Noticias

Crescent Star Party (PBB) advisory board head Yusril Ihza Mahendra announced his candidacy for the 2014 presidential election on Sunday, casting himself as an underdog in a speech delivered before hundreds of supporters in Indonesia’s second-largest city, a stronghold for the small Islamic party.

The Election Supervisory Committee (Bawaslu) has said it will be flexible with the deadline for the General Elections Commission (KPU) to fix citizen registration problems still affecting around 3 million voters in the final list of 186 million voters.

As of Tuesday, the KPU and the Home Ministry had produced citizen registration numbers for around 7.1 million of 10.4 million voters who had lacked them. The KPU is scheduled to hold a plenary meeting on Wednesday, the deadline previously set by Bawaslu.

The Great Indonesia Movement (Gerindra) Party is the most popular political party on social media, a survey has shown.

The online media monitoring firm Katapedia found that Gerindra was the most-talked about political party in the month of November, making up 19.67 percent of total political party mentions on the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook.

CEO of Katapedia Deddy Rahman said that Facebook and Twitter were surveyed simply because among social media sites they had the largest number of users in the country.

Following the termination of its agreement with the National Encryption Body (Lemsaneg), the General Elections Commission (KPU) has said that it was now seeking help from universities, information technology (IT) experts and even hackers to secure voter data for the 2014 polls.

The Golkar Party will need to work hard to consolidate internally if its chairman and presidential candidate, Aburizal Bakrie, is to score a victory in next year’s election, commentators say.

“Golkar is experienced in winning legislative elections, but is always vulnerable when it comes to presidential elections,” Gun Gun Heryanto, a political communications lecturer at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University, said on Tuesday.

“In the reform era, divisions within Golkar in the run-up to presidential elections have long been an issue.

Jakarta Governor Joko Widodo has again topped a poll of prospective presidential candidates, despite there being no move by his party to officially nominate him for the nation’s highest office.

In a survey by Australia-based Roy Morgan Research, Joko was chosen by 37 percent of respondents, followed by Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra) co-founder and chief patron Prabowo Subianto, who was favored by 15 percent.

Members of the Indonesia Democratic Party of Struggle have denied the existence of a pact that says chairman Megawati Soekarnoputri will support Great Indonesia Movement founder Prabowo Subianto in his presidential bid in 2014.

“I do not want to comment on that. The people from Gerindra [Great Indonesia Movement] first revealed the issue, so let them assume and interpret it as they like,” said Puan Maharani, chairwoman of the Indonesia Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) central executive board.

The number of eligible voters who are not exercising their voting rights continues to rise, with many analysts believing the number will increase in next year’s legislative and presidential elections.

M. Fadillah, a member of the Jakarta office of the General Elections Committee (KPU), said the number of people voting in the capital had been falling for a number of years now.

Vote-buying and ballot fraud are voters’ chief concerns about next year’s general elections, a new study by the People’s Voter Education Network has revealed.

Thirty-four percent of the public were worried about the two points People’s Voter Education Network (JPPR) deputy coordinator Masykurudin Hafidz told the Jakarta Globe on Wednesday.

Masykurudin said 14 percent of eligible voters were also worried that general election organizers might use their positions to influence results.

R espondents also expressed concerns about intimidation.