Pop stars, model, prince’s ex-wife: meet the Indonesian election’s most colourful candidates

Two pop stars and a former model who was once married to a Malaysian prince are among a slew of Indonesian celebrities who have added a touch of glamour to Wednesday’s general elections by running as candidates.

The singers Krisdayanti and Riefian Fajarsyah (better known as Ifan), and the former model/actress Manohara Odelia Pinot are vying with nearly 8,000 candidates from 16 national political parties for 575 seats up for grabs in the House of Representatives (DPR).

Apart from the national parliament, an estimated 192 million Indonesians will also vote for their next president and vice-president, as well as members of local and regional parliaments on the same day.

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Ifan, 36, from pop band Seventeen, said he decided to run for public office after losing his wife and several bandmates to a tsunami last year. The band was performing at a beach on December 22, when a tsunami in the Sunda Strait hit the coastal areas, killing about 600 people.

He will be running in West Kalimantan province on a National Awakening Party ticket for a DPR seat.

In an Instagram video post on February 27, Ifan appealed for support from voters in the constituency, saying he would fight for their aspirations in parliament.

“If you all allow me, we can bring our cause into the national parliament,” said Iran, who is running for a second time after an unsuccessful bid in 2014.

Pop diva Krisdayanti, 43, who is running as a legislative candidate for the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle in East Java, said she knew it would not be easy running for public office even though she was a well-known figure in the entertainment industry.

“I believe that it is time for me to serve the people beyond singing. I’ve chosen to serve the people in the electoral district where I was born, because they’ve been my biggest fans and strongest supporters,” Krisdayanti said in one newspaper interview.

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Manohara, 27, who is representing the Nasdem Party in another constituency in East Java, hopes to champion environmental and health issues.

Manohara told the Kompas newspaper that she left the world of acting and modelling four years ago, and had been actively involved in different institutions which were engaged in the development of a clean and sustainable environment.

She noted that many Indonesians still prefer to burn garbage rather than throwing it away. “This is not good, because the smoke produced affects the environment,” she said.

Back in 2009, she made headlines after escaping in Singapore from her then husband, Tengku Muhammad Fakhry Petra, amid allegations of physical abuse. The prince is the younger brother of Sultan Muhammad V, the Kelantan monarch who abdicated as Malaysian king in January. The abdication came weeks after news reports said he had married former Russian beauty queen Oksana Voevodina.

Celebrity candidates are much sought after by Indonesian political parties since they are known vote-getters. A political party must win at least 4 per cent of the votes to qualify for a seat in the DPR.

At least 91 DPR candidates in the General Election Commission’s list of permanent candidates are from the entertainment world, and they include models, musicians, dangdut singers and film stars.

The National Democrats Party tops the list with 37 celebrity candidates, while the Indonesian Solidarity Party has only one, Giring Ganesha, the lead vocalist of the band Nidji.

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Some of the famous candidates are artistes who have just entered politics, while others have been involved in the political arena for quite some time, and are seeking to be re-elected as DPR members.

Some of the celebrities have even switched party loyalties in this election.

Indonesian political observer Pangi Syarwi Chaniago attributed the trend to the parties’ difficulty in finding well qualified candidates. Hence, political parties prefer to take short-cut by finding candidates who are well known to the public, even though they may not be have the necessary expertise.

Pangi noted that this trend is not new, since parties have relied on star power during the general elections every five years.

“Political parties now … sell the names of public figures to gain electoral status,” he said, referring to the 4 per cent threshold.

Pangi found it worrying that political parties had ignored the proper process of recruitment, which was to select candidates based on their level of competence.

“The party should recruit candidates based on [their] ideology, integrity, capability, loyalty, reliability, not just recruiting [based] on popularity and logistics,” he added.