Indonesia's Constitutional Court Rules Presidential Threshold Opposes Democracy
At the beginning of 2025, there was some big political news related to the electoral threshold for presidential and vice-presidential nominations in Indonesia. And, it is a development that is bound to change future presidential elections in the country.
In 2003 – when Indonesia was at its very early stages of democracy, and just ahead of its first direct election in 2004 – a threshold was imposed that heavily limited the number of presidential nominations in elections. Based on Articles 5 and 101 of Law No. 23 of Year 2003 on General Elections, this threshold was set at a minimum of 15 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives (DPR) or 20 percent of the votes in the legislative election.[1]
What it meant was that those political parties that did not meet the threshold (which was almost all political parties) had to form coalitions in order to meet the threshold and become able to come up with a presidential and vice-presidential candidate.
Advantages and Disadvantages of the Presidential Threshold
The advantage of this threshold was that there would typically only be two or three presidential candidates in the elections. Moreover, the candidates would each enjoy some significant support from the (sum of) political parties in the DPR, suggesting a more stable situation which is important for governance. Obviously, a president (or cabinet) facing a DPR in which most seats are controlled by opposition faces serious obstacles in terms of achieving programs and ambitions. And so, the need to achieve proportionality in the country’s electoral system through coalition-forming acted as a form of accommodation for voters' voices as well as legal certainty over people's sovereignty.
[1] Back then, legislative and presidential elections were not held concurrently: legislative elections were held first, followed by the presidential election around three months later.
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