Markus Junianto Sihaloho – The National Awakening Party, or PKB, insists it is seriously mulling backing former vice president Jusuf Kalla for the presidential election, despite polls giving it no chance of winning enough votes to be eligible to nominate a candidate.
Marwan Jafar, the chairman of the party at the House of Representatives, said on Monday that party officials would discuss the matter with Nahdlatul Ulama, the country's biggest Islamic organization, from which the PKB was conceived.
"Of course the PKB is serious about the declaration of Jusuf Kalla as a presidential candidate," he said, but added that no definitive announcement about the party's candidate would be made before the legislative election in April.
Marwan said that in addition to consulting with NU, PKB officials would also carry out a series of internal survey to determine the best candidate.
Others being considered by the PKB are Mahfud M.D., the widely respected former chief justice of the Constitutional Court, and Rhoma Irama, a dangdut singer-turned-cleric notorious for his conservative Islamic rhetoric.
Kalla, a hugely popular vice president during President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's first term, has been linked to various parties for the presidential election to July, with his own Golkar Party insisting it will nominate its chairman, Aburizal Bakrie.
The PKB has become the latest to join the fray, with 24 of its 33 provincial chapters declaring at a national caucus last Thursday that Kalla be considered alongside Mahfud and Rhoma as a potential presidential candidate.
For his part, the former vice president has welcomed the call, but stopped short of saying whether he would accept any of the proposed nominations thrown his way.
Greety Tielman, the head of the PKB's eastern Indonesia caucus, said last week that support for Kalla initially came from the party's eastern Indonesian chapters. Greety said that Kalla, a South Sulawesi native, was an experienced politician with a proven ability to lead.
But the question of the PKB's presidential candidate is likely to be moot, according to a slew of polls that show the party getting fewer than 6 percent of votes in the April 9 legislative election.
Under electoral law, a party or coalition must win 25 percent of votes in the legislative election or 20 percent of House seats to be eligible to nominate a candidate for the July 9 presidential election.
The PKB's support base has also dwindled over the years, due in part to a spat that saw former president Abdurrhman "Gus Dur" Wahid, its founder and then chairman, ousted by his nephew and the current party chief, Muhaimin Iskandar.
The PKB won 12.6 percent of votes in the 1999 election, the same year that Gus Dur became president, before declining to 10.5 percent in the 2004 election and 4.9 percent in 2009.
Islamic parties in general have also declined in recent surveys, with pollsters noting that the best they could hope for was a coalition with one of the major nationalist parties and a vice presidential slot.
A poll by the National Survey Institute (LSN) last November found Mahfud as the leading Islamic party candidate, with 16.4 percent of the 1,240 respondents polled saying they would vote for him.
Rhoma and Religious Affairs Minister Suryadharma Ali, from the National Development Party (PPP), were next with 9.6 percent and 9.1 percent, respectively.
In the same survey, 45.6 percent of respondents supported the merging of Islamic parties into a single coalition, a move expected to be useful in strengthening ties between Muslims across the nation and strengthening the conservative voter base.
Despite the evident public support, however, Syamsuddin Haris, a political analyst for the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), remained pessimistic that much good could come out of such a coalition, citing the lack of a unifying figure like the late Gus Dur.