The wait is over. After taking two weeks to count 135m ballots from roughly 480,000 polling stations across the vast archipelago, the Election Commission confirmed Joko Widodo as Indonesia's president-elect on July 22nd. The commission said that Mr Joko, the governor of Jakarta, the capital, and his vice-presidential running mate, Jusuf Kalla, had won 71m votes on July 9th, 53.15% of the total. The losers, Prabowo Subianto and Hatta Rajasa, got 46.85% of the total, or 62.6m votes. Mr Joko won in 23 of the country's 33 provinces. His winning margin of 6.3 percentage points was wider than quick calculations had predicted on election night. Mr Joko, known to all as Jokowi, is due to start his five-year term as leader of the world's third-largest democracy on October 20th. He will be like no leader Indonesia has had before, hailing from neither the armed forces nor from an established family, such as that of his early patron, Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of Sukarno, modern Indonesia's founding father, and a president herself in 2001-04. Instead Jokowi rose up through local government, a product of the far-reaching political decentralisation introduced after the overthrow of Suharto, Indonesia's late dictator, in 1999. A former furniture exporter, Jokowi was elected mayor of Solo, a medi- um-sized city in central Java, before becoming governor of Jakarta in 2012. He has a reputation for being a man of the people.
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