Early Look into the Indonesian Election Results: Who comes out on top?

Two weeks have passed since the 2024 Indonesian general elections, which was only
the second election in the country’s 79-year history that elections for the president, vice
president, People’s Consultative Assembly (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, MPR), the
House of Representatives (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR), and Regional Representative
Council (Dewan Perwakilan Daerah, DPD) were conducted on the same day, leaving the whole
nation standing at attention while waiting for the official results to be released. In accordance
with Law No. 17 of 2017 article 413 paragraph (1), the General Elections Commission (Komisi
Pemilihan Umum, KPU) is expected to release the official results on the 20th of March, thirty
five days after the commencement of the elections. Still, given the massive impact that these
results will surely bring for the whole populace, many have turned to unofficial ‘quick counts’,
which base their results on a selected sample of polling stations throughout the country,
conducted by third party organizations to parse out who are most likely to come out as the
winners this election cycle.
Evidently, most of this attention has centered on the potential winners of the presidential
and vice presidential elections, to see who will be the figures to replace incumbent President
Joko Widodo and Vice President Ma’ruf Amin. Virtually all of these quick counts peg the pairing
of incumbent Minister of Defense, Prabowo Subianto and eldest son of President Widodo as
well as incumbent Mayor of Surakarta, Gibran Rakabuming Raka as the favorites to win the
election. Litbang Kompas has the pairing racking up 58,47% of their sampled vote share, while
Charta Politika has them at 57,99%, and Indikator at 58,08%. The second highest vote-getter

according to these quick count polls is candidate pair number one, that being presidential
candidate Anies Baswedan and vice presidential candidate Muhaimin Iskandar, receiving
25,23% of the vote share according to Litbang Kompas, 25,36% according to Charta Politika,
and 25,34% according to Indikator. Finally, the number three pairing of presidential candidate
Ganjar Pranowo and vice presidential candidate Mahfud MD appear slated to finish as the
lowest vote-getters, with the pair getting 16.30% of the vote by Litbang Kompas’ count, 16,64%
by Charta Politika’s count, and 16,58% by Indikator’s count.

With roughly two weeks left to go in this period of vote recapitulation, the official vote
tally by the KPU (which accounts for 78,10% of the total votes as per the writing of this article), it
seems that the quick count polls roughly echo the actual result from the ‘real count, with KPU’s
numbers also showing the Prabowo-Gibran pairing leading the pack at 58,82%, Anies-Muhaimin
trailing at 24,49%, and Ganjar-Mahfud sitting at 16,68%. With nearly 80% of the vote already
counted by the KPU, it seems that the likelihood of the number two candidate pairing being
overtaken by one of the other candidates is already out of the question. However, this does not
necessarily mean that the Prabowo-Gibran pair’s victory is already a given, as it is important to
remember the two-round system that the Indonesian election uses, where in order for a
candidate to win in the first round they must win a simple majority of the vote share (at least 1
vote over 50% of the total vote share) and at least 20% of the votes in over half of Indonesia’s
provinces, with the election going into a second round if no candidate is able to achieve both of
these conditions. Prabowo-Gibran has already achieved the latter condition and needs only to
fulfill winning a simple majority, thus it would require the pair to drop to getting under 50% of the
vote share for the election to move to the second round.

Though much of the attention in this election cycle is indeed placed on the potential
victors of the presidential election, as mentioned previously, this year’s general election will also
determine the victors of the legislative election. Here it is important to remember that for the
results of the legislative election, Indonesia implements a parliamentary threshold, that being a
certain amount of the vote share that a political party must receive in order to be able to gain
seats in the House of Representatives (DPR). According to Law No. 7 of 2017, a political party
must win at least 4% of the total vote share to gain seats in the parliament. Thus, looking at the
standings based on the votes already counted by the KPU so far, the parties slated to win seats
in the DPR are, PDI-P (16.39%), Golkar (15.05%), Gerindra (13.30%), PKB (11.53%), NasDem
(9.43%), PKS (7.50%), Demokrat (7.41%), PAN (6.95%), PPP (4.01%). Once again these
numbers are subject to change, given that the KPU has yet to tally all of the votes, but these
initial results do paint a picture on the makeup of Indonesia’s parliament for the next five years.
Interestingly, with PDI-P, PKB, NasDem, and PKS (the political parties who were part of the
coalitions supporting Anies-Muhaimin and Ganjar-Mahfud) all winning a sizeable amount of
seats in the parliament for this period, it would mean that if Prabowo-Gibran were to win the
election as the preliminary results seem to indicate, unlike their predecessors the two would
have to work with a parliament that would be largely made up by the parties opposing them.