‘Quick counts’ tip President Widodo for election win
Indonesian President Joko Widodo won a second five-year term, preliminary election results showed yesterday.
The result is a victory for moderation over the nationalistic rhetoric of his rival, Prabowo Subianto.
Although official results will not be released until next month, a series of “quick counts” by pollsters showed Mr Widodo, whose running mate is Muslim scholar Ma’ruf Amin, as much as 11 percentage points ahead.
Vote counts from five independent groups showed Mr Widodo with a clear lead over Mr Subianto, a general under the Suharto dictatorship, who said Indonesia would fall apart without his leadership.
The vote ended at 1pm local time in Sumatra, although some of the 800,000 polling stations across the nation remained open late because of delays and long queues.
The quick counts have proved reliable indicators in past elections, but Mr Widodo declined to declare victory.
Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, is an outpost of democracy in a region of authoritarian regimes and is expected to be among the world’s biggest economies by 2030.
Mr Widodo was the first Indonesian president to be elected from outside the Jakarta elite, and a second term in office could cement the country’s 20 years of democratisation.
Addressing jubilant supporters a few hours after polls closed, Mr Widodo called for the nation to reunite and heal the divisions caused by the campaign.
“From indications of the exit poll and also the quick counts, we can see it all, but we must be patient to wait for the official counting from the Election Commission,” he said.
Mr Subianto, who also lost to Mr Widodo in the 2014 election, did not concede defeat.
He said his campaign’s exit poll and quick count showed that he won, but urged his supporters not to cause unrest.
His campaign team has made allegations of substantial voter list irregularities, but analysts said the claims were absurd and were meant to undermine the election.
Almost 350,000 police officers and military forces joined 1.6 million paramilitary officers to protect voters across the more than 17,000 islands that make up Indonesia.
More than 192 million people were eligible to vote in national and regional elections, contested by more than 245,000 candidates.