(Bloomberg) -- Prabowo Subianto claimed victory for a third day in Indonesia's presidential election, dismissing unofficial quick counts showing a win for incumbent leader Joko Widodo.
“The official victory is in front of our eyes,” Prabowo, as the former general is commonly known, told a gathering of his supporters in Jakarta on Friday. “Despite all the irregularities, various threats and intimidation and practices that deviate from the principles of democracy, the will of the Indonesian people cannot be pressured anymore.”
Prabowo claims to have won Wednesday's vote by polling about 62 percent based on a survey by his campaign team. Widodo, known as Jokowi, declared victory on Thursday, citing unofficial quick counts by about a dozen independent pollsters, which gave him an average 54.5 percent of the votes. Prabowo, who narrowly lost to Jokowi in 2014, has said he has evidence of massive voting irregularities.
With both the contestants claiming victory, any legal challenge of the verdict will have to wait until the General Elections Commission announces official results. The authority is set to declare an official quick count based on polling stations' reports in the next week, before completing the manual counting of ballots by May 22.
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Over 80 percent of the 193 million people eligible to vote participated in the country's first simultaneous presidential and parliamentary elections. More than 245,000 candidates were in the fray for about 20,000 positions, which included 575 seats to the national lower house of parliament.
The unofficial results sent the nation's stocks, currency and bonds soaring on Thursday as investors bet the president may now accelerate economic reform in Southeast Asia's largest economy.
To contact the reporter on this story: Yoga Rusmana in Jakarta at yrusmana@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anna Kitanaka at akitanaka@bloomberg.net, Thomas Kutty Abraham, Sunil Jagtiani
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