There was no big surprise when the Jakarta General Elections Commission (KPU Jakarta) announced the official result of the Jakarta gubernatorial election on Sunday.

Like the quick-count results released earlier by a number of pollsters, the KPU Jakarta result showed that incumbent candidate pair Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama and Djarot Saiful Hidayat narrowly beat the Anies Baswedan and Sandiaga Uno ticket.

Of 5,499,865 eligible votes, Ahok-Djarot garnered 2,364,577, while Anies-Sandiaga got 2,197,333 votes. Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono and Sylviana Murni came third with 937,955 votes.

Ahok-Djarot won in three municipalities — North Jakarta, West Jakarta and Central Jakarta — and Thousand Island regency, while the Anies-Sandiaga ticket won in East Jakarta and
South Jakarta.

In the Thousand Islands, where Ahok delivered a speech considered by some Muslims to be have contained blasphemous remarks about the Quran, Ahok-Djarot dominated the tally count with 5,532 votes, followed by Anies-Sandiaga with 4,851 votes and Agus-Sylviana with 3,891 votes.

As none of the candidate pairs garnered the 50 percent of votes needed to win outright, Ahok and Anies are expected to run off in the second round of the Jakarta gubernatorial election slated to be held on April 19.

The campaign period will kick off on Mar. 7, or three days after KPU Jakarta officially announces the candidate pairs going on to the second round. In this case, KPU Jakarta head Sumarno said, Ahok-Djarot would be obliged to take leave during the campaign period, although the incumbent pair have made it clear they would prefer to continue working.

Sumarno argued the mandatory leave was in accordance with Article 70, Paragraph 3, of the 2016 Regional Elections Law stating that an incumbent regional head must take leave of absence if he or she wishes to campaign for re-election.

“Basically, the incumbent pair has to take leave during the campaign period,” Sumarno told journalists on the sidelines of the recapitulation. The law, however, does not specify any sanctions should an incumbent refuse to take leave during the campaign season.

Previously, Ahok said he would rather do his job as governor than campaign. “If I were asked to choose [between campaigning and working], I’d choose working,” Ahok said on Friday at City Hall.

Separately, the Ahok-Djarot team spokesman I Gusti Putu Artha told The Jakarta Post that, according to KPU Regulation No. 6 Article 36, the next campaign should only consist of a gubernatorial candidate debate “to sharpen the candidate pairs’ vision and mission”. “Therefore, Ahok and Djarot should not be required to take leave during the campaign period,” Putu said.

He added that he would report the KPU instruction that Ahok-Djarot take leave to the Jakarta Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu Jakarta), asking the agency to overrule it.

Meanwhile, vice chairman of the Anies-Sandiaga team Syakir Purnomo said he hoped that Ahok-Djarot would take leave so both candidate pairs would “start campaigning together simultaneously in order to achieve healthy competition, or fair play” in the gubernatorial election.

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