Jakarta. Former Vice President Jusuf Kalla has made a prediction regarding the upcoming February presidential election -- he believes no candidate will secure an outright victory.

With three potential candidates in the race, achieving more than 50 percent of the votes will be a challenging task, Kalla was quoted by the Antara news agency as saying.

"We are going to have three candidates, so it will be very difficult for any candidate to win in a single round, given that they would need to secure at least 85 million votes," Kalla said.

The forthcoming election is expected to feature three candidates: former Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo, Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto, and former Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan.

Kalla believes that all three candidates "have an equal chance of winning."

While Kalla did not explicitly reveal his preference among the three, he has hinted at his support for Anies in several media interviews.

In one such interview, Kalla dismissed the significance of numerous surveys that ranked Anies lowest among the three candidates. 

He argued that election surveys involving only 1,200 respondents "cannot accurately represent the will of 205 million voters," pointing to the 2016 US presidential election in which Donald Trump defied pre-election surveys to win the presidency, despite losing the popular vote.

In Indonesia, the winner of the presidential election is determined by who secures the most popular votes.

During the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election, Kalla publicly announced his support for eventual winner Anies, while his superior, President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo, openly backed incumbent governor Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama.

Kalla served as vice president from 2004 to 2009 alongside President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and from 2014 to 2019 alongside President Jokowi.