PDI-P scrutinizes electoral roll, Golkar at crossroads

PDI-P scrutinizes electoral roll, Golkar at crossroads
The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Sun, 07/12/2009 11:09 AM | Headlines
There is no such thing as weekend downtime for the teams of defeated presidential candidates former president Megawati Soekarnoputri and Vice President Jusuf Kalla.
Just three days after several major quick count results flagged incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as the winner of the July 8 presidential election, Megawati and her running mate Prabowo Subianto's campaign team reported the General Elections Commission (KPU) to the Elections Supervisory Body (Bawaslu).
"The KPU should have announced and fixed the permanent voter list by July 6. But on July 6, it appeared that the KPU had only released the temporary list," the team's lawyer, Arteria Dahlan, said, as quoted by vivanews.com at the Bawaslu office on Saturday.
He said it was one of the KPU's alleged violations of the existing regulation on the election roll.
Arteria added that following the KPU's failure to announce the permanent list on July 6, the Megawati-Prabowo team checked the election roll the next day until Saturday and found seven million problematic names in the electoral roll.
The team accuses the KPU of not doing its job finalizing the list, and questions the commission's decision not to use 69,000 poll stations.
Earlier in the day, secretary of the team Fadli Zon said he would coordinate with the Kalla-Wiranto campaign team that was conducting separate checks.
"We will compare our findings on the problematic election roll," Fadli said.
Besides asking Kalla's Golkar Party to team up in scrutinizing the problematic election roll, Megawati's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) has asked Golkar to join its coalition in the House of Representatives.
PDI-P chief patron and Megawati's husband Taufiq Kiemas said it would be better for Golkar to do so than to renew its alliance with Yudhoyono's Democratic Party, which already has 60 percent of the House's 560 seats when combined with its coalition partners.
"Together we can increase our power in the Parliament," said Taufiq, adding that the PDI-P had so far only coalesced with Prabowo's Gerindra Party.
However, Golkar does not appear to have decided yet what it will do after Kalla's landslide defeat, with the quick count results placing him third in the presidential race with some mere 13 percent of votes, compared to Megawati's 27 percent and Yudhoyono's 60 percent of votes.
Golkar legislator Hari Azhar Azis told The Jakarta Post the party was likely to renew its coalition with the Democratic Party.
Observers predict a similar outcome as Golkar has never been away from power.
The Democratic Party's coalition partners responded to the issue differently. While the National Mandate Party's (PAN) Patrialis Akbar "welcomes" Golkar's likely return, the Prosperous Justice Party's (PKS) Mahfudz Siddiq has expressed concern that it will "disrupt the allocation of seats in the Cabinet" for alliance partners.
The campaign team head for the Yudhoyono-Boediono ticket, State Secretary Hatta Radjasa, said Yudhoyono was open to possibilities of coalescing with Golkar and even the PDI-P.
Some Golkar executives have called for an early national meeting to decide on the issue.