PKB forms contingency plans to ensure say in presidential poll
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.