国际英语新闻:Indonesian presidential debate kicks off

JAKARTA, Jan. 18 (Xinhua) -- The election process in Indonesia has entered another phase as debate sessions have started on Thursday with two arch-rival presidential candidates, the incumbent President Joko Widodo and former army general Prabowo Subianto, were scheduled to undertake five debate events leading to ballot casting on April 17.

In the first debate televised nationwide, the incumbent president and his challenger delivered their views on legal, human rights, corruption and terrorism affairs.

The debate that lasted two hours was marred with exchange of critics launched by the two candidates against each other over their respective programs regarding each issue.

Commenting on the performance of the two candidates, law expert Indriyanto Seno Adji said that the two have adequately delivered their views on legal issues lingering in the country as well as the solutions.

"But they had to expose their concrete and applicable solutions to address the legal and corruption issues, which have been highly expected by the public," the expert, who formerly led the nation's anti-graft commission, said on Friday.

He, however, said that the incumbent president delivered better concepts than the challenger due to his proven records in supervising legal enforcement to eradicate corruptions in the country.

The plus point for the incumbent president was his idea to set up a national legislation center tasked to settle disputed regulations, which sometimes are against each other, to address corruption issues, he said.

Besides legal, human rights, corruption and terrorism issues, the Indonesian General Election Commission has prepared other issues in the next four debates.

The debate events were held during the long campaign period that started from September last year to April 13.

Results of the latest surveys on the two candidates' electability carried out by six polling agencies showed a higher approval rate for President Widodo than his arch rival Subianto.

The upcoming presidential election would be a rematch between the the two as they used to compete in the 2014 election. Widodo won 53.5 percent of votes to get the presidency through 2019.