JAKARTA: The battle lines for Indonesia’s 2019 presidential election were drawn on Friday as the incumbent Joko “Jokowi” Widodo formally registered as a candidate after choosing a conservative Islamic cleric as his running mate.

Jokowi, the first Indonesian president from outside the military and political elite, announced his vice-presidential candidate, Ma’ruf Amin, on Thursday after weeks of fevered speculation in local media. Jokowi’s pick has become bigger news in Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, than an earthquake on the island of Lombok that killed more than 300 people.

The decision disappointed liberals but analysts say it shores up Jokowi’s position among conservative Muslims who demonstrated their political power last year with the ouster of Jakarta’s minority Christian governor, a Jokowi ally, who was later imprisoned for blasphemy. Attacking the popular Jokowi as insufficiently religious is one of the few cards his opponents have.

Amin, 75, heads the influential Indonesian Ulema Council that issues fatwas, or religious edicts, and the advisory council of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim organisation. He was one of the clerics who galvanised street protests of hundreds of thousands against the Jakarta governor, Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, for his alleged blasphemy and has a long record of supporting Shariah law and railing against homosexuality, secularism, liberalism and minority sects within Islam.

Indonesia and neighbouring Malaysia, both Muslim-majority nations, have become important if sometimes unpredictable bastions of democracy in Southeast Asia, a region of more than 600 million people where authoritarian rule has been the norm. Elections in Malaysia in May ended the 60-year domination of the Malay coalition, and Indonesia has established a two-decade track record of free and largely peaceful elections since the fall of dictator Suharto in 1998.

Published in Dawn, August 11th, 2018