Indonesia election 2024: can Anies Baswedan upset the odds and convince voters he is a moderate?

Anies has been polling a distant third behind Prabowo Subianto and Ganjar Pranowo in the race to be Indonesia’s next president

The former governor of Jakarta is aiming to appeal to moderate voters that he is no longer a firebrand

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Indonesian presidential candidate Anies Baswedan registers for his candidacy at the election commission in Jakarta on Thursday. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 7:00pm, 20 Oct 2023Updated: 8:25pm, 23 Oct 2023

Indonesian presidential candidate Anies Baswedan, the former governor of Jakarta, and his running mate Muhaimin Iskandar, chairman of the Islam-based National Awakening Party (PKB), may have been the first team to register for next year’s election but they are still considered the weakest in a three-horse race to succeed incumbent Joko Widodo.

Anies and Muhaimin put their names before the elections commission on Thursday, formalising their intention that they had first announced in early September. The candidates arrived at the commission’s Jakarta headquarters standing on the back of an open-top Land Rover. Throngs of their supporters chanted their names and scrambled to shake their hands.

Despite the enthusiasm, opinion polls have consistently placed Anies last among three presidential candidates for the election on February 14 next year. The main contest is widely seen as being between Prabowo Subianto, Indonesian Defence Minister, and Ganjar Pranowo, the former governor of Central Java, both of whom have substantial leads over Anies in the polls.

Thomas Lembong, an adviser to Anies’ campaign, has dismissed the public polls as inaccurate. “The externally published surveys are practically useless as guides because they are shaped for propaganda.

“Virtually all the internal polls [commissioned by all the competing teams] that are not available to the public consistently show a neck-to-neck race among the three candidates,” Lembong said.

But political analysts also agreed with the public poll results, saying the Anies and Muhaimin pairing would struggle to win the election.