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Parties with less to gain shirk presidential campaigning
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A pedestrian walks through a pedestrian bridge covered by election campaign banners in Salemba, Jakarta on Dec. 7, 2023. (Antara/Galih Pradipta)
While the 2024 presidential candidates have been pounding the pavement seeking to win over the country’s voters, some of the political parties backing them appear to have turned their attention away from the top of the ticket and toward the legislative elections.
The general election on Feb. 14 of next year will decide the next president, vice president and legislators at the national and regional levels.
Alongside billboards and banners featuring the presidential and vice presidential candidate pairs, the campaign ads of legislative candidates have flooded the country’s streets in the past weeks.
With such a large number of candidates running for office, not all political parties have campaigned for their presidential pick with the same intensity, said Firman Noor, senior political researcher at the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN).
He said the political parties that had nominated presidential or vice presidential candidates from their own ranks or from closely affiliated spheres were already campaigning at full intensity as they had the most to gain, both through the candidates themselves and in legislative races as a result of the coattail effect.
These parties include the Gerindra Party, whose chair Prabowo Subianto is seeking the presidency; the National Awakening Party (PKB) with VP candidate Muhaimin Iskandar; the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) with presidential candidate Ganjar Pranowo; and the NasDem Party with presidential candidate Anies Baswedan.
“Meanwhile, for other parties, which are only lending their support to presidential candidates who are not members of their party, their calculations are rather pragmatic as they know they are unlikely to get a significant boost from the coattails of the candidate pairs,” Firman said. “They will campaign for presidential candidates in some regions, where these candidates still appeal to some of the party’s voters, while focusing only on their legislative candidates in other regions.”
