While the proposed revisions concern an array of electoral issues—ranging from a plan to bar members of outlawed organizations from running in elections to the threshold for nominating presidential candidates—the debate clearly centers on the question of whether the nation should hold regional elections in 2022 or push them until 2024, as mandated by the current law. 

The matter is more than just a technicality, with analysts saying that the date of the next regional elections could be game-changing for the 2024 presidential race. Popular regional leaders and potential presidential candidates, such as Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan, West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil and Central Java Governor Ganjar Prabowo, will end their terms in 2022, 2023 and 2023, respectively. Pushing the regional polls until 2024 would mean they would lose the political stage that could give them the upper hand in the next presidential race.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, who is barred from seeking a third term, has recently joined the debate and may have swayed the positions of some political factions within the House of Representatives, putting the proposed revisions at risk of being shelved.

During a meeting with former member of his campaign team last week, the President, a former mayor of Surakarta who became president after winning the Jakarta election and serving as its governor for two years only, reportedly rejected the proposal to revise the Election Law, saying that it was too early to do so. He also argued that holding local elections in 2022 would disrupt the national efforts to contain the pandemic.

The law, enacted in July 2017, combines the Presidential Election Law, the Legislative Election Law and the Election Organizers Law. A draft revision of the law obtained by The Jakarta Post stipulates that regions that held elections in 2017 and 2018—including Jakarta, West Java, Central Java, East Java and North Sumatra—will hold the next elections in 2022 and 2023, revising the 2016 Regional Elections Law that mandates that regional elections be held simultaneously in 2024 in line with presidential and legislative elections.

The draft law, which also regulates regional elections, stipulates that simultaneous regional elections, in which governors, mayors, regents and their respective deputies are determined, will only be held in 2027.