The current president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, proved unable to deliver on his promised reforms because he had to hand out so many cabinet seats to other parties in order to build a coalition of his own in 2004. Indonesian voters have long been frustrated by the endless horse-trading and political compromise such deals inevitably involve. And so Jokowi, as he is widely known, will have to form a coalition to run for president, meaning that if he manages to take the helm of the world’s third-largest democracy in July, he’ll do so with little power and representing an alliance with no clear platform.
But his party managed to eke out only 19 percent - more than any of the 11 other parties in the running, but not enough to cross the threshold.
Polls had predicted that the Democratic Party of Struggle would win up to 30 percent of the vote, largely thanks to the massive popularity of the politician the party announced would represent it in the presidential election: Joko Widodo, the governor of Jakarta, who was expected to win that race handily. Under the country’s complex electoral rules, a party must win 25 percent of the popular vote (or 20 percent of the seats in parliament) before it can formally nominate a presidential candidate. In April, voters in Indonesia’s parliamentary elections shocked many observers, confounded most pollsters, and seemed to set back their own long-term interests by failing to deliver a massive victory to the main opposition party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle.
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