Hatta Rajasa, the running mate of presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto, denied on Friday that the pair had ever promised a top Cabinet position to Golkar Party chairman Aburizal Bakrie.
Hatta seemed to contradict Prabowo's earlier statement that he had offered Aburizal the position of menteri utama, or chief minister, in return for Golkar's support.
"The chief ministerial [position] does not exist in law," he said on the sidelines of the declaration of support from former national athletes' for Prabowo and Hatta at the Gelora Bung Karno stadium in Central Jakarta. He added that the pair had also not promised Cabinet seats to members of the coalition who supported their candidacies.
Prabowo previously said that there would be a professional "chief minister" who would manage the grand plan to speed up development. "Thank God, he [Aburizal] is willing [to accept the offer]," Prabowo said after visiting Aburizal's home on Jl. Ki Mangunsarkoro in Jakarta earlier this month.
He said the position offered was a key position to control the economy of the fourth-most populous country in the world.
Prabowo said that Aburizal was capable of handling such a task because the Golkar chairman had served as coordinating economic minister from 2004 until 2005 and coordinating minister for people's welfare from 2005 until 2009.
Shortly after Prabowo made the offer, Aburizal declared Golkar's support for the Gerindra Party-led coalition, despite speculation that the party would team up with Gerindra's rival, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P).
The offer has been criticized by constitutional experts who say the country's system of government would have to be changed from presidential to parliamentary for such a ministerial position to exist.
University of Indonesia (UI) political law expert Ganjar Laksmana Bonaprapta, for example, said that the country did not recognize such a ministerial position.
"Chief minister in the English language means prime minister. We don't recognize that," he told The Jakarta Post on Friday.
Despite the conflicting stances, Aburizal appeared to still hold out hope on the offer. "We'll see later [whether I will get the position or not]," he told the Post when asked about the issue.
The head of Prabowo–Hatta's campaign team, Mahfud MD, meanwhile, said that there was no need to make a fuss about the offer because it was fully constitutional. "There is no formal term for chief minister. It can be called head minister, coordinating minister, prime minister, whatever. There's no problem. It's legit," he said on Thursday.
Therefore, he insisted, Prabowo would not change the presidential system as stipulated in the 1945 Constitution. "It won't change. Everything is already stipulated in the ministerial law. The position probably will be the same as coordinating minister. The position of coordinating minister itself is not stipulated in law. It is the creation of the President himself," he said.
Ganjar, however, said that a chief minister would be different from a coordinating minister.
"We already have coordinating ministers. If he [Prabowo] wants to position someone above coordinating ministers, we can actually call the position anything," he said. "But I'm worried that it wouldn't be effective."
Ganjar reasoned that such a position would only make the government bureaucracy bigger than before as it would add another layer between the coordinating ministers and the president.
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