Deja Vu in Jakarta
The election dispute has now passed on to its next phase, the Constitutional Court. This is one of the two highest courts in the country. The other, termed the Supreme Court, functions as the court of final appeal for civil or criminal cases, whereas the Constitutional Court handles cases which touch on issues of putative unconstitutionality, effectively dividing the authority vested in the United States in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Constitutional Court will examine the purported irregularities in the conduct of the election, to assess the legitimacy of the declared result.
This is a somewhat immense undertaking, given the sheer size of the electorate in a country whose population exceeds a quarter of a billion souls. Challenging each vote cast for the opposing party is necessarily impossible, and the focus for Prabowo’s camp so far appears to be concentrating on technical difficulties regarding the mechanical assessment of the vote, despite the fact that the manual count is the process used to allot the votes that actually decide the election. With the numbers involved, proving inaccuracy in the manual count will be difficult to impossible, especially given the death of several counting agents earlier in the process. This may explain Prabowo’s determination to assail the mechanical count, despite its functionally limited relevance in proving his claims.
Given the difficulties in actually proving his case, challenging the results in the court might accordingly seem misguided. However, it is the natural next step in a process that has played out previously in much the same manner. The current election dispute may appear to be especially controversial, and elements of it are indeed new and troubling. However, the protests, the criticism of the electoral apparatus, the challenges and demands for a recount, that seem so unique and newsworthy, are to an extent merely steps in an elaborate waltz that has been danced before. Danced, in fact, by these self-same candidates, on the same stage, to much the same tune, in the 2014 election.
Then, as now, Prabowo Subianto lost to Joko Widodo, alleged that the count was conducted unfairly and called on his supporters to protest, followed by government suppression of the protests. As now, he took a case to the Constitutional Court, which held at that time that there were no electoral irregularities sufficient to justify abandoning the result of the election. It seems unlikely that he can expect a different decision in this case, when the discrepancy between his votes and Jokowi’s is even greater.
Assuming that the trajectory of this case follows that of the last one, Prabowo will likely call for more protests in the likely eventuality of the court declaring a Jokowi victory. As in 2014, these are likely to be much more minor than those directly following the initial announcement of the election result. In this case, they may be more minor still. While one alarming difference between 2014 and today may be seen in the level of violence in this year’s protests, Prabowo’s supporters must surely be increasingly aware of the tenuousness of his case at this point, and having seen the past results, should not expect the Constitutional Court to offer a different result.