Jakarta (ANTARA) – Executive Director of the Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem) Khoirunnisa Nur Agustyati said that the House of Representatives and the government as lawmakers need to formulate rules for coalition dominance in the general election of the president and vice president (pilpres) proportionally.
The rational domination rule is considered important, considering that the Constitutional Court in Decision Number 62/PUU-XXII/2024 which abolished the presidential threshold also mandated that political parties could form coalitions, as long as the coalition did not cause domination.
“We can say that the Constitutional Court actually suggests that there needs to be a maximum threshold for coalition, so that it does not become a dominant coalition. In formulating numbers, for example in the form of percentages, we also need to encourage that the legislators are also based on rational calculations,” said Ninis, her nickname, in a webinar that was followed online in Jakarta, Monday.
Likewise, Head of the Department of Politics and Social Change at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Arya Fernandes said that lawmakers need to formulate rules so that there is no dominant coalition, as mandated by the Constitutional Court’s decision.
“The Constitutional Court is very concerned that the limits of the coalition must be regulated so that there is no dominant coalition because according to the Constitutional Court, if there is coalition dominance it will limit people’s choices in elections,” he said at the same opportunity.
According to Arya, the regulation so that there is no dominant coalition is complicated and complex. This is because the legislators need to formulate a definition of the dominance of a coalition of political parties.
“The first complexity is what is called domination? What is the size? Is the size of domination more than 50 percent? Or is it more than 2/3 or 1/3 or what? How, what is meant by domination?” he said.
It is known that the Constitutional Court, Thursday (2/1), decided to remove the provisions of the minimum percentage threshold for proposing a presidential and vice presidential candidate pair or presidential threshold in Article 222 of Law Number 7/2017 on Elections.
The Constitutional Court stated that the presidential threshold is not only contrary to the political rights and sovereignty of the people, but also violates morality, rationality, and injustice that cannot be tolerated and is clearly contrary to the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia.
In its legal considerations, the Constitutional Court also provided five guidelines for lawmakers to carry out constitutional engineering. The first guideline is that all political parties participating in the election have the right to propose a presidential-vice presidential pair.
Meanwhile, in the third guideline, the Constitutional Court said that political parties participating in the election can join in proposing a presidential-vice presidential pair, as long as the combination does not cause the dominance of political parties which causes limited candidate pairs and choices for voters.
Meanwhile, in the fifth guideline, the Constitutional Court mandates that constitutional engineering be carried out by involving the participation of all parties who have an interest in organizing elections, by applying the principle of meaningful participation.
This article was published on Antaranews.com with the title “Perludem: Presidential election coalition dominance must be regulated proportionally”, https://www.antaranews.com/berita/4567534/perludem-harus-diatur-dominasi-koalisi-pilpres-secara-proporsional