U

nlike for most people, the weekends are not a break from a hard week's work for the three presidential candidates.

After spending the week projecting their vision, mission and political platforms nationwide through national media to the whole society, this weekend they all change campaign strategy to focus locally and at grassroots level.

Megawati Soekarnoputri and her running mate Prabowo Subianto started on Saturday a two-week safari campaign around Java, incumbent Vice President Jusuf Kalla and his running mate Wiranto set out to tour eastern Indonesia, while incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono visited supporters in resources-rich Riau.

The Megawati-Prabowo campaign team has since long planned the tour of Java for the remaining weeks of the campaign season, aiming at the heartland of their political support until the eve of polling day.

"The national campaign team will cover Java in the coming two weeks. Megawati and her entourage start with campaign buses from Jakarta Cipanas, Bandung and other towns and villages along the Southcoast areas, while Prabowo and his team kick off their safari from Indramayu in West Java taking in other towns and villages along the Northcoast," Hasto Kristianto, member of the campaign team, said before Megawati's departure here on Saturday.

Java plays a strategic role in the presidential election because the island, only one third the size of Papua or Sumatra, is home to 62 percent of the 230 million population of Indonesia and includes the strongholds of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) and the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra) and of the former president Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid and his National Mandate Party (PKB), which also nominated the Megawati-Prabowo ticket.

In Riau, thousands of Pekanbaru residents thronged into the Pasar Bawah shopping center to greet SBY, causing a heavy traffic jam on main streets leading to the venue.

In dialogue with rice traders, he told them the government has allocated Rp 14 trillion to promote microfinance to ease the unemployment problem under the National Society Empowerment Program (PNPM)

SBY and First Lady Kristiani Yudhoyono also bought some locally-made Melayu blouses. The pair took lunch with locals before moving to Rumbai, where the President spoke before thousands of people, including oil mining employees and their families.

Back in Java, Boediono visited tea farmers in Purwakarta, West Java, with a pledge that he and SBY would give priority to the agricultural sector not only to reach self-sufficiency in rice but also to export agricultural products because the country was an agrarian country.

He also said the government would improve the capacity of the fertilizer companies to provide subsidized fertilizer to the farmers.

State Secretary Hatta Rajasa who is chairing the SBY-Boediono campaign team, said both the candidates and their campaign teams were changing their campaign strategy to focus on the grassroots level in the remaining two weeks.

"Besides, we are also distributing booklets containing the pair's vision and concrete programs for the next five years to people across the country," he said here on Friday.

Kalla meanwhile met with thousands of Golkar Party and People's Conscience Party (Hanura) supporters at the Jayapura sports stadium where he was adopted as a member of a Papuan tribe.

He said he was fighting to win the race to be the first elected non-Java president, to pave the way for candidates from other tribes in Papua, Maluku, Sulawesi and Sumatra to eventually become No. 1 in the country.

Kalla also appreciated the province's soccer team winning the recent national league championship.

He underlined to local people the urgent necessity to have a strong national leader with the ability to work fast to achieve better and more rapid progress.

Rizal Harahap and Angela Flassy contributed to the article from Pekanbaru and Jayapura.