JAKARTA, Public Relations of the Constitutional Court—The old version of the Constitution drafted by the founding fathers didn’t talk about general election in detail, although they discussed the normative formulation, said Constitutional Justice Saldi Isra when delivering his keynote speech at a webinar on “Reviewing the Design for Filling Regional Head Positions” organized by the Law Faculty of Andalas University on Friday morning, December 18, 2020.

“In the old version of the 1945 Constitution, no articles, paragraphs, or phrases on general election (pemilu) were found. However, when we read the transcripts of the first formulation of the Constitution, [it] was mentioned by some of the founding fathers, but it wasn’t laid out in a normative formula,” he said.

Justice Saldi believes the general election is not based on the old version of the Constitution. After the amendment to the 1945 Constitution, it became a focus of discussion by the founding fathers.

“There was a national issue on how [to refer to] the election at regional level without having to explain in detail the election at the national level. In the amendment to the 1945 Constitution, [they] chose the phrase ‘governors, regents, and mayors’ as regional heads that are elected democratically,” he added.

Writer: Utami Argawati
Editor: Lulu Anjarsari
Translator: Yuniar Widiastuti (NL)

Translation uploaded on 12/21/2020 21:53 WIB

Disclaimer: The original version of the news is in Indonesian. In case of any differences between the English and the Indonesian version, the Indonesian version will prevail.