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One way or another, Ahok has smooth path to reclaim power

Amid the scandals that are surrounding his volunteer group Teman Ahok, Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama has picked up more party support, now from the Golkar Party that has nine seats on the city council, which will likely smoothen his way to reclaim Jakarta’s top position

Safrin La Batu (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Sat, June 25, 2016

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One way or another, Ahok has smooth path to reclaim power

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mid the scandals that are surrounding his volunteer group Teman Ahok, Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama has picked up more party support, now from the Golkar Party that has nine seats on the city council, which will likely smoothen his way to reclaim Jakarta’s top position.

Golkar officially declared support for Ahok on Friday, following Hanura, which declared its support for him on the previous day, and Nasdem in February.

“Golkar has decided to support Ahok in the upcoming [Jakarta] gubernatorial election,” the party chairman Setya Novanto declared Friday during an event that was attended by the governor.

Some senior officials in the party previously declared their support for Ahok, but those declarations were not considered Golkar’s official stance. Setya said the decision was made after a talk was held between members of Golkar’s Jakarta branch and the party’s national board members.

With Golkar joining his camp, Ahok now has 24 seats backing him on the city council. At least 22 seats are required for a candidate to run on a party ticket. Those seats consist of 10 from Hanura, nine from Golkar and five from Nasdem.

Besides campaigning through political parties, the governor still has the chance to run as an independent candidate as Teman Ahok has already gathered more than enough ID-backed signatures to support him.

The volunteer group has so far gathered more than 1 million of the signatures, surpassing the 530,000 required for an individual to run as an independent candidate in the 2017 gubernatorial election.

The group, however, is currently under a spotlight after news broke about an alleged Rp 30 billion channeled to Teman Ahok by developers of the Jakarta Bay reclamation projects. There have also been accusations that some of the IDs gathered had been faked and that foul play had occurred in the gathering process.

The support both from Teman Ahok and the political parties has provided Ahok with a strong foundation from which to campaign. However, Ahok has yet to make up his mind about which path to choose, although he previously said that he “would not leave Teman Ahok”.

“I will meet members of Teman Ahok before Lebaran [which falls on July 6]. I will talk with them about whether they still want me to run through a difficult ticket or an easy ticket,” he said on Friday.

Teman Ahok previously said it would support whatever means Ahok would eventually choose, although it still expected that he would run on a non-party ticket.

“Either way is not a problem for us. We will still support him,” Teman Ahok spokeswoman Amalia Ayuningtyas said Sunday.

“Since the beginning, we gathered the ID-backed signatures to bring him to the gate of the election.”

Most recent political polls also confirmed that Ahok remains the most popular candidate in the election.

For example, a poll released Friday by Datalyst Indonesia, which conducted an online survey from February to May, revealed that of the 3.5 million tweets published about Jakarta politics, 2.6 million, 76 percent of them, were about Ahok. That number put Ahok well above lawyer and former human rights minister Yusril Ihza Mahendra, who was in the second position with only 10 percent of the tweets being about him. Meanwhile, singer Ahmad Dhani was in third place with 5 percent. Neither of the latter have received official support from any parties.

Of the 2.6 million tweets about Ahok, 57 percent of them were positive tweets and only 43 were negative.

In an effort to stop Ahok in the election, some other political parties, led by the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), have sought to form a big coalition. The PDI-P has talked with Gerindra and may talk with the Democratic Party as well.

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