Final results give Indonesian president election win (Roundup)

Jul 24, 2009, 12:07 GMT

   Jakarta - Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono won the country's July 8 presidential election with 60.8 per cent of the vote, the General Elections Commission said Friday.

   Yudhoyono received nearly 74 million votes to win a second five-year term, the commission said on its website, reporting its final tally of the ballots.

   His rivals, former president Megawati Sukarnoputri and Vice President Jusuf Kalla, had 26.8 per cent and 12.4 per cent of the votes, respectively, the commission said.

   The results are consistent with predictions made by several pollsters hours after the polls.

   Around 50 million eligible voters did not vote.

   A deputy secretary-general of Yudhoyono's Democratic Party, Anas Urbaningrum, welcomed the results.

   'We are grateful that the vote count has been completed and the results are not different from quick counts conducted by pollsters,' he said.

   Representatives of Megawati and Kalla refused to attend the commission's plenary meeting Thursday night to decide on the final tally, arguing that the election body had yet to address their complaints of irregularities in the voter rolls and other allegations of cheating.

   The election results are to be formally announced Saturday, and candidates then have 72 hours to challenge them.

   Indra Piliang, a spokesman for Kalla's campaign team, said it would file a suit at the Constitutional Court to challenge the conduct of the election.

   'There have been discrepancies between the voter list issued by the General Elections Commission and what we found,' he told the TV One channel.

   'This could also be a criminal case,' he said.

   If the challenges fail, Yudhoyono would be sworn in in October.

   Yudhoyono, 59, has been credited with some successes in his first term, including stabilizing the economy, cracking down on deep-rooted graft and bringing peace to the rebellious Aceh province.

   Analysts said his resounding victory gives him a stronger mandate to pick professionals for his next cabinet and push through reforms as he faces the daunting task of tackling the effects of the global economic crisis.

   Last week's bombings at two luxury hotels in Jakarta, which killed nine people including two suspected suicide bombers, have raised fears of a return of instability to the world's most populous Muslim nation after a few years of calm.

   Police suspect the attacks were the work of Islamic extremists linked to Jemaah Islamiyah, a militant group.

   Experts hailed this month's peaceful election as an indication of how Indonesia has come a long way since the turmoil that marked former dictator Suharto's departure in 1998.

   A decade ago, South-East Asia's largest economy was a shambles, being hard hit by the region's 1997-98 financial crisis.

   Until a few years ago, Indonesia still grappled with a separatist insurgency in Aceh, deadly bombings carried out by Islamic militants and Muslim-Christian violence in the east of the country.