Despite the party’s efforts to restore the its reputation, not a single figure joining the Democratic Party convention to select a presidential candidate is popular enough to win the election, a new survey has shown.
The survey conducted by Indo Barometer found that Dahlan Iskan, the state-owned enterprise minister, was still the most popular, although he was only favored by 12.1 percent of the respondents.
Dahlan was followed by Pramono Edhie Wibowo, the former Army chief of staff and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s brother-in-law, who could only garner 1.9 percent.
Other contestants such as Trade Minister Gita Wirjawan, chairman of the Regional Representatives Council Irman Gusman, House Speaker Marzuki Alie and former ambassador to the United States Dino Patti Djalal each scored a rating of less than 1 percent from the respondents.
However, more than 80 percent of those polled did not select any candidate, preferring instead to say they had not yet decided (47 percent), did not know (24.8 percent), would not vote, or refused to tell.
“From the results of this poll it was revealed that the electability of the presidential hopefuls from the Democratic Party is not strong enough to compete with other political parties,” executive director of Indo Barometer M.Oodari said on Thursday.
The survey was conducted between Dec. 1-15 in 33 provinces, involving 1,200 respondents.
Dahlan has been repeatedly declared as the most well-known contender among another candidates competing in the convention.
An Indonesian Survey Circle (LSI) survey released in October also found Dahlan as the leading candidate in terms of electability in the Democratic Party’s ongoing national convention.
Pramono ranked second with 5.3 percent, followed by Marzuki with 3.2 percent and Gita with 2.2 percent.
No other Democratic candidates passed the 2-percent mark in that particular poll.
Dahlan’s electability, however, is still below that of the other major parties’ candidates.
Megawati Sukarnoputri of the Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) tops the list at 29.8 percent and Golkar’s Aburizal Bakrie has 28.6 percent.
Neither party has settled yet on a final candidate; Jakarta Governor Joko Widodo has received growing grassroots support within the PDI-P and internal uncertainly over Aburizal’s electability may lead Golkar to nominate a different candidate.
Survey result reliability
Many politically figures and analysts, however, have expressed their concern over surveys and their findings.
Pramono said a popularity survey of candidates does not necessarily mean voters would select that person.
“The results of the survey were complied from a limited number of respondents, perhaps 1,500 to 2,000. But there are 186 million eligible voters in the country,” Pramono said.
He said while political surveys could be used as input and a source for discussion, he chose to believe that the public have their own preferences, which may differ from the polls’ findings.
Pramono went on to say surveys could be manipulated by certain parties or persons to produce results that could favor certain candidates or parties.
“The eligible voters who were used as the respondents in the survey might have certain preferences while other voters who were never included as respondents might chose other candidates,” he said.
Pramono said Indonesians were intelligent enough to make up their minds to choose a competent leader who had a commitment to develop the nation and despite his own poor ratings, he said would continue to meet with people and discuss their concerns.
“I will keep communicating with the constituents, but I will let them choose the best candidate,” he said.
Academic doubts
Igor Dirgantara, a political analyst at Jayabaya University in Jakarta, echoed Pramono’s sentiment.
Igor warned that opinion polls of presidential candidates will produce increasingly conflicting results as the July 2014 elections approach, with pollsters acting to influence rather than reflect the public mood.
He said that while the surveys would continue to be presented as entirely objective academic endeavors, the polling agencies would not disclose who was funding them.
“There will be a sort of hegemony of opinions, where the polls will be plugging certain figures as worthy and others as not as worthy and hence bound to lose,” he said.
He added that the lack of transparency about the surveys would only grow more marked in the coming months and would be the main factor in the polls’ lack of credibility.
“Pollsters often cite anonymity for not publicly disclosing where they get their funding from,” Igor said.
As the campaigning intensifies and the candidates without a realistic chance get left behind, the polls will reflect a snowballing of support behind different candidates, he said.
“There will be a bandwagon effect, so certain figures will always come out on top according to certain pollsters, who will almost deify them,” he said.
Some pollsters, he added, would continue to publish genuinely objective surveys alongside the more “tendentious” ones, throwing the actual political map into more confusion.
Frontrunner Joko
Most polls conducted this year have named Joko Widodo as the front-runner, should he decide to stand, followed by Prabowo Subianto, the founder and chief patron of the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra).
However, there are large variations between the polls on the projected votes for each man and the gap between them.
A survey released by the survey Poll Tracking Institute on Sunday also revealed that Dahlan Iskan remained the most popular figure among the contenders in the Democratic Party convention with 16.9 percent of the votes.
Marzuki Alie followed with 4 percent while Pramono received only 2.3 percent of the respondents vote.
Executive director of Poll Tracking Institute Hanta Yuda said only 30 percent of the 2,000 respondents selected one of the 11 convention contenders.
The rest, he said, claimed they were not familiar with the candidates, while others said they have not yet decided who they would choose
Source/Fuente:http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/politics/support-for-democratic-part...
