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Post-race: Confrontation or cohabitation?
If the vox populi, vox dei dictum bears any truth, Indonesia should actually cherish the fact that it managed to avoid the entrapment of this far-right global trend, as the winning pair is known to embrace and pursue moderate and all-inclusive policies.
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A sign on a footbridge, which reads “The elections are over, let’s bring back our brotherhood and nation’s unity”, is seen in Tanah Abang, Central Jakarta. (The Jakarta Post/Dhoni Setiawan)
T
he General Elections Commission (KPU) has announced that Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and his running mate, Ma’ruf Amin, won the presidential race against rival candidate pair Prabowo Subianto-Sandiaga Uno. Regardless of the latter’s efforts to challenge the election result, either politically or legally, Jokowi and Ma’ruf look certain to lead the country for the next five years.
Regrettably, following the KPU announcement riots erupted, notably in Jakarta, during which ardent supporters of Prabowo and Sandiaga vented their frustration, rampaging the capital city. They said the presidential election was systematically and massively rigged and consequently demanded the KPU to declare the result null and void.
The presidential election result is actually an anomaly, given the worrisome global political trend in which voters strongly tend to entrust far-right leaning candidates for their nationalistic, primordial and antiforeign political platforms.
According to Kristof Szombati in The Far Right in Government ( 2018 ), these are cases in point: Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India, Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, Victor Orban in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Benyamin Netanyahu in Israel.
