W

hen, on Tuesday, the people of Indonesia should have been cherishing the end of a prolonged national divide and moving on to extend olive branches to each other, losing presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto stirred confusion, if not anxiety, through his pledge to challenge his defeat.

What many failed to digest is the fact that instead of contesting the election result at the Constitutional Court, Prabowo said he opted to pull out of the race, which he claimed was laden with violations and was undemocratic. Such a move is unprecedented and unrecognized in the democratic system Indonesia is operating under and it is clear it was aimed at delegitimizing the whole election process at the expense of the people.

An advisor to the Prabowo-Hatta Rajasa campaign team, Akbar Tandjung, said the coalition members had unanimously ruled out the options of accepting the election results and of bringing the dispute to the Constitutional Court.

If only the ticket had acknowledged the final vote tally, which shows they lost to Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo-Jusuf Kalla by 8 million votes, Indonesia would have lived up to its billing as a mature democracy. Kalla, in contrast, had displayed his statesmanship when he congratulated the incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono after losing the 2009 race.

Prabowo would prove his commitment to democracy, even though he could not accept the defeat, if he sought justice at the Constitutional Court, since it is the only institution mandated to adjudicate election disputes.

The only choice for Prabowo, despite his slim chance of winning, is to prove his allegations before the Constitutional Court that massive and systematic fraud cost him his bid for the presidency '€” if congratulating Jokowi and Kalla is too agonizing for him. Prabowo-Hatta would have to file any motion with the court by Friday at the latest.

Prabowo'€™s selection of a third, unconventional way will be interpreted as a desperate attempt to turn the election results to his favor. The more he follows this avenue to reject the official results, however, the more people will question his integrity, given his much-vaunted claims to be ready for either victory or defeat.

What can hopefully change Prabowo'€™s resistance is pressure from his coalition partners. Speculation has been rife that internal bickering has plagued the coalition that nominated the pair of Prabowo and Hatta since last weekend when the manual vote tabulation showed Jokowi and Kalla take an unassailable lead.

One by one executives of Prabowo'€™s coalition partners '€” Hatta'€™s National Mandate Party (PAN), the Golkar Party and the United Development Party (PPP) '€” publicly conceded defeat and congratulated Jokowi and Kalla.

Hatta, who was not seen accompanying Prabowo on Tuesday, has reportedly called on his party to respect the General Elections Commission (KPU) result, although he failed to make it public, as expected. Both President Yudhoyono and his son Edhie Baskoro Yudhoyono, respectively the Democratic Party chairman and secretary-general, congratulated Jokowi and Kalla on Wednesday. So did world leaders.

God willing, sooner or later Prabowo will follow suit.