Legal Literacy - On January 2, 2025, Constitutional Court (Constitutional Court) made history. After previously rejecting 32 cases testing the constitutionality of the presidential nomination threshold, the Constitutional Court finally stated that the requirement for political parties or a coalition of political parties to have 20 percent of the DPR seats or obtain 25 percent of the national valid votes in the previous election. In operative part of the decision Number 62/PUU-XXII/2024 read by Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court Suhartoyo, the Constitutional Court decided to remove the provision on the minimum threshold percentage for proposing presidential and vice-presidential candidates in Article 222 of Law Number 7 of 2017 concerning Elections because it was contrary to the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia. This decision is not just a technical change in election rules. This is a fundamental constitutional correction. The question now is not whether Article 222 needs to be replaced, but how soon the DPR must act, and what the replacement norm should be designed like.

Why is This Constitutional Court Decision Different from Previous Ones?

For more than a decade, various parties ranging from individuals, academics, to political parties have repeatedly challenged the presidential threshold provision. Always failed. But this time the Constitutional Court shifted fundamentally, not only about the percentage figure, but about the principle. The Constitutional Court stated that the presidential threshold determined in Article 222 of Law Number 7 of 2017 is not only contrary to political rights and popular sovereignty, but also violates morality, rationality, and intolerable injustice. The Constitutional Court considers that the threshold closes and eliminates the constitutional right of political parties participating in elections who do not have a percentage of valid votes nationally or a percentage of the number of seats in the DPR in the previous election to propose presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Even further, new political parties that are declared to have passed as election participants immediately lose this constitutional right, something that the Constitutional Court views as a form of real injustice. From a constitutional law perspective, this shift in the Constitutional Court's attitude is very meaningful. The Constitutional Court not only annulled an article but the Constitutional Court affirmed that the presidential nomination threshold regime, regardless of its size, is contrary to Article 6A paragraph (2) of the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia. This means that anyone who later tries to revive the threshold in any form through revisions to the Election Law must be prepared to face constitutional review again.