Megawati Wijaya and Shawn W. Crispin, Jakarta – As Indonesians headed to Wednesday's presidential polls, the only uncertainty surrounded by how large a margin the incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono would win.
If as expected he garners at least 50% of the vote against his two rivals, incumbent Vice President Jusuf Kalla and former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, Yudhoyono will be swept into a second term with a thumping electoral mandate and have further consolidated the country's exceptional democratic transition.
According to the Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI), an independent polling agency, Yudhoyono was set to take 63% of the vote based on a survey of 3,000 respondents across 33 provinces conducted between June 30 and July 2. Megawati placed second with 19.6% and Kalla third with 10.6% in the same poll. If that forecast is accurate, Yudhoyono will be the first president elected in a single round of voting, avoiding a two candidate run-off tentatively set for August. (At the time of going to press, with 94% of the vote counted, Yudhoyono had 60.8% of the vote, according to LSI, Reuters reported.)
A resounding Yudhoyono win would have profound implications for Indonesia's politics and economics. His upstart Democrat Party already won April's legislative elections, notching 21% of the vote, up from only 7.5% in 2004, giving Yudhoyono unprecedented sway inside the influential legislature, or Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat (DPR). Those legislative numbers coupled with a strong presidential mandate would allow a new Yudhoyono-led administration to push through economic reforms and liberalization measures previous nationalistic elements in the DPR have voted down.
Indonesia made stealthy economic progress during Yudhoyono's first term, witnessed in the fact the economy is one of the region's few on course to record positive gross domestic product (GDP) growth this year. That's in part been driven by decentralization measures that have broken the center's long-time stranglehold on natural resource revenues and allowed for more geographically broad-based economic activity – a feat regional neighbors like Thailand and the Philippines have failed to achieve.
His government's anti-corruption efforts have addressed investors' main complaint and some market analysts believe that he will accelerate the campaign during a second term. Sriyan Pietersz, JP Morgan's head of research for Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)/Frontier Markets, believes a solid Yudhoyono win will allow him to appoint a "dream team" of technocrats and "nail down a superstructure to what's been done so far".
Pietersz foresees a virtuous case scenario where a feel-good "Yudhoyono factor" helps to reduce Indonesia's market risk premium, in turn appreciates the rupiah and eventually allows the government to borrow more cheaply on international credit markets. That, the analysis follows, would drive a structural lowering of interest rates, reduce the current crowding out of private investment and provide greater incentive for foreign direct investment in the country.
Senior HSBC economist Fredric Neumann in a recent report ranks Indonesia in its top three Asian economic recovery stories, along with China and India. "With politics out of the way, the [Indonesian] economy should steer a robust path," he wrote, presaging a Yudhoyono second term.
Yudhoyono's upside has already been well noted by Indonesian voters. According to LSI, the incumbent president began his election campaign in May with a sky-high approval rating of 73%. That rating was backed by big money, with the Yudhoyono-Boediono ticket declaring Rp20 billion (US$1.9 million) in campaign funds, substantially more than Megawati-Prabowo's Rp15 billion and twice Kalla-Wiranto's Rp10 billion, according to the General Election Commission.
Yudhoyono's comparative largesse, analysts say, is indicative of the broad private sector's strong support for his candidacy and proposed policies. Yudhoyono's popularity has, however, dipped slightly over the past two months, dampened partially by his rivals' populist charges that his technocratic running mate, Boediono, adheres more to neo-liberal rather than pro-poor economic policies. His campaign was also hit by a number of public relations debacles, detracting some from his carefully crafted clean-hands image.
One of his campaign team's members reportedly beat and kicked a female journalist who was covering a Democrat Party rally in Papua province, sparking a threatened news coverage boycott of future Yudhoyono events by many local and Jakarta-based journalists. In another incident, campaign member Ruhut Sitompul spewed racist commentary against Arabs during a nationally televised debate.
And at a rally in Kalla's home base in South Sulawesi, presidential spokesman Andi Mallarangeng simultaneously jabbed at Kalla and angered locals by saying an ethnic Bugis person was not fit to lead the country. Yudhoyono, like all previous Indonesian presidents, is ethnically Javanese. Voters-cum-protesters took the racial slight to the streets.
Those isolated incidents gathered more media attention than Kalla's and Megawati's broad bids to highlight Yudhoyono's statistical failure to bring down substantially unemployment and poverty rates, as he vowed upon taking office in 2004. Both Yudhoyono and Kalla promised to bring down unemployment, which peaked at 9.9% in 2004, to 5.1% when their term expired. The current rate is stuck at 8.5%. Meanwhile, the poverty rate is mired at 15.4%, down from the 16.7% they inherited in 2004, but substantially higher than their stated 8.5% goal.
Megawati and her running mate former soldier Prabowo Subianto, who eyed strong support from grass-roots farmers, fisher-folk and small traders, however, failed to effectively elaborate on their people-based economy alternative, judging by their lack of upward movement in voter opinion polls. Megawati was also perceived to have performed poorly in three rounds of televised debates, all shown live on national television for the first time.
In comparison, Kalla outshone both Yudhoyono and Megawati during the debates and steadily built momentum throughout the campaign. Over 80 million Indonesians tuned into the debates, representing one-third of the total population, and some analysts believe Kalla's performance would have swayed many undecided voters in his ticket's favor. But with an overall popularity rating of only 3% as of April, leagues behind Yudhoyono's 70% in the same poll, his surge was likely too little, too late.
Kalla tried to capitalize on a "the faster, the better" campaign slogan, a jab aimed at Yudhoyono's perceived slow and deliberate decision-making, and claimed that he was often the brains behind the incumbent administration's many policy successes. Striking nationalistic chords, Kalla also criticized Yudhoyono's neo-liberal economic policies and threatened war against neighboring Malaysia to defend Indonesia's claim to the oil-rich and contested Ambalat Island.
Whether those tactics will be enough to split the vote and keep Yudhoyono under the 50% threshold seems to most analysts highly unlikely. Yudhoyono's victory, according to Imam Prasodjo, political analyst from Universitas Indonesia as well as the moderator of a presidential debate held in 1999, was partly a case of "saved by the bell". Other analysts say the election was from the start Yudhoyono's to lose and that he ran a modest campaign aimed specifically at preserving his position rather than undermining his opponents.
Previous legislative and presidential election results showed that Indonesian voters tend to shy from extreme candidates and opt for more moderate ones. Because both Kalla and Megawati were forced by coalition partners to take on former soldiers implicated in human rights violations as their running mates, the Yudhoyono-Boediono ticket's conservative track record is more in-line with what Indonesians have looked for in a candidate. If that trend holds, a historic Yudhoyono win is likely in the cards.
[Megawati Wijaya is a Singapore-based journalist and may be contacted at megawati.wijaya@gmail.com. Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times Online's Southeast Asia Editor.]