Anies to challenge Indonesian election results in court

The challenge comes amid claims the poll results were distorted by state ‘interventions’ that favoured presumptive winner Prabowo Subianto.

A fan snaps a selfie of Anies Baswedan in Jakarta last month. Picture: AFP)

Defeated Indonesian presidential candidate Anies Baswedan will lodge a Constitutional Court challenge against the country’s February elections amid claims the results were distorted by state “interventions” that favoured presumptive winner Prabowo Subianto.

The former Jakarta governor confirmed on Wednesday his team would dispute the February 14 vote – the final outcome of which will be released by the ­National Election Committee on March 20 – as a matter of ­“principle”, and to ensure the ­future integrity of Indonesia’s democratic process.

“We plan to file to the MK (constitutional court) for sure, but the content is not something we can disclose right now,” Mr Anies told the Jakarta Foreign Correspondents’ Club.

“The issue is not the outcome between candidates, but whether it is statistically possible for any pair of candidates to achieve more than 50 per cent in a single round without intervention.”

Pre-election surveys had for months put Mr Prabowo at least 20 percentage points ahead of Mr Anies and third presidential candidate Ganjar Pranowo.

But few were willing to predict a first-round victory for the notorious former special forces commander, let alone the 58 per cent vote share he looks set to have achieved when the formal count is completed next week.

Mr Prabowo lost two previous presidential contests to current President Joko Widodo. Many pundits have suggested he owes his political turnaround in large part to the support of his former rival and the resources of the state that allegedly backed his campaign – claims Mr Prabowo and Jokowi have consistently denied.

Mr Anies would not say whether Mr Ganjar would join his judicial challenge, though both rival candidates have so far refused to concede as questions persist over the integrity of the campaign. A Kompas survey revealed as many as 60 per cent of voters who received social aid in the three months before the elections voted for Team Prabowo.

The two losing teams are understood to be working towards a parliamentary inquiry into allegations that state intimidation and billions in social aid were used to engineer an election victory for Mr Prabowo and his running mate Gibran Rakabuming Raka, Jokowi’s eldest son whose candidacy was only made possible after laws were changed to accommodate it.

The five political parties behind the two teams – which includes parliament’s largest, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) — would likely have the combined parliamentary numbers to get an inquiry over the line if they were to remain united amid jockeying for position within the winning coalition. But such is the level of paranoia over potential intervention in the counting process, that The Australian understands the camps are unwilling to publicise their intent before the formal vote count is released.

In recent days concerns have also been raised over a “statistically impossible” rise in the vote haul for the Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI), chaired by Jokowi’s youngest son and for months touted as a post-presidential vehicle for Mr Joko who lacks a party through which he can maintain influence.

For the PSI to have any political sway, however, it must pass a 4 per cent vote threshold to secure seats in parliament, which it was unlikely to do given quick counts had estimated it would capture just 2.78 per cent of the vote, before a precipitous rise in its vote haul which survey experts described as “impossible”.