Skip to main content

Sex sells for Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in wooing female vote


JAKARTA's sophisticated set has a joke about why Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono will win the presidential election next month - and it has nothing to do with his handling of the economy or his leadership skills.It's all about sex, and how to win the female vote. Vice-President Jusuf Kalla, who is going head-to-head with SBY for the top job on July 8, has the catchy campaign slogan "Faster! Better!" This attempts to underline the slow progress after five years of Dr Yudhoyono's careful hand, and to show Mr Kalla would leap out of the blocks to get things done. But the affable and considered Dr Yudhoyono, the wits point out, will have women falling over themselves to tick his box next month with his simple directive: "More! More!" Marital relations have been a key element of the campaigning, even if only as part of the noisy rhetoric of secondary groups such as the moderately Islamist Prosperous Justice Party.


This party declared its members were likely to favour the team of Mr Kalla and retired general Wiranto because their wives were known for wearing the Muslim jilbab headdress. Dr Yudhoyono's wife, Ani, is famous for her elegant coiffure. And with open campaigning having begun this week, after a razzle-dazzle Electoral Commission ceremony featuring all three candidates and each of their deputies, the focus is now more on style than substance. Former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, who throughout her political career has battled accusations she is not the sharpest knife in the box, came out punching on the prime-time television current affairs program Kick Andy last night. Asked how she could guarantee her nationalist economic policies would work, she answered: "If I weren't smart, why would Prabowo (her vice-presidential running mate, a retired general with a dubious but uninvestigated human rights record) have chosen me?" This was up there with Ms Megawati's greatest eyebrow-raiser. Asked last year how she expected to run the country with only a high school education, she said: "The Prophet (Mohammed) was a leader, and he didn't have a university degree either."

This week's opinion polls suggest Dr Yudhoyono and his running mate, economics professor Boediono, will win the election comfortably. The Indonesian Survey Circle predicted the incumbent would be returned with more than 63per cent of the vote, with Ms Megawati on 16.4 per cent and the hapless Kalla-Wiranto ticket getting just 5.9 per cent. That survey was particularly bad news for Ms Megawati, as it found that one of her strongest constituencies - the poorly educated - were inclined to support Dr Yudhoyono. Various organisations have made wildly differing election predictions, prompting allegations some were being paid to help particular tickets. But there is little doubt the aggressive campaign of Dr Yudhoyono's team, headed by the US-educated Mallarangeng brothers - Andi, Choel and Rizal, whose Fox Indonesia has adopted a Barack Obama-style grassroots push - is working.

The reception at Jakarta's Tanah Abang textiles market this week was evidence of that, with delighted shoppers - male and female - calling out to Dr Yudhoyono: "More! More

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens

Billionaires Among Thousands of Indonesians Found in Secret Offshore Documents  By Nicky Hager April 9, 2013, 8:15 pm Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens, holding ownership of more than 190 offshore trusts and companies, secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show. The nine families, worth an estimated $36 billion among them, are at the top of a wealthy class that dominates Indonesia’s politics and economy. Six were closely tied to the late dictator Suharto, who helped a special circle of Indonesians grow rich during his 31-year rule by granting economic fiefdoms to family and friends. The billionaires are among nearly 2,500 Indonesians found in the files of Singapore-headquart ered offshore services provider Portcullis TrustNet, which ICIJ has been analyzing and began reporting on last week. Although there is no evidence in the files of illegality by any of the ni...
Post a Comment
Read more

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s.   During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization.   Even though NU was one of the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

is that true in Indonesia there freedom of religion?

The problems began shortly after Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric, opened a boarding school in 2004. The school, in a predominantly Sunni Muslim part of East Java, raised local tensions, and in 2006 it was attacked by thousands of villagers. When a mob set fire to the school and several homes last December, many Shiites saw it as just the latest episode in a simmering sectarian conflict — one that they say has been ignored by the police and exploited by Islamists purporting to preserve the purity of the Muslim faith.   Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has long been considered a place where different religious and ethnic groups can live in harmony and where Islam can work with democracy.   But that perception has been repeatedly brought into question lately. In East Java, Sunni leaders are pushing the provincial government to adopt a regulation limiting the spread of Shiite Islam. It would prevent the country’s two major Shiite organizations from ...
Post a Comment
Read more