Indonesian presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto gestures after casting his vote in the presidential and parliamentary elections at a polling station in Bogor on February 14, 2024. Indonesians began voting for a new president on February 14, with Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto the frontrunner. Despite concerns about his human rights record, he leads Southeast Asia's largest economy.
Yasuyoshi Chiba | AFP | Getty Images
Indonesia's defense minister and former army general Prabowo Subianto appears to have an early unofficial lead in the next presidential election, according to “breaking news” and exit polls ahead of the voting deadline.
Mr Prabowo won a simple majority of votes cast in Wednesday's election in the world's third-largest democracy, according to two early independent snap tallies based on vote samples released just hours after polls closed on Wednesday. It seems that you have acquired the.
According to a tally released by independent polling companies Indicator Politics and SMRC, former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan came in second place with just under a quarter of the votes, followed by former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo in third place. It became the rank.
Official results will not be announced until at least a month later. The winner will replace President Joko Widodo, also known as Jokowi, who is not running for election after completing his maximum 10-year term.
To win outright, candidates need to win more than 50% of the national vote and at least 20% of the votes cast in more than half of Indonesia's 38 provinces on Wednesday. If no one achieves this, Indonesians in the world's largest archipelago nation, spanning more than 17,000 islands, will head to a runoff between the two best-performing candidates.
More than 200 million people turned out to vote in Indonesia in just the sixth election since the Southeast Asian archipelago emerged from President Suharto's military dictatorship in the late 1990s.
The results of these elections could have some impact on Indonesia's democratization, while also determining whether Southeast Asia's largest economy achieves developed status by 2045. It is also unclear whether the new president will derail outgoing President Joko Widodo's plan to move the capital from Jakarta. Go to Nusantara or curb Indonesia's ambitions to become a global hub for battery manufacturing.
—CNBC's Celestine Francis Xavier contributed to this article.
This is a developing story. Check back for more updates.
