Results of a survey held by the Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting (SMRC) on October 4-11, 2024 reveal that 64.5 percent of the public wants a sizable number of political parties to stay outside the new government as opposition forces.
“Our survey reveals that 64.5 percent of citizens agreed with the opinion that to make supervision on the president’s performance effective, there should be a large number of political parties, say close to half, that are outside the government. Only 27.6 percent disagreed with this view, while the remaining 7.9 percent did not answer,” Saiful Mujani of the SMRC said during the talkshow ‘Political Surgery with Saiful Mujani’ broadcast on the SMRC TV Youtube channel on Thursday, October 17, 2024.
The survey used multistage random sampling system with a valid sample size of 994 and a margin of error of plus-minus 3.2 percent at a 95 percent confidence level. Interviews were conducted face-to-face with respondents by trained interviewers.
Mujani said that those inside and outside the government are both needed to ensure the government will run effectively and lawfully.
“There is a very famous phrase among political scientists: democracy needs the losers. In a democracy there must be winners and losers. The winners become the government, while the losers are expected to become the opposition or supervisors,” Mujani, a political science professor at the State Islamic University (UIN) Jakarta, said in a statement as quoted on Friday, October 18, 2024.
The survey also shows that 67.5 percent of the public agreed that the president and his government must be supervised by the House of Representatives (DPR) and only 28.3 percent believe that the president will do good for the people, and the remaining 4.1 percent did not give their answers.
In assessing the performance of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, 32.2 percent of respondents said they were satisfied, 46 percent were not, and 21,8 percent did not did not answer to the questionnaire.
As for the administration of President-elect Prabowo Subianto, 41.3 percent of the respondents said they believe on the Prabowo administration, 37.8 percent do not, and 20.9 percent did not give their opinion.
Mujani said the above figure shows that the public has hopes or expectations that under Prabowo there will be a party with relatively large political power outside the government.
“There is an expectation in the society that the Prabowo government will be different from the previous government. People have a normative framework that there must be a significant number of parties outside the government to oversee the government. Prabowo should not follow Jokowi’s pattern,” he said.
Mujani specifically highlighted a tendency for the president-elect to embrace all political parties.
“The mantra spelled in Prabowo Subianto’s recent speeches is about unity. Therefore, if there are political parties that do not join the government, then that is a threat to unity (according to Prabowo),” Mujani, author of the book on Muslim Democrats, said.
He reminded that Indonesia should adhere to the presidential system, with the president being elected competitively.
“There must be losers and winners. It is expected that losers will function as watchdogs. Parties that lost in the 2024 presidential election should all become the opposition. This is how we should build our democratic system,” he concluded.
