Well the quick count results are already coming in from today’s hard-fought presidential election in Indonesia and, based on the unofficial tallies so far, President Joko Widodo can be safely projected to have defeated Prabowo Subianto a second time to win his re-election, meaning he and his running mate Ma’ruf Amin will be leading the country until 2024.
While the quick count results are still incomplete and coming in, all of the pollsters are consistently putting the result at around 55% for Jokowi-Ma’ruf and 45% for Prabowo and his running mate Sandiaga Uno, a 10% electoral gap that would be impossible for Prabowo to overcome unless the remainder of the vote was wildly inconsistent with what has already been tabulated.
(As of 3:47pm Western Indonesia time)
Litbang Kompas
Jokowi-Ma’ruf: 55.06%
Prabowo-Sandiaga: 44.94%
% of vote sample counted: 53.90%
CSIS
Jokowi-Ma’ruf: 55.93%
Prabowo-Sandi: 44.07%
% of vote sample counted: 70.68%
Indo Barometer
Jokowi-Ma’ruf: 53.40%
Prabowo-Sandiaga: 46.60%
% of vote sample counted: 52.00%
Charta Politika
Jokowi-Ma’ruf: 54.41%
Prabowo-Sandiaga: 45.59%
% of vote sample counted: 67.31%
Poltracking
Jokowi-Ma’ruf: 55.24%
Prabowo-Sandiaga: 44.76%
% of vote sample counted: 68.10%
Indonesia Indikator
Jokowi-Ma’ruf: 55.02%
Prabowo-Sandiaga: 44.98%
% of vote sample counted: 59.44%
The result will not be official until the General Election Commission completes its full official vote count (a process that could take up to 35 days), but the quick count results seem to indicate such a large gap in votes between the incumbent and the challenger that it seems unlikely that Prabowo will choose to challenge the result in court.
However, just as quick counts were coming in, Prabowo’s campaign announced that the results of their own exit polling resulted in a result nearly flipped from that of the quick counts, with Prabowo polling at 55.4% and Jokowi at just 42.8%.
Will Prabowo’s campaign cite the vast difference in their exit polling and the quick count tallies as a justification to challenge the results? Remember that in 2014, three quick count pollsters showed Prabowo winning the vote (which he ended up officially lost by 6.3%) leading the Gerindra chief to say he did not accept the results and would challenge them in the Constitutional Court, before finally withdrawing from the vote count process (essentially conceding defeat without having to say he conceded defeat).
Prabowo and many of his senior supporters have claimed for weeks that there would be unrest and street protests if they believed the Gerindra chief lost due to voter fraud. After he voted today, Prabowo said he couldn’t guarantee there would be no unrest if he lost.
We’ll just have to wait to hear the full response from Prabowo’s camp to see if they’ll be challenging the results or giving their supporters any reason to feel unrestful…
Joko Widodo climbed up the political ladder to cement his place as the country’s leader in a remarkably short period of time, ascending from mayor of Solo in 2005 to governor of Jakarta in 2012 to president in 2014, when he defeated Prabowo the first time.
Jokowi’s huge estimated margin of victory this time can be attributed not only to his maintaining the country’s steady economic growth over the last five years with his infrastructure-focused agenda, but also his ability to maintain his “man of the people” branding while at the same time building up alliances with senior members of the country’s political, religious, and military elites.
