0 Pastika offered the PDI-P’s support

In a surprising twist, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) chief patron Taufik Kiemas on Wednesday night offered the party’s official endorsement for incumbent Governor Made Mangku Pastika’s re-election bid. For the last few months, the local PDI-P elite, in particular its provincial executive chairman Cok Ratmadi, had repeatedly made it known to the public that the party would not endorse Pastika again and would instead nominate Pastika’s estranged deputy governor, Anak Agung Ngurah Puspayoga, who happens to be Ratmadi’s baby brother and is known among the PDI-P circle as Kiemas’s golden boy. 

Ratmadi even stated that the party’s recommendation letter for the nominee had been issued and that the party’s chairwoman, Megawati Soekarnoputri, was only waiting for the perfect time to announce the endorsement. “Now we all know that they had not been quite truthful about the recommendation,” Pastika said on Thursday. Sources close to the PDI-P and sources close to Pastika all confirmed that Kiemas had indeed offered Pastika the endorsement to run in the next election as the official candidate of the PDI-P with Puspayoga as his running mate. 

Pastika and Puspayoga ran in the 2008 gubernatorial election on the PDI-P’s ticket and won a landslide victory. The relationship between the two figures started crumbling last year when Puspayoga forged an alliance with Satria Naradha, the owner of the island’s largest daily, Bali Post, and television station BaliTV. Naradha’s media outlets have always painted Pastika as a failed leader, while at the same time promoted Puspayoga as a viable alternative. The offer was made during a meeting at Megawati’s holiday villa in Cucukan village, Gianyar. Only three persons attended the meeting: Kiemas, Pastika and Puspayoga. “He [Kiemas] told us it would be better if both of us could run together [for the re-election]. 

So that all things could run smoothly,” Pastika said. Pastika rejected the offer, stating that he had already accepted the endorsement from a coalition of Golkar, the Democratic Party, the Great Indonesian Movement Party (Gerindra), the People’s Conscience Party (Hanura) and the National Mandate Party (PAN) after waiting in vain for months for the PDI-P endorsement and trying fruitlessly to have an audience with Megawati. “Pastika’s refusal is not directed at the PDI-P, but at Puspayoga. Pastika doesn’t want to run with a man he could no longer respect and trust,” a source close to Pastika said. 

Political analyst Nyoman Wiratmaja warned that the offer could actually be a clever ruse to taint Pastika’s image among the PDI-P’s loyal supporters in Bali. “Now the PDI-P elite, who have worked so hard last year to alienate Pastika, could claim that it is Pastika who doesn’t want to be the PDI-P candidate and it is Pastika who has deserted the PDI-P. They will try to portray him as a man who has betrayed the party that had elevated him to his present position,” he said.

source : bali daily