Visitors take a selfie with Si Mayor, the mascot for the 2024 Jakarta gubernatorial election, during the launch of the election mascot at the National Monument Square in Jakarta on May 25, 2024. - Antara
JAKARTA: A public opinion poll for the 2024 Jakarta gubernatorial race has found that two of the city’s former governors, Anies Baswedan and Basuki 'Ahok' Tjahaja Purnama, are the most popular of a set of potential candidates for the position, suggesting that the two politicians, who competed for the job in 2017, could face each other once more in November.
Indonesia will hold its first simultaneous regional elections on Nov 27, with the governorship of Jakarta, widely seen as a springboard to the presidency, being one of the most sought-after positions.
The survey, released on Tuesday by Litbang Kompas, the research arm of newspaper Kompas, found that Anies and Ahok were the most popular picks to run in November by a wide margin above the other prospective candidates included in the survey.
Anies, who served as Jakarta’s governor from 2017 to 2022, came in first of the more than 20 potential candidates in the survey, favoured by 29.8 per cent of respondents. He was followed by his predecessor Ahok with 20 per cent.
Litbang Kompas interviewed 400 Jakarta residents in person from June 15 to 20, and the results of the survey had a 4.9 per cent margin of error at a 95 per cent confidence level.
Anies is not affiliated with any political party, but the largest party in the city, the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), has offered him its early support for another run in November.
Ahok, meanwhile, belongs to the second-largest party in Jakarta, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), which has yet to decide whom it will back for the Jakarta race.
Despite being the two largest parties in the capital, the PKS and PDI-P must still forge alliances with other parties to be eligible to register a candidate with the General Elections Commission (KPU) Jakarta office starting on Aug 27.
Besides Anies and Ahok, no other potential candidate in the survey cracked two-digit polling figures.
In third place was popular former West Java governor Ridwan Kamil of the Golkar Party, who was favoured by 8.5 per cent of respondents.
Golkar has been considering Ridwan as a possible candidate for reelection in West Java instead, while some of Golkar’s partners in the Onward Indonesia Coalition (KIM) would prefer him to run in Jakarta.
Polling below 2 per cent in the survey were President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s youngest son Kaesang Pangarep, a newcomer to the political world who has chaired the Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI), a self-styled youth party, for less than a year.
Anies’ polling lead was noteworthy but also “very expected”, said analyst Ujang Komarudin, who attributed it to favourable attitudes about his time as governor of the city province.
Ahok’s standing in the survey, meanwhile, drew the attention of his own party, the PDI-P. That Ahok polled so well without having declared any intention to join the race prompted PDI-P executive Said Abdullah to publicly voice his support.
“God willing, I’m hoping the PDI-P can endorse Ahok as a gubernatorial candidate [for Jakarta],” he said on Wednesday, as quoted by kompas.com.
Ahok served as governor of Jakarta from 2014 to 2017 and was known for his blunt remarks and resolute approach to solving the capital’s issues. But he was accused of blasphemy in 2016 while running for reelection in a three-way race against Anies and Democratic Party politician Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono.
In 2017, he lost the runoff to Anies and was sentenced to two years in prison. Another senior PDI-P politician, Hendrawan Supratikno, however, noted that the party was keeping its options open.
“We’re open to every possibility [including endorsing Ahok], but we’ll see how it goes,” he told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.
Ahok’s polling results also sparked questions about whether the city would see a rematch of the 2017 gubernatorial race, which was marred by deep polarisation between each candidate’s supporters that carried forward into the 2019 presidential race between Jokowi and Prabowo Subianto.
However, Ujang predicted it would be “quite hard” for Ahok to secure endorsements from political parties given his past conviction, let alone win the election.
“Endorsing Ahok would be very risky as it could again bring up issues related to SARA [ethnicity, religion, race and intergroup relations], and I don’t think the PDI-P would take that risk,” he said.
Kennedy Muslim of pollster Indikator Politik Indonesia also noted reservations about Ahok among political party elites, which could prevent the PDI-P from forming a coalition to back the controversial politician. Kennedy said the competition in Jakarta was “dynamic”, as the number of undecided respondents in the Kompas survey remained high at 30 percent, surpassing Anies’ lead. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
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