Indonesia's journey into democracy faltered yesterday as the counting of votes proceeded at a spectacularly slow pace for a second day, giving rise to angry accusations from opposition political parties of cheating by officials reluctant to give up their vote-rigging habits from the old days.
Late yesterday, more than 48 hours after the polls closed on Monday, less than 6 per cent of the votes cast had been tallied. Protesters mounted a picket outside the count headquarters in Jakarta, and said they suspected that officials sympathetic to the ruling Golkar party were trying to change the outcome as it plunged towards its first defeat in 30 years.
International election monitors warned that every day of delay took away from the credibility of the final count.
The most up-to-the-minute official figures show the opposition Democratic Party-Struggle (PDIP) led by Ms Megawati Sukarnoputri leading with 38.5 per cent of the vote, followed by the National Awakening Party with 22.7 per cent and Golkar with 15.5 per cent. But an unofficial count showed Golkar moving into second place. Election officials explained that much of the problem was simple logistics.
Having forecast that the outcome of the parliamentary elections would be known by yesterday evening they now admit they underestimated the complexity of gathering over 100 million voting papers from the 14,000 islands which make up this vast tropical archipelago, and dividing them among the 48 parties listed on the ballots, as well as counting separate votes for local bodies on a proportional representation system.
Each sub-district throughout Indonesia's 26 provinces (and East Timor) has to collate the votes for every polling station in its area before sending them to a higher level, which means that the whole operation is moving, as one official put it, "at the pace of the slowest villages".
Some instances have emerged where voting figures have changed in the transfer from hand-counting to computer. A European Union election observer unit concluded that the poll was "sufficiently free and transparent to guarantee a voting result which will reflect the democratic will of the Indonesian people."
But Mr John Gwynn Morgan, head of the EU team, expressed "grave concern" at events since polling day, "especially the slowness of the count which made the election vulnerable to fraud".
Mr Gwynn Morgan told a press conference that his real worry concerned "reports of discrepancies in transferring written voting records into computerisation" - though he conceded they had found only two instances of this at polling stations. The slow pace of counting engendered mistrust and doubt among voters, he warned.
The Washington-based National Democratic Institute and the Carter Centre of Atlanta, which supplied hundreds of election monitors, also cautioned in a joint statement that "a long period of uncertainty over results leads inevitably to loss of confidence in the election process." However at a separate press conference, Mr Jimmy Carter, a former US president, expressed confidence in the outcome.
"It is a problem but it doesn't necessarily mean any wrongdoing," he said.
The growing frustration of opposition parties led the presidential nominee of the PKB, Mr Abdurrahman Wahid, to threaten to set up an emergency government if the election was contaminated by fraud, though this was seen as primarily a way of putting pressure on the election officials to move faster.
Meanwhile there are reports in Jakarta that Golkar is badly split, with many members unhappy with the choice of President B.J. Habibie as its presidential candidate. Pro-reform Golkar members are unhappy with his close association with the disgraced former president, Mr Suharto.
President Habibie has not yet given up hope of gaining a second term when the 700-member electoral college, with the 462 elected members of parliament and 238 official nominees, meets in November to select a new president.
However his spokeswoman conceded last night that even if Golkar formed a strong alliance with minor parties and unelected officials, some Golkar members might not vote for him.
Stocks fell slightly on the Jakarta stock exchange as market euphoria over the peaceful elections subsided. Dealers said reports of irregularities had prompted some profit-taking.