Southeast Asia’s largest democracy Indonesia will elect their next legislature in a nation-wide election to be held today. The election which is expected to be largely peaceful will be the country’s third parliamentary election in 10 years. Today, millions of Indonesians across the archipelago will vote amongst 11,215 candidates for a new 560-member legislature which will determine which of the 38 contesting political parties will qualify to run for president in July. Besides the top level legislature elections, 112,000 people at the regional level are competing for 1,998 provincial legislative council seats and an estimated 1.5 million others are battling for 15,750 seats on district/municipal legislative councils. Parties or coalitions that win a fifth of the seats or 25 percent of the popular vote can nominate a candidate for the presidential race.

Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, emerged from 32 years of dictatorship following the collapse of General Suharto’s regime in 1998, leading to reforms that freed the media, struck down repressive laws and for the first time allowed citizens to vote for a president.

It has since become a relatively stable democracy compared to many of its Asian neighbors, despite some concerns about vote-rigging, fraud and tensions in far-flung provinces like Papua in the east and Aceh in the west, reported the New York Times.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s Democrat Party is expected to come out on top this time round. During the last elections, the democrats won seven percent of the vote and were forced to form a coalition with Suharto’s Golkar and a handful of other Islamic parties.

Yudhoyono, a former army general became Indonesia’s first directly elected president in 2004. He is credited for stabilizing the economy, reigning in security by thumbing out the Taliban, cooling domestic tensions, giving women and the media more freedom, overhauling the judiciary and streamlining bureaucracy in Indonesia.