Exit polls yesterday gave Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono an unassailable lead as voting closed in the second direct presidential election since the fall of the Suharto dictatorship.
A poll broadcast by MetroTV gave the liberal former general 58.51 percent of the vote, compared with 26.32 percent for opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri and 15.18 percent for outgoing Vice President Jusuf Kalla.
Another “quick count” poll broadcast by TV One gave Yudhoyono 60.10 percent, Megawati 27.33 percent and Kalla 12.58 percent.
PHOTO: AFP
Final official results are not expected for several days but the unofficial figures suggest Yudhoyono will avoid a second-round run-off in September.
He needs more than 50 percent of the vote and 20 percent in all 33 provinces to win in the first round.
“The vote count hasn’t finished yet ... but the poll surveys in their quick counts show the success of my comrades,” he said at his residence in Bogor, south of Jakarta, after polling closed across the archipelago.
Megawati and Kalla complained before the election about incomplete voting lists and missing polling booths, but Yudhoyono called on his rivals to resolve any objections peacefully.
“Let’s work together to maintain a peaceful situation in this country. If there are objections or protests, please do it through mechanisms and procedures in line with our law,” he said.
Megawati, the daughter of independence hero Sukarno and an ex-president who lost to Yudhoyono in 2004, has made no comment and a spokesman said she was not ready to concede defeat.
Kalla said he was “shocked” at his poor performance but offered his congratulations to Yudhoyono, his boss in the outgoing administration and running mate in 2004.
“Based on the quick count result I congratulate SBY, but I’m still waiting for the official results,” he said in an interview with TV One, using Yudhoyono’s nickname.
Some 170 million people were eligible to vote in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, from eastern Papua province to Sumatra island in the west — spanning three time zones and 17,000 islands.
Yudhoyono has promised to boost growth and clean up the corrupt bureaucracy, but has been attacked as a “neo-liberal” by his rivals who championed populist policies of “self-reliance.”
The 59-year-old — who likes to write love songs in his spare time — is the most popular Indonesian leader in the democratic era despite a reputation for indecisiveness and his background as a Suharto loyalist.
His centrist Democratic Party almost tripled its vote in April general elections to become the largest in parliament, allowing him to pack his new Cabinet with hand-picked technocrats instead of political appointments.
If re-elected, he will be the first president to serve consecutive terms at the helm of the world’s third-biggest democracy behind India and the US, after its violent birth at the end of 32 years of dictatorship in 1998.
There were no reports of violence disrupting voting, despite communal tensions in several provinces.
Security forces opened fire on a group of people who attacked a police post and set three vehicles ablaze before dawn in Papua, but no one was injured.
With some 30 million people living below the poverty line, wages and jobs came well ahead of religious and security issues for many voters.
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS