After more than four weeks of waiting, finally we can pop the champagne corks or cut the yellow rice cone, and celebrate the final outcome of the presidential election.
The Constitutional Court on Wednesday ruled that the results of the July 8 presidential election, as released earlier by the General Elections Commission (KPU), were valid, and that the claims by the two losing candidates of massive frauds were not substantiated.
It’s not so much the results that we should be celebrating as the finality and certainty of the electoral outcome that gave the incumbent, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a landslide victory with more than 60 percent of the votes.
Prior to Wednesday’s announcement, there was the prospect of the KPU having to re-run the election as demanded by the two losing candidates, Megawati Soekarnoputri and Jusuf Kalla.
Both Megawati and Kalla have now accepted the results, albeit grudgingly.
Megawati still refrained from congratulating the winner, though, insisting that the election was not free or fair. But since she never conceded defeat in 2004 at the hands of Yudhoyono, her behavior came as no surprise at all.
Kalla has reportedly called President Yudhoyono to congratulate him, but to some degree he had to because he is still active as the Vice President and the two men will have to work together until their term in office ends Oct. 20.
It was not exactly the picture of a perfect presidential election thanks to the KPU’s incompetence in managing the entire electoral process. There were problems with the voters’ registration, but we could safely say that those who were eligible were able to vote on July 8, because of a last-minute intervention by the Constitutional Court that allowed people to vote simply by presenting their ID cards even if they were not registered.
Megawati and Kalla’s best claim of fraud was that many people were registered more than once on the electoral roll, because loopholes in the national population registry allowed people to possess more than one ID card. But the pair were unable to prove that these errors were widely abused to give Yudhoyono the victory.
Kudos to the Indonesian people for showing the world, once again, that we as a nation of 240 million people — with diverse races, ethnicities, cultures and languages spread over 17,000 islands — can organize a free and fair election, free of violence.
While the people have shown that they can embrace democracy, sadly we cannot say the same about our political elite. While we have built and strengthened our political institutions and system to make a
democracy out of Indonesia over the past eleven years, we have yet to see any significant changes in the culture or behavior of our political elite.
The ideal picture of a democracy is where the national healing process begins as soon as election results are announced. Any election is always divisive and the nation is polarized and divided by affiliations to political parties of candidates.
As is practiced in most democracies, the losing candidates would concede defeat and extend congratulatory messages as soon as the results are out, and the winner would embrace the losers and take the initiative to lead in efforts to reunite the nation.
But this did not happen in Indonesia in 2009.
Rather than accepting defeat gracefully, the losers are bitching about how the election was stolen from under their feet. The winners could not possibly be expected to embrace people who still bear grudges against them.
Megawati and Kalla are probably too busy now— facing serious challenges to their leadership of their respective parties after their humiliating defeat — to be thinking about mending ties with the winners. Both are in the twilight of their political careers and will soon fade out.
They could have left a much better legacy than what they are creating now.
But it’s their loss rather than ours. This ship is sailing, with or without them.
