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Indonesia’s election: How the West was lost
Despite protestations to the contrary, opposition candidates Prabowo Subianto and Sandiaga Uno appear to have lost the presidential race. According to quick count results, however, the pair have comfortably won Indonesia’s largest electorate, West Java.
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Nadi Kusnadi, a resident of Leuwinanggung, Depok, in West Java, decorates polling station 39 to resemble a cafe, a day before the simultaneous presidential and legislative elections. (The Jakarta Post/P.J.Leo)
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espite protestations to the contrary, opposition candidates Prabowo Subianto and Sandiaga Uno appear to have lost the presidential race. According to quick count results, however, the pair have comfortably won Indonesia’s largest electorate, West Java. Prabowo-Sandi are ahead in the province with some 60 percent of the vote to Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and Ma’ruf Amin’s 40 percent.
The 20-point lead to Prabowo is a near-copy of Prabowo’s result against Jokowi in West Java in the 2014 presidential election. But the easy Prabowo win has come as an unpleasant surprise to many in the Jokowi camp.
Earlier in the year, several polls indicated that the race in West Java was close, the candidates separated by only a few percentage points.
In a speech to volunteers on March 10, Jokowi went so far as to claim that an internal survey gave him a narrow lead over Prabowo in the province.
So how was West Java lost? The best explanation is that Jokowi was always likely to lose in West Java — a religiously conservative province and the base of the Islamist PKS party. In a campaign characterized by identity politics, Jokowi — despite his best efforts — came second in a piety arms race.
Indonesia’s survey institutes have been highly successful in predicting the result of the presidential election nationally. In West Java, however, polling earlier in the year appears to have been thrown off by a significant proportion of so-called undecided and swing voters.
These voters ultimately moved en masse in favor of Prabowo-Sandi — a bias accurately predicted by Indikator in projections the institute modeled just prior to the election.
