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Tuesday, July 06, 2004
In Other Election News,
Gen. (retired) Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is trouncing his rivals for the Indonesian presidency, but he needs at least 50 percent of the vote to win outright. He's not getting it. Pulling up solidly in number 2 is the incumbent, Megawati Sukarnoputri, so they might face each other in a runoff next September.
This is pretty good news. No one I talked to in Indonesia wanted to vote for Mega, either because she's a woman, and women by some Islamic notions are not supposed to lead a country, or because she's proved herself dumb and ineffectual. But she was one of the less-bad candidates on offer. Yudhoyono was the other. (And almost everyone wanted to vote for him, in spite of his military career.) The real horror-show candidate, former General Wiranto, is pulling up a satisfyingly distant third.
UPDATE: The votes are still being counted — counting goes on for days and weeks in Indonesia — and Wiranto is not a distant third. He's a close third. But his chances of a pop-singing career are stronger, at this point, than his prospects for the presidency. (In America we may think singing politicians are weird, but they're normal in Indonesia.)
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
4:20 PM
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