Opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri yesterday rejected Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s landslide re-election win and will challenge the results in court, a spokesman said.
Megawati’s campaign will lodge a challenge to the results of the July 8 poll with the Constitutional Court, alleging widespread irregularities including millions of people left off voter rolls, lawmaker Gayus Lumbuun said.
“Because there are still unresolved legal issues, we are rejecting the presidential election results from the KPU [election commission],” said Gayus Lumbuun, from Megawati’s Democratic Party of Struggle.
PHOTO: AFP
Official results announced by the commission yesterday gave the liberal ex-general Yudhoyono 60.8 percent of the vote, far ahead of ex-president Megawati, with 26.8 percent, and Vice President Jusuf Kalla, with 12.4 percent.
The Megawati campaign boycotted the official announcement of the results at the election commission office.
Kalla’s campaign will also launch a Constitutional Court appeal over voter list irregularities, but has not yet decided whether to accept or reject the results, campaign spokesman Indra Piliang said.
‘IRREGULARITIES’
“We have accepted the draft results signed by the KPU members ... [but] because we found irregularities in the voter list we’ll file a legal challenge to the Constitutional Court,” he said. “According to the law, there have to be objective results before the declaration of the president and vice president-elect.”
Yudhoyono denied there had been widespread fraud in the election but said opposing candidates had the right to launch “peaceful” challenges to the results.
“Our system and laws of course allow for those sides who still want to protest and file complaints,” Yudhoyono said in a press conference broadcast on national TV.
“In the public arena, voting issues of irregularities have emerged ... irregularities in elections don’t always mean fraud. Nonetheless they have to be corrected, repaired and settled,” he said.
The 59-year-old Yudhoyono, who defeated Megawati in Indonesia’s first direct presidential election in 2004 on an anti-corruption platform, is credited with ensuring stability and economic growth.
Kalla’s Golkar Party, the political vehicle of late dictator Suharto, has indicated it could join a Yudhoyono-led government, while Megawati has maintained bitter opposition to the president.
Paramilitary police provided heavy security outside the election commission office, the road to which was blocked off by razor wire and armored vehicles.
ATTACKS
A spokesman for the election commission said the security measures were to prevent a repeat of bomb attacks on luxury Jakarta hotels on July 17, which killed seven people plus two suicide bombers.
Yudhoyono has come under fire for appearing to blame the attacks on political rivals aiming to overturn the election results, although police say the most likely perpetrator was a radical splinter faction of the Jemaah Islamiyah militant network.
The bombings, the first major attack in Indonesia since 2005, have broken years of quiet associated with Yudhoyono’s rule but are seen as not likely to undermine forecasts of robust economic growth.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema