Prabowo won last month’s race by a double-digit margin, having ridden on the coattails of President Jokowi, who has led the country on a fierce development drive that has won accolades among predominantly young voters.
Prabowo Subianto, 72, was officially declared on Wednesday the winner of the 2024 presidential election by a landslide, capping off a five-week wait for confirmation by the General Elections Commission (KPU) amid calls to mend political fences and address concerns of an impending lurch back into the authoritarian New Order era.
But while the outcome will have kicked off a period of power-sharing negotiations, Prabowo’s two election rivals still intend to dispute the election returns at the Constitutional Court in the coming weeks.
Prabowo and running mate Gibran Rakabuming Raka won last month’s race by a double-digit margin, having ridden on the coattails of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, who led the country in a fierce development drive that has won accolades among predominantly young voters.
Prabowo won a whopping 58.58 percent of the vote, according to the final tally announced by the KPU on Wednesday evening, besting rivals Anies Baswedan, the former Jakarta governor, and Ganjar Pranowo, the former Central Java governor. The incumbent defense minister won by 33.66 percentage points more than the 40.97 million votes cast for Anies and the 27.04 million votes cast for Ganjar.
Crucially, Prabowo garnered more votes than his rivals in 36 of 38 provinces, including in the key battlegrounds Central Java, East Java, Bali and Papua, widely known as constituencies that previously backed his former rival-turned-ally Jokowi, who soundly defeated him in 2014 and 2019.
Anies, who ran alongside National Awakening Party (PKB) chairman Muhaimin Iskandar, managed to retain some of his support in Aceh and West Sumatra, but narrowly failed to clinch victory in the capital Jakarta, which Anies had run for five years.
Ganjar, who was initially projected to become Jokowi’s successor, failed to win even a single province, including a key bloc of voters in his own Central Java backyard, a traditional stronghold of his party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P).
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