Mahfud MD: DPR Will Struggle to Lower the Parliamentary Threshold as Wasted Votes Benefit the Big Parties

JAKARTA — Former Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal and Security Affairs Mahfud MD says the House of Representatives (DPR) will find it difficult to lower the parliamentary threshold because large parties in parliament are advantaged by wasted votes. The reason is that incumbent parties want to maintain a high threshold to gain the spillover votes from parties that fail to meet the threshold, since seats that could have been spread to smaller parties end up divided among parties that pass the DPR. “If now we talk about it again, perhaps it will be lowered; the fight with the DPR is not easy. Because the DPR is controlled by the seat-holding parties that also have an interest in obtaining spillover from wasted votes, right? They want that too,” Mahfud said at a Seminar on the Parliamentary Threshold, on Wednesday (4 March 2026).

“Previously, people thought that if there were no threshold, everyone would form a party. Then the threshold for presidential candidacy and for parties would be unclear,” he added.

However, in practice, the system results in many voter votes not being converted into seats in the DPR. Therefore, Mahfud believes the momentum to revise the Elections Bill could be used to re-examine the rationality of the threshold. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that policy changes remain in the hands of the DPR as the law-making body.

Earlier reports said that proposals to change the parliamentary threshold emerged alongside plans to revise the Elections Law by the DPR. Several political parties hold different views on the threshold amount to be proposed in the revision of the Elections Law, ranging from removal, maintenance, to altering the figure. NasDem, for instance, proposed raising the parliamentary threshold to 7 percent. However, that proposal was considered too high by several other parties.