His clean image is tipped to win his party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, which is presided over by political scion Megawati Sukarnoputri, up to 30 per cent of both the popular vote and the parliamentary seats.

This is significantly more than any of the other 11 parties, and enough under Indonesia law to lay the groundwork for “Jokowi’s” presidential bid in July.

To nominate a president, a party must command 25 per cent of the popular vote (either singly, or in coalition with other parties), or 20 per cent of the parliamentary seats.

“The bull is back; it’s a bull market,” says a former Australian diplomat and long-term Indonesia watcher, referring to PDI-P’s logo of a black bull on a red background. After voting, Mr Joko exhorted his “fellow countrymen and women” to “light up your spirit again, holding hands, to bring victory to PDI-P".

“This is only the first stage and we will continue to the next one.”

PDI-P is one of a number secular-nationalist-protectionist parties in a country divided between them and Islamic statism. No other party is likely to reach the threshold alone.

Golkar, the political vehicle of former autocrat Suharto, has a formidable machine at the village level and may get over the line, but it is weighed down by the unpopularity of its leader and presidential candidate, businessman Aburizal Bakrie, who is widely blamed for failing to compensate the victims of a mud volcano in eastern Indonesia caused by his company’s drilling program.

Mr Bakrie said after voting that Golkar was aiming for 22 to 23 per cent support.

Gerindra, the party formed to support the presidential ambitions of former military strongman Prabowo Subianto, hopes for 20 per cent but is likely to need to form a coalition with others. Mr Prabowo has proven himself an adept pragmatist, forging an alliance with his former bloody enemies in the Aceh independence parties, and he may well look to the fragmented and shrinking Islamic parties to boost Gerindra over the threshold.

The Democrat Party, formed to support the candidacy in 2004 of outgoing president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is tipped to crash from 21 per cent of the vote at the 2009 election to anywhere between 5 and 10 per cent. It has been beset by corruption scandals in its inner sanctum, though Dr Yudhoyono ran hard as the anti-corruption president.

The other big losers will be the Islamic parties, whose high-water mark of 38 per cent of the vote in the 2004 election has been falling since, with the six Muslim parties expected to poll just 20 per cent of the vote between them in 2014.

Wednesday's election — the fourth genuinely democratic parliamentary election since Suharto was ousted in 1998 — does not just determine the make up of the two houses of the national parliament, it also picks the members of local and regional parliaments.

Indonesia’s 187 million potential voters chose on Wednesday between 235,637 candidates for 19,699 positions at 545,000 polling stations across three time zones.

Amalia Agus, who is in her 60s, said outside her South Jakarta booth that her primary concern was to elect “an honest parliament, unlike the current one”. Indonesia’s national parliament is one of the most corrupt institutions the country.

At the other end of the age range, Sulistiani, 18, is one of 14 million voting in her first election, but was equally concerned about corruption, which she says means “the people who are poor will become poorer”.

Sulistiani, the daughter of a rice-seller, and currently out of work herself, said her number one hope was that the new government deliver “better conditions for people, because Indonesia still has many poor people”.