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AKARTA: Six government coalition political parties appear unwilling to reconcile their divergent views on proposed amendments to the legislative threshold, as legislators begin to deliberate revisions to the 2008 legislative election law.

Democratic Party lawmaker Gede Pasek Suardika said on Thursday that the six parties: the ruling Democratic Party, the Golkar Party, the National Awakening Party (PKB), the National Mandate Party (PAN), the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) and the United Development Party (PPP), had met a day earlier to discuss for the first time the possibility for coalition members to agree on an appropriate legislative threshold during the deliberation of the law revision.

The meeting, attended by the House of Representatives’ party faction leaders, ended with only minor progress achieved, as Democratic Party politician and Cooperatives and Small and Medium Enterprises Minister Syariefuddin Hasan, who led the forum, suggested that other party representatives “calm down and consider their legislative threshold proposal for the sake of the coalition.”

The government has proposed a legislative threshold of 4 percent for the 2014 polls, an offer supported by the Democratic Party. The coalition’s strongest party, Golkar, has sided with the biggest opposition party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), which instead wants the threshold to be set at 5 percent. Meanwhile, four smaller coalition parties, PKB, PAN, PKS and PPP, have joined with the opposition’s People’s Conscience Party (Hanura) and the Great Indonesian Movement Party (Gerindra) to form the so-called “central axis”, which wants a 3 percent threshold.