JakartaPost-Jan 2, 2024
The Constitutional Court annulled on Thursday the threshold for political parties in nominating presidential candidates, restoring hopes for more competitive polls in the future after more than a dozen attempts to open up the race. The court ruled in favor of four university students who challenged the threshold requiring a party or coalition of parties to hold 20 percent of the House of Representatives seats or to have won 25 percent of the popular vote in the previous legislative election to be eligible to field a presidential candidate. The court agreed with the petitioners that the steep requirement in the 2017 General Elections Law was discriminatory to small parties and newcomers, and that it had made the elections less competitive, undermining popular sovereignty and the rights of voters. “We found that the threshold tends to benefit big political parties, or at least those with House seats,” Justice Saldi Isra said in the ruling. “Not to mention that in previous elections, certain political parties dominated the process to nominate candidates, which limited the rights of voters to have alternative candidates,” he said. The ruling essentially allows any party or coalition of parties registered at the General Elections Commission (KPU) to field a candidate regardless of the number of votes they won in the previous legislative election or whether they have seats in the House. The bench suggested that the government and the House find another way to regulate how political parties nominate their candidates that is not based on shares of House seats or the popular vote. Read more at:
