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Constitutional Court ready to rule on Prabowo’s petition
Yusril Ihza Mahendra (Antara)The courtroom phase of the legal battle surrounding the presidential election result has ended and whether or not losing candidate Prabowo Subianto can overturn incumbent Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s reelection victory now awaits the Constitutional Court judges’ ruling
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Yusril Ihza Mahendra (Antara)
The courtroom phase of the legal battle surrounding the presidential election result has ended and whether or not losing candidate Prabowo Subianto can overturn incumbent Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s reelection victory now awaits the Constitutional Court judges’ ruling.
Despite the witnesses and experts called by Prabowo’s legal team to testify in the hearings, however, analysts believe that the chances of success for the challenge are slim as the team appeared to have been unable to substantiate the claims of widespread fraud in April’s election.
The nine justices of the court convened in a meeting on Monday to start deliberating the court’s final ruling regarding the petition, which followed a series of hearings that saw the lawyers of the General Elections Commission (KPU) as well as of Jokowi’s legal team rebutting all allegations of fraud.
“The justices will deliver their respective views and opinions about the case [during the meeting] and they will discuss all evidence and testimony before reaching a decision,” Constitutional Court spokesperson Fajar Laksono said on Monday at the court in Central Jakarta.
In the meeting, the nine-justice bench decided to announce its ruling on Thursday, a day earlier than the initial plan of Friday, which was also the deadline for the delivery of the ruling.
When asked about the reasoning, Fajar said the justices simply felt that they “would be ready to read out the ruling” on Thursday, although the deliberation meetings were expected to continue until Wednesday.
The Prabowo camp, which has consistently refused to accept defeat since the April 17 election, alleged the KPU committed “structured, systematic and massive” fraud in Jokowi’s favor during the campaign and election process.
Jokowi and his running mate Ma’ruf Amin have been declared the election’s winners, as the KPU’s final vote tally showed that the pair gained 55.5 percent of the vote against Prabowo and Sandiaga Uno’s 44.5 percent.
The losing ticket accused the commission of inflating the incumbent’s tally by about 22 million votes, allegedly from an incorrect final voters list (DPT) that included 17.5 million problematic voters with invalid ID cards.
However, in the course of the hearings Prabowo’s witnesses delivered rather underwhelming testimony with conflicting statements that were often criticized by the justices for their lack of consistency.
One of the witnesses, for instance, testified that his team had identified the names that made up the 17.5 million problematic voters. But when pressed for details, he was not able to confirm whether or not any of them had voted in the election.
The court had also asked Prabowo’s legal team for the missing physical forms of evidence to support its claim that there had been invalid voters on the DPT, asserting that it was necessary to prove what they had alleged.
“From the hearings, I saw little that could have a significant impact on changing the KPU’s official election result,” constitutional law expert Feri Amsari of Andalas University in West Sumatra said.
The losing ticket failed to elaborate and prove its allegations, including accusations that election organizers and the state apparatus had been involved in election rigging, he said. “There was no concrete evidence to support the claims.”
Feri went on to say that the petition had the potential to be legally flawed since the Prabowo camp had filed a revised petition — which the legal team read out during the first hearing — while a court regulation does not provide for revisions to petitions challenging presidential election results.
The panel of justices will only reveal whether or not it accepted the revised petition during the ruling, Fajar said.
The Jokowi camp is optimistic that the result of the presidential election will remain the same, with Yusril Ihza Mahendra, the head of Jokowi’s legal team, arguing that the Prabowo camp had not been able to back up any of its allegations before the court.
“In my opinion, the panel of justices is likely to reject [Prabowo’s] lawsuit,” he said.
Should Prabowo fail in the lawsuit, it would be the second time that the former general has lost a presidential dispute at the Constitutional Court.
In 2014, Prabowo and his running mate Hatta Rajasa challenged Jokowi-Jusuf Kalla’s election victory in the court, but this was subsequently rejected as the justices found insufficient evidence to prove their allegations of systematic electoral fraud.
Bambang Widjojanto, the head of Prabowo’s legal team, said the camp would accept the court’s ruling whatever it
might be.
KPU commissioner Viryan Azis said the commission was ready to implement any of the court’s rulings in regard to the case, including if the justices ruled that the Prabowo-Sandiaga ticket, which claimed it should have won by 52 percent of the vote against Jokowi-Ma’ruf’s 48 percent, based on its own data, was the rightful winner or if the justices ordered the KPU to redo the voting process. He said the KPU had a maximum of three days from when the court read out the ruling to implement the ruling.
“So if, for instance, the court rejects the petition, the KPU will go on with the next phase, which is to name [Jokowi-Ma’ruf] the president and vice president-elect,” he said.
