January 3, 2025
JAKARTA – The Constitutional Court annulled on Thursday the threshold for political parties in nominating presidential candidates, restoring hopes for more competitive polls in the future after more than a dozen attempts to open up the race.
The court ruled in favor of four university students who challenged the threshold requiring a party or coalition of parties to hold 20 percent of the House of Representatives seats or to have won 25 percent of the popular vote in the previous legislative election to be eligible to field a presidential candidate.
The court agreed with the petitioners that the steep requirement in the 2017 General Elections Law was discriminatory to small parties and newcomers, and that it had made the elections less competitive, undermining popular sovereignty and the rights of voters.
“We found that the threshold tends to benefit big political parties, or at least those with House seats,” Justice Saldi Isra said in the ruling.
“Not to mention that in previous elections, certain political parties dominated the process to nominate candidates, which limited the rights of voters to have alternative candidates,” he said.
The ruling essentially allows any party or coalition of parties registered at the General Elections Commission (KPU) to field a candidate regardless of the number of votes they won in the previous legislative election or whether they have seats in the House.
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The bench suggested that the government and the House find another way to regulate how political parties nominate their candidates that is not based on shares of House seats or the popular vote.
The ruling was seven to two, with Justice Anwar Usman and Justice Daniel Yusmic Foekh dissenting on the grounds that the petitioners lacked legal standing to pursue the case.
The four students from Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic University (UIN) in Yogyakarta filed the petition about a week after the February presidential election last year, saying they are independent and did not represent any political parties.
Political parties were divided over their third-party intervention, with President Prabowo Subianto’s Gerindra Party, along with allies the Golkar Party and the National Awakening Party (PKB) opposing the petitions. Those in support were small parties with no representation in the legislature, such as the Hanura Party and the Labor Party.
Gerindra and Golkar are the third- and second-largest parties in the House, respectively, after the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), currently the only de facto opposition party, which controls 19 percent of the House seats.
The presidential nomination threshold in Indonesia was introduced in 2004, when the figure was set at 15 percent of House seats or 20 percent of the popular vote. Five years later, the House raised the bar to 20 percent of the seats or 25 percent of the popular vote.
Thursday’s ruling marks a change in the court’s stance.
In the past there have been 33 petitions challenging the threshold set in the 2017 General Elections Law. These petitions were either rejected by the Constitutional Court on the grounds that it was up to the House and the government to determine the threshold, or dismissed because the petitioners lacked legal standing.
Read also: Court rules in favour of major parties
Thursday’s ruling automatically rendered void three other similar petitions to revoke the threshold. These were filed by election activist Titi Anggraini, co-founder of the Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem), election watchdog the Network for Democracy and Electoral Integrity (Netgrit), as well as a group of lecturers and a lawyer.
Titi described the ruling as a “victory” for all Indonesian people, saying it would benefit both political parties and voters.
“Political parties will have a better chance to nominate presidential candidates, while voters will have more voting options in the elections. This will ensure Indonesia has a more just, equal and inclusive democracy in the future,” Titi told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.
Titi urged political parties to prepare their best members to run in the 2029 presidential election.
Netgrit executive director Hadar Navis Gumay, who is a former KPU commissioner, said: “The public will have more alternative candidates entering the competitions in the future. We thank the court for this ruling.”
The court’s surprise decision on Thursday came only months after it lowered the electoral threshold for political parties to nominate candidates in regional head elections, opening the door for opposition candidates to mount a challenge to the dominance of the Gerindra-led Onward Indonesia Coalition (KIM).
Indonesia held presidential and legislative elections in February of last year, which were won by Prabowo and opposition party the PDI-P, respectively. Nine months later, people voted for their governors, mayors and regents in nationwide regional election.