INDONESIA'S ruling Golkar party recorded its most crushing victory ever in Thursday's general election, almost wiping out one of the two minority parties in the process, results announced yesterday revealed.
Senior party officials said that even they were surprised by the margin of victory. With 105.1 million of a possible 124.7 million ballots counted by last night, Golkar had 74.1 per cent of the valid vote.
The Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) was almost annihilated, attracting only 3 per cent of the voters.
Mr Abdul Gafur, one of seven Golkar party chairpersons, said: "The result surprises us because, according to our calculations, we thought we could have only got 70 or 71 per cent."
Observers dismissed Mr Gafur's assertion that Golkar would now be in a stronger position to influence the decision-making process.
Political analyst Mr Cornelius Lay said: "Golkar's position won't really be changed by this result because the House of Representatives has no real power at all. What is significant, however, is the destruction of PDI."
This time last year, under the leadership of Ms Megawati Sukarnoputri, PDI looked like a credible opposition party. This election has shown that by removing her, the government has snuffed out all viable opposition to it.
Ms Megawati was ousted in a government-sponsored party coup last June. Opposed to her successor, Mr Suryadi, she said she would not vote in the election and told her supporters not to back the PDI. Mr Lay said: "The tiny PDI vote shows how many people still look to Megawati as their political leader. It also destroyed Suryadi's political credibility.
The United Development Party, the only other party allowed by law, saw its share of the vote rise from 17 per cent to more than 23 per cent. Despite this, many of its supporters protested against the results yesterday, complaining of electoral fraud.
And the country's independent election monitoring committee, KIPP, said in its preliminary report on polling that there had been systematic violations of the rules, including multiple voting, intimidation of polling witnesses, discrimination in the treatment of voters and procedural irregularities.