s, is one of several Indonesian political parties that gathers only a fraction of the vote and would be unable to put forward a candidate of its own in the July election.
In a provocative move aimed at raising the temperature surrounding the ruling, Yusril announced his candidacy for the presidency in December — despite his party having no seats in the current incarnation of the House and little prospect of jumping over either the DPR or popular vote hurdles in April’s legislative ballot. The party secured around 3 percent of the vote nationwide in 2009, save for in his native Bangka-Belitung, where the party won just over a tenth of all votes cast.
Ruled out
Today’s ruling eliminates any chance that smaller parties’ candidates will be able to campaign for the presidency.
“The consequence is clear; the threshold remains,” said Ari Dwipayana, a political science lecturer at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta. “Competition in the presidential election is going to be tight, there is only a limited number of presidential candidates that can participate.
“New coalitions will be formed as a result of this. And Yusril might take another step — he might take issue with the results of the election. That is a real possibility.”
The ruling makes grim reading for Prabowo Subianto, the former special forces commander, presidential aspirant and spearhead of the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra).
Several polls have placed Prabowo as the second-most-popular presidential candidate after Joko Widodo, but his relatively youthful political organization most likely precludes him from running for president as an outright Gerindra candidate. Today’s ruling all but confirms that Prabowo will need to get into the trenches with other political parties and negotiate a coalition from which to mount a push for the State Palace — a reality he acknowledged shortly after the court announced its verdict.
“Remember: the president cannot work alone,” Prabowo said. “For me, the main task of a leader is to find, form and lead the best team. With the current rules, if Gerindra cannot reach 20 percent then it will have to form a coalition.”
“You normally have to compromise,” Prabowo said. “This is the political reality.”
Yusril gave a more exasperated-sounding statement immediately after the ruling, implying that the court had not done its job, before signing off with a typically lyrical flourish.
“The [Constitutional Court] has always been vocal in saying it is the sole interpreter of the constitution,” he said via his Twitter account, @Yusrilizha_Mhd. “But when I requested the court make an interpretation, it said it is unauthorized to interpret the constitution. Peculiar.”
“I have done my job well as an academic and as an activist to correct how the country is being run,” he tweeted. “Especially with regard to the presidential election so that it conforms to the norms of the constitution… and so I will not be blamed by history for not doing something.”
