With the one-month campaign period for the presidential election to start Tuesday, the candidates have set out different campaign strategies to sway voters.
The Megawati Soekarnoputri-Prabowo Subianto ticket has prepared two main strategies for campaigning, referred to as “air” and “land” strategies.
“By ‘air’, we mean we will use commercial ads on a massive scale in both electronic and print media.
As for “land", we mean our party members will team up with other volunteers at the grassroots level to help promote our vision and mission statement,” team member Fadly Zon said Sunday.
He said his side had already set out Megawati-Prabowo’s action plan to rebuild Indonesia in major local newspapers.
“We will use a whole page [ad] to convey our platform to the masses.”
The programs the Megawati team has laid out in newspapers include using state enterprises as an engine to revive the country's economy, focusing on credit disbursement for the poor, creating two million hectares of new areas for various plantations to absorb 12 million workers and other programs to improve health, education and the environment.
Ahead of the April legislative elections, Prabowo’s Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra) had 4,052 TV spots, while Megawati’s Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) “only” had 2,010 spots.
Milton Pakpahan, a member of the Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono-Boediono campaign team, said the Democratic Party (PD) would mix its old strategy with a new one derived from the support of its 24 coalition parties.
“Basically we will use our old strategy, which is promoting SBY’s achievements during his first term as the President,” he said.
The PD will also bring local wisdom into play to help promote SBY-Boediono’s vision and mission statement, Milton said without elaborating.
Yahya Sacawirya, another member of the SBY-Boediono team, said the Democratic Party hoped to garner 80 million votes with the help of its 24 coalition parties.
Meanwhile, Fahmi Idris, chief of the Jusuf Kalla-Wiranto team, preferred not to disclose the team’s strategy. “It’s a secret. Just wait and see what will happen.”
He added the campaign would focus more on the candidates’ ideas and how to transform them into reality. Lately, Kalla has been seen approaching Muslim leaders and clerics in Java and other regions across Indonesia to win their support.
On Sunday, he was in Tuban, East Java, to meet influential Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) cleric KH Abdullah Faqih.
Earlier in the day, Kalla visited the Darussalam Islamic boarding school in Gresik, in East Java, where he promised to increase donations to Islamic boarding schools.
Kalla's strategy of appealing to Muslim voters has been more visible, with the publication of a book about his wife Mufidah and Wiranto’s wife Rugaya.
The book, titled Devout Wives of Future Leaders, depicts the two ladies wearing headscarves, or jilbab.(fmb)
