Jakarta – Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto, who is also the Gerindra Party's presidential candidate, visited the Presidential Palace on Thursday for a meeting with President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo.
Prabowo arrived at the palace at around 3 p.m. and was immediately escorted to a private location where he was expected to have a meeting with the President.
The senior minister did not issue any statement before entering the palace and only greeted photojournalists and reporters who had covered a cabinet meeting organized to discuss efforts to mitigate inflation at the regional level earlier in the morning.
In the morning meeting, Jokowi briefly met Central Java governor and Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) presidential candidate Ganjar Pranowo.
Ganjar was present at the meeting together with other governors from the country's 37 provinces.
President Jokowi gave awards to a number of local governors who were deemed successful in combating high food prices and reducing inflation at the local level. Ganjar was not one of the governors to win the award.
President Jokowi's meeting with Prabowo is the second this week, following their encounter in Pekalongan, Central Java, on Tuesday.
An opinion survey conducted by Lembaga Survei Indonesia (LSI) showed the upcoming presidential election will be a close contest between Ganjar and Prabowo.
The LSI survey found that 37 percent of 1,220 respondents polled in early August would vote for Ganjar, a 1.3-point advantage over Prabowo and about a fifth would vote for former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan.