JAKARTA -- A standoff deepened on Wednesday evening in Jakarta with both contestants in a fiercely contested presidential election claiming the right to govern the archipelago of 17,000 islands and its 250 million people.
The vote was Indonesia's third direct presidential poll since the end of authoritiarian rule in 1998, and pitted a relic of the old era -- the former general Prabowo Subianto -- against Joko Widodo, Jakarta governor and a relative neophyte who rose to prominence after 2005 on the back of a successful tenure as mayor of Solo, a city in east Java.
