Popular support for Jakarta Governor Joko Widodo to run for president next year continues to mount, despite his insistence that he wants to see out his job at City Hall before considering a stab at the State Palace.
The results of a poll released over the weekend put Joko ahead of other potential candidates, with analysts saying he stood a legitimate chance of winning if nominated.
The poll by the National Survey Media (Median), conducted between April 28 and May 6, showed that Joko and Jusuf Kalla, the former vice president, enjoyed the highest name recognition from among a field of 28 potential candidates.
Ninety-two percent of the 1,600 respondents polled said they knew who Joko and Kalla were, while Megawati Sukarnoputri, the former president, enjoyed 91 percent name recognition.
“It has to be said that Joko has caught the attention of the majority of voters,” said Rico Marbun, the executive director of Median. “His popularity has been high since he became the Jakarta governor, and it continues to grow thanks to massive media coverage of his activities.”
Karyono Wibowo, a senior researcher at the Indonesian Public Institute, a think tank, said on Sunday that Joko’s party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), should nominate him for president, arguing that it would also boost the party’s own popularity.
“A figure like him can have a positive impact and boost the popularity of the PDI-P,” he said.
“Joko is the ideal candidate for president from whatever angle you look at it.”
However, Karyono acknowledged that it was difficult seeing him get the PDI-P’s nomination, given that the party was widely expected to nominate its chairwoman, Megawati, as it did in 2004 and 2009.
Jeffrie Geovanie, a member of the board of advisers at the Center for Strategic and International studies, a think tank, said separately that Joko had the best chance out of any potential candidate in the field, if political preferences were factored out.
“If we want to evaluate the chances of each of the potential candidates objectively, then there’s no doubt that Joko is ahead of all the others,” he said on Sunday as quoted by Republika Online.
He added that Joko was more popular than established political party leaders such as Megawati, Golkar Party chairman Aburizal Bakrie, who the party has confirmed will be its candidate, and Prabowo Subianto, the founder and chief patron of the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra), who leads most polls of candidates from the political mainstream.
Jeffrie said that if the PDI-P went on to nominate Joko, then next year’s election would likely become a showdown between him and the candidate who would emerge from the Democratic Party’s convention next month.
An official from Gerindra, which joined the PDI-P in backing Joko in last year’s gubernatorial election in Jakarta, agreed that Joko should run for the nation’s highest office, but not just yet, saying that the party was sticking with Prabowo for 2014.
Martin Hutabarat, a member of Gerindra’s board of advisers, said in a statement on Sunday that Joko had great potential and that with more experience he could be a candidate that “people should have no doubts about voting for.”
However, he said that the timing was not right for Joko to run in 2014, given that he had only recently become the governor of Jakarta and was expected to see out his term in office.
“Gerindra plans to nominate Joko for the 2019 presidential election, after his term as governor of Jakarta is over,” Martin said.
Grassroots voters are also rooting for a Joko presidential bid, with a Facebook page titled “Jokowi Presidenku 2014” (“Jokowi My President in 2014”) garnering more than 100,000 fans since it was created in April.
“The idea to create this account came because of the leadership crisis that we have in Indonesia at the moment,” Yanes Yosua Frans, one of the administrators behind the Facebook page, said at a rally on Sunday at the Hotel Indonesia traffic circle in Central Jakarta.
“We want to end this crisis. Only Jokowi [can do it].”
Joko himself has said that he was not interested in a presidential bid in 2014. Following a series of opinion polls earlier this year that put him ahead of other potential presidential candidates, he said he was more focused on resolving the problems facing Jakarta, including flooding and traffic congestion.
source:http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/joko-ideal-candidate-for-2014-analysts/
