Reflecting on the Pramono-Rano Victory from the Perspective of Common Sense of Jakarta Residents

The results of the 2024 simultaneous regional head elections (Pilkada) real count have been officially announced. Among the hundreds of regional elections that have been announced by the Regional General Election Commission (KPUD), the winner of the 2024 Jakarta Regional Election is perhaps the most anomalous when compared to the winners of other elections. Explicitly, the winner of the 2024 Jakarta Regional Election came from a minority political group that managed to turn things around from a nobody to a prima donna or a new hope for Jakarta residents. They are the Pramono Anung-Rano Karno pair, which was only promoted by one parliamentary party in the Jakarta DPRD (PDI-P).

Pramono-Rano managed to defeat the Ridwan Kamil-Suswono pair from a large coalition directly supported by power forces and the independent pair Dharma Pongrekun-Kun Wardana. Pramono-Rano's vote acquisition based on the Jakarta KPUD data release amounted to 2,183,239 (50.07 percent), superior to Ridwan Kamil-Suswono who won 1,718,160 votes (39.40 percent) and Dharma Pongrekun-Kun Wardana who received 459,230 votes (10.53 percent). Pramono-Rano's victory is said to be an anomaly because they actually departed from a zero percent (0.01 percent) level of electability at the beginning of registering as a candidate pair for governor-vice governor of Jakarta 2024. However, within three months, they managed to overtake the Ridwan Kamil-Suswono pair, which according to survey institutions was predicted to win the Jakarta Pilkada with more than 50 percent electability.

Source: KPUD Jakarta

Pramono-Rano's victory is categorized as an anomaly because like a battle, they are ants while their opponents (Ridwan Kamil-Suswono) are big elephants supported by the power of 13 political parties. They also received direct support from President Prabowo Subianto and former President Jokowi who openly campaigned for Ridwan Kamil-Suswono to be elected by Jakarta residents as the definitive governor and vice governor for the 2025-2029 period. However, in fact, Pramono-Rano, who were obviously ants on the day of voting, managed to overthrow the big elephant with a convincing result.

Prabowo and Jokowi also proved unable to influence the choice of Jakarta residents to vote for Ridwan Kamil-Suswono. Endorsements, appeals, and even invitations from Prabowo-Jokowi did not sell well in the 2024 Jakarta elections.  Jakarta residents are increasingly proving that they are very mature, have political literacy above the national political literacy average so that any power intervention to win their heroes proves pointless.

The citizens of Jakarta know who deserves to lead them, they also understand how to punish the ruling political forces that previously arranged for the 2024 Jakarta elections to be not followed by Anies Baswedan, who has great potential to win the 2024 Jakarta elections based on surveys─and only followed by one candidate pair (Ridwan Kamil-Suswono) against an empty box─before finally Dharma-Kun Wardana registered as an independent pair and the Constitutional Court (MK) issued a decision that allowed PDI-P to carry their candidate independently without a coalition with other political parties who had agreed to form a large coalition to win Ridwan Kamil-Suswono.

Apart from the great political work of the Pramono-Rano pair and the team, the Pramono-Rano victory in the 2024 Jakarta Pilkada certainly cannot be separated from the support of former Jakarta Governors who have fanatical followers such as Anies Baswedan and Basuki Cahaya Purnama (Ahok) who loudly and firmly intervened in campaigning for the Pramono-Rano pair. Only in the 2024 Jakarta Pilkada, the ranks of Anies and Ahok's hardline supporters united in winning the Pramono-Rano pair. The result was truly effective. First in the history of the Jakarta elections since the 2012 Jakarta elections were followed by more than three pairs of candidates for governor-deputy governor, only this time (2024) the Jakarta elections were successfully held in one round with a resounding victory achieved by the Pramono-Rano pair.

The victory of Rano-Pram is a mirror of the political rationality of Jakarta residents who do not want them to be intervened by rulers and former rulers who should be statesmen by not getting too deep into interfering with the political preferences of Jakarta residents whose education and level of political literacy cannot be equated with residents of other regions. The phenomenon of the results of the 2024 Jakarta Pilkada should be an alarm and at the same time a slap in the face for the authorities and anyone who intends to win the electoral battle─that voters who have a relatively high level of political literacy empirically cannot be influenced or bought in any way. The 2024 Jakarta elections are concrete evidence of this.