PKB forms contingency plans to ensure say in presidential poll

Tiarma Siboro and Indra Harsaputra, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta/Surabaya

The National Awakening Party (PKB) has set up a contingency plan in case it does not achieve the minimum votes required to contest the presidential election.

The plan includes forming a coalition with other parties and reconsidering the nomination of its founder Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid, a party leader said on Wednesday.

Head of the PKB election team Khofifah Indar Parawansa said Gus Dur would secure the presidency and therefore would not need to join forces with other parties if PKB won the majority vote in the April 5 polls.

Khofifah, however, said the PKB had set a realistic target of winning 24.7 percent of the vote. This, she said, would be enough to help Gus Dur regain the presidency which he lost in 2001, by forming a coalition.

"We have yet to decide which party we will join forces with, as it depends on the results of legislative election," Khofifah told a press conference at PKB headquarters here.

She added the party would not push for Gus Dur's candidacy if the party did not fare any better than in the 1999 election, when it won 12.6 percent of the vote.

The conference came only 24 hours after about 30 influential clerics from Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) recommended Gus Dur as the PKB presidential candidate. The clerics, however, said the proposal would be scrapped if Gus Dur experienced health problems and would ask the party to name a replacement.

Gus Dur beat Megawati Soekarnoputri in the 1999 presidential election, but the visually impaired Muslim cleric was dismissed in July 2001 by the People's Consultative Assembly that elected him.

Khofifah said the PKB had also formed a team comprising the party's executives to take strategic action if Gus Dur's health prevented him from campaigning.

Gus Dur is expected to start the campaign in East Java, the stronghold of PKB, on the first day of campaigning on Thursday. The party's provincial chapter has chartered a helicopter to enable Gus Dur visit all parts of the province.

In Surabaya, chairman of NU's East Java chapter Ali Maschan Moesa said the 30 clerics were supporting Gus Dur's bid for the presidency in their personal capacity, not NU as an institution.

"The meeting failed to heed the views of those who oppose Gus Dur's nomination," Maschan said.

He said NU would announce its preferred presidential candidate only after the legislative election.