Jakarta – A legal challenge by lawyer and Crescent Star Party (PBB) head Yusril Ihza Mahendra that threatened to turn Indonesia's presidential election on its head was rejected on Thursday by the country's Constitutional Court.
Yusril Ihza Mahendra, a law professor at the University of Indonesia and a key aide to former president Suharto before the transition to reformasi, filed a challenge against the 2008 Presidential Election Law with the Constitutional Court in an attempt to enable him to run for the presidency without the PBB first passing the legislative threshold.
The 2008 law mandated that parties may field a presidential candidate only if they secured either 20 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives (DPR) or 25 percent of the popular vote.
Indonesia votes on April 9 for 560 seats in the House and 132 in the Regional Representatives Council (DPD). The outcome of these elections will determine who can run in the July 9 presidential race – the third direct presidential election in Indonesia's history.
"It's against the 1945 Constitution," Yusril said at the court's preliminary hearing in January. "There are 12 political parties in the 2014 election: these 12 parties therefore have the right to nominate their candidates for president and vice president."
People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) speaker Sidharto Danusubroto said at the preliminary hearing that such a profound jolt to Indonesia's electoral system would have a destabilizing effect.
"This rule was prepared for 2019," he said in January. "If it were implemented this year it would be chaotic."
Yusril, a prolific lawyer and former defender of Suharto's son, Tommy, launched the challenge to enable him to run for president on his party's ticket. The PBB, an Islamist bloc that grew out of the banned Masyumi Party in the 1960s, is one of several Indonesian political parties that gathers only a fraction of the vote and would be unable to put forward a candidate of its own in the July election.
In a provocative move aimed at raising the temperature surrounding the ruling, Yusril announced his candidacy for the presidency in December – despite his party having no seats in the current incarnation of the House and little prospect of jumping over either the DPR or popular vote hurdles in April's legislative ballot. The party secured around 3 percent of the vote nationwide in 2009, save for in his native Bangka-Belitung, where the party won just over a tenth of all votes cast.
"The consequence is clear; the threshold remains," said Ari Dwipayana, a political science lecturer at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta – "Competition in the presidential election is going to be tight, there is only a limited number of presidential candidates that can participate.
"New coalitions will be formed as a result of this. And Yusril might take another step – he might take issue with the results of the election. That is a real possibility."
Yusril gave an exasperated statement immediately after the ruling, implying that the court had not done its job.
"The [Constitutional Court] has always been vocal in saying it is the sole interpreter of the constitution," he said via his Twitter account, @Yusrilizha_Mhd. "But when I requested the court make an interpretation, it said it is unauthorized to interpret the constitution. Peculiar."