Abdul Khalik, Jakarta – With the General Elections Commission having announced 34 parties eligible to run in the 2009 elections, old players and newcomers are gearing up for the nine-month campaign, which will kick off this Saturday.
More experienced parties established teams tasked with winning votes in the legislative elections (Bapilu) long before the parties were announced, with the country's two biggest parties, the Golkar Party and the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), preparing hundreds of billions of rupiah for the nationwide campaign.
Golkar said it had consolidated its political machinery right down to the village level and had prepared around 14,000 candidates for the national and regional legislative elections. "Our Bapilu lineup comprises 700 of the most influential members, and we have prepared about Rp 200 billion to finance the national campaign until next April," the party's deputy secretary-general Rully Chairul Azwar told The Jakarta Post.
He expressed optimism that Golkar could achieve its target of winning 30 percent of votes nationally, surpassing its 2004 election achievement of about 22 percent.
Taking a different approach, the PDI-P said it would try to propose fresh candidates with clean track records to woo voters.
Learning from recent regional elections, in which new faces tended to win, the PDI-P Bapilu chief Cahyo Kumolo said at least 40 percent of the party's legislative candidates would be fresh and untainted members.
"We are now concentrating our resources, money and energy at the district, subdistrict and village levels to make sure we have a firm grip on the grass roots before election day. Our party leaders will directly meet as many people as possible," he told the Post. Cahyo said the party was optimistic it could improve on its 2004 election result of 18.5 percent of the vote.
The rising Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), which has set an ambitious target of 20 percent of the vote, up from 7.34 percent in 2004, is already throwing money at voters, several days before the campaign officially kicks off. Last Sunday, the party launched in Jakarta a national program giving away millions of rupiah in the form of working capital to small businesses.
However, long before the parties began their unofficial campaigns, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Vice President Jusuf Kalla were criticized for using state facilities to promote themselves or their own parties – the Democratic Party and Golkar, respectively.
Newly established parties expressed optimism they could pass the minimum threshold of 2.5 percent of the vote in the upcoming elections, required to be eligible to run in the 2014 elections.
The Democratic Reform Party (PDP), founded by former chairman of PDI-P's Jakarta chapter Roy BB Janis, former minister for state enterprises Laksmana Sukardi and oil tycoon Arifin Panigoro, said it had consolidated its members at branches across the nation to get as many votes as possible.
"We will have at least 2 million members across the nation by April next year. So we will have no difficulties in reaching the 2.5 percent threshold," Roy, the party chairman, told the Post.