JakartaPost-Apr 23, 2024
The Constitutional Court handed presidential-elect Prabowo Subianto the keys to the nation’s highest office on Monday after its sweeping rejection of legal arguments for a revote brought an end to all election disputes and forced his rivals to concede defeat. The court, in back-to-back hearings, ruled that there was no evidence of fraud or state intervention to sway the results of one of the world’s biggest elections this year. The justices upheld Prabowo’s landslide victory in the Feb. 14 presidential election in twin five-to-three majority rulings to reject the challenges put forward by the legal teams of unsuccessful candidates Anies Baswedan and Ganjar Pranowo. They said neither petitioner was able to produce convincing evidence to back their claims that state interference or endorsements from incumbent President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo had helped Prabowo secure a resounding win. Chief among the claims was that the government had distributed social assistance during the campaign season to marshal support at the ballot for the defense minister, who ran on a promise to continue the incumbent’s policies. But Justice Arsul Sani said the court did not find evidence that the strategy had changed voters’ preferences, leading the bench to dismiss any “causal relationship between the distribution of the social aid program and an increase in votes for one of the candidate pairs”. Another argument that was shot down was the attempt to disqualify the candidacy of Gibran Rakabuming Raka, Prabowo’s running mate, due to a last-minute change to the eligibility requirements by the same court in October, which an ethics board later ruled as a serious breach. Gibran is President Jokowi’s eldest son, and the chief justice of the court at the time, Anwar Usman, was Jokowi’s brother-in-law. However, Chief Justice Suhartoyo acknowledged that there were legal gray areas in judging neutrality during campaigning, leading him to call on government officials and lawmakers to draft more detailed provisions that address allegations of “state partisanship” in future polls. Read more at: https://www.thejakartapost.com/indonesia/2024/04/23/court-rulings-seal-prabowo-win.html.
