INDONESIA: Indonesians voted in parliamentary elections yesterday in a crowded contest that may see the former political party of ousted strongman Suharto win the most votes, but not a majority.
More than 147 million voters were eligible to participate in the vote for the 550-seat parliament and local legislatures.
Tens of thousands of police were deployed during voting at nearly 600,000 polling booths in the world's most populous Muslim country. Voters struggled with newspaper-size ballots to choose from dozens of parties and hundreds of candidates.
"It's confusing because the ballot paper is so big," said a voter in Jakarta. "After you open it, it's hard to close it back up." The election for the parliament and local legislatures was billed as history's biggest one-day vote, and was only Indonesia's second democratic vote since Suharto's fall in 1998.
Polls closed at most voting stations at 1 p.m. (7 a.m. Irish time) and at some places counting began shortly after that, although it could be one or two days before meaningful results are known.
A win for the party Golkar - which has sought to distance itself from the former autocrat who ruled for three decades while taking credit for economic growth then - could badly dent President Megawati Sukarnoputri's chances of winning a second term in Indonesia's first direct presidential election on July 5th.
"The economy has suffered, economic recovery has not yet finished. And you know of increasing unemployment, poverty," said Golkar presidential candidate Mr Akbar Tandjung.
The results will be followed by a scramble to build coalitions before the presidential election, in which recent opinion polls show Mr Megawati has lost the status of frontrunner.
Amid fears of unrest, 275,000 police were deployed, but voting was largely peaceful across the vast archipelago, apart from some minor violence in Aceh province. The results will test the popularity of conservative Islamist parties in the wake of bomb attacks by militants linked to Osama bin Laden.