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Analysis: Puan makes last dash in 2024 presidential bid
House Speaker Puan Maharani is making high-profile public appearances and increasingly playing the woman card in a bid to boost her electability, which has remained stubbornly low in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.
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Indonesian House of Representatives members from the PDI-Perjuangan faction take pictures while pointing at Puan Maharani at the DPR building, Senayan, Jakarta, Tuesday, October 1, 2019. PDIP who won the most votes in the 2019 election Appoints Puan as Chair of the DPR RI 2019-2024 period. (JP/Seto Wardhana)
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ouse Speaker Puan Maharani is making high-profile public appearances and increasingly playing the woman card in a bid to boost her electability, which has remained stubbornly low in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. Representing the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP), the country’s largest political party, is not enough to secure the country’s top job, as the president will be directly elected by voters in February 2024. She needs to be one of the most popular candidates to have a chance of winning.
Puan does not have much time. Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto, whose Gerindra party has declared his candidacy for 2024, is growing in popularity and enjoying the field almost to himself while other potential figures are holding back. Today, wherever Prabowo goes, he will be referred to as a presidential candidate as well as defense minister and Gerindra chair. He is the man to beat.
For Puan, it is a question of whether she has any chance of beating Prabowo. Unless she improves her electability, she might have to sit down and let Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo, who is far more popular, take up the PDIP’s presidential-nomination ticket.
Puan, 46, is the daughter of former and current PDIP chair Megawati Soekarnoputri, who makes the final decision about the presidential nomination. Megawati is insisting that Puan contest the 2024 election to continue the family tradition of leading Indonesia. Megawati was president in 2001-2004 and her father Sukarno was Indonesia’s first president from 1945-1966. Megawati is not going to rush naming Puan as the party’s candidate, unless the daughter improves her electability.
All surveys of the most-popular figures for 2024 elections put Prabowo and Ganjar in the top two, followed closely by Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan. Puan consistently features lower in all these surveys, not even in the top five. She has a long way to go.
The electoral law says that only political parties have the power to nominate their presidential and vice-presidential candidates in 2024, and then only parties that have won at least 25 percent of the legislative votes in 2019, or 20 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives. Parties can pool their votes or their share of the House seats to jointly nominate their candidates. Going by this definition, only PDIP has the automatic right to nominate its candidates. Gerindra had to secure the support of the Nation Awakening Party (PKB) in formally announcing Prabowo’s 2024 candidacy.
Last week, Puan launched her “political safari” visiting other political parties to explore the possibility of forming a coalition ahead of the simultaneous presidential and legislative elections in 2024. She comes with a huge leverage: The offer of the running-mate slot, and of course Cabinet seats, if they were to support her presidential bid.
