A Last-Ditch Attempt to Overturn the Elections

INDONESIA - Report 31 Jul 2014 by Cyrillus Harinowo and Maria Kartika Purisari

Executive Summary

Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s presidential win at first looked like a happy ending. The vote count was completed on July 22, and the General Election Commission pronounced him the winner. The president-elect then gave a victory speech from Sulawesi, from the deck of a traditional merchant ship. His win was virtually assured, anyway, because before the vote count was finished, opposition candidate Prabowo Subianto withdrew from the race. And everyone concluded that the game was over.

Only it wasn’t. Three days after Jokowi was declared the winner, Prabowo filed a lawsuit in the Constitutional Court, charging that the election had been conducted in a climate of massive, systematic and structural fraud, and appealing for the results to be overturned. To back his claim, he arrived with a 146-page report, and 10 trucks full of documents.

While Prabowo is within his rights, he has little chance of succeeding. The gap between his and Jokowi’s votes was enormous, at 6.3%, or more than 8.4 million votes. He’ll therefore need to prove that more than 4.2 million votes were rigged. The Court will hand down its decision on August 21.

Meanwhile, neither Jokowi nor the public seems disturbed by this turn of events. Life is going on as usual, especially with everyone busy celebrating the July 28-29 Muslim holidays that end the fasting month of Ramadan. Almost 20 million people return to their hometowns for the celebrations and couldn’t care less about the fight over the presidency. The election momentum has more or less dissipated.

Before this political drama, the trade balance turned positive again, albeit only mildly, at $70 million. Exports in May increased by 3.73% from April, to $14.83 billion, while imports declined by 9.23% to $14.76 billion, after their peak in April. But we expect the Q2 trade balance to show a deficit.​

Monthly inflation was 0.43% in June, the lowest for that month in five years, pushing the y/y rate down to 6.7%. With that development, Bank Indonesia kept its reference interest rate flat, at 7.5%.

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