Opposition candidate calls for new vote after election loss
JAKARTA: Failed Indonesian presidential candidate Anies Baswedan challenged Prabowo Subianto’s decisive victory at the Constitutional Court yesterday, alleging rules were unfairly changed to allow the outgoing leader’s son to run as his vice president.
Anies’ call for a new vote comes a day after Defence Minister Prabowo, 72, was confirmed as the next leader of the world’s third-biggest democracy.
But his campaign was mired in allegations that outgoing leader Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi, had interfered in a bid to establish a political dynasty, engineering rules changes that allowed his eldest son Gibran Rakabuming Raka to run as Prabowo’s vice-president.
“We asked for the disqualification of the vice presidential candidate ... and we asked for a revote with that said VP candidate being replaced,” Anies’s legal chief Ari Yusuf Amir told AFP.
“We also asked the Constitutional Court to order the president to stop meddling in the next process of the election.”
An Anies campaign staffer told AFP on condition of anonymity that they would “provide the proof of intervention ... and let the judges decide what to do with that.”
Earlier, Anies’ legal chief told reporters outside their campaign headquarters that they submitted an ‘election dispute petition’ to the court online early yesterday morning.
Prabowo was widely predicted to win the presidency on his third attempt after losing in 2014 and 2019.
His legal team was confident the result would not be successfully challenged because of his majority and wide margin of victory, local media reported.