Jakarta – A senior executive of Golkar, the country's largest political party, said Wednesday maintaining the pairing of current President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Vice President Jusuf Kalla was the most rational strategy for winning the 2009 presidential election.
"There are a lot of scenarios for seeing a candidate from Golkar win the next presidential election," said Rully Chairul Anwar, the deputy secretary general of the party, in a telephone interview. "However, the most feasible one is to maintain the present duo of Yudhoyono and Kalla."
Speculation has been rife since Kalla's "political safari" during the Idul Fitri holiday in October that Kalla, who is also chairman of Golkar, will run for president in the next election.
Not only did Kalla make the whirlwind tour of nine provinces in Sumatra and Sulawesi, but he also visited a number of Indonesian leaders, including former presidents and vice presidents.
Since then, Kalla has said several times that Golkar would use national internal surveys to select its presidential candidates. He said the surveys would provide more objective results than the convention system applied in the 2004 election.
In 2004, Golkar nominated Wiranto to run for president via a convention but he failed in the first round of the election.
The party leadership concluded that convention system only enabled the party's elite to suggest candidates, while the constituent level was left in the cold.
Rully said Golkar had already started running surveys and planned to present a shortlist of party candidates before Golkar's national leadership meeting in 2009, during which the final candidate will be selected by a vote.
He declined to reveal the provisional results of the surveys this far, saying they could affect the leadership of the current president and vice president. "It is predicted that the current combination will manage to win the 2009 election, but Golkar will wait until the 2009 legislative election is over to announce its candidate for the presidency," he said.
Legislative elections are held several months prior to the presidential elections. Since 2004, voters have directly voted for a president and vice president instead of voting for a president and having the vice president appointed.
Political expert E. Sofiah of the Center for Information and Development Studies said Wednesday the current leaders would have more chance of winning the election than if both ran for election with other partners.
Echoing Sofiah's recommendations, head of the Golkar faction at the House of Representatives, Priyo Budi Santoso, said the current team would stand a greater chance of surviving the next election if it ran together.
"This is what many Golkar members believe, including me," Priyo was quoted as saying by detik.com.
He mentioned there were four scenarios Golkar could use for its next election strategy.
It could nominate its own presidential candidate; have the current combination of Yudhoyono as president and Kalla as vice president; run a coalition with the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle; or form a coalition with the Islamic parties. (lln)