Febriamy Hutapea – Religion and ethnicity appear to be losing their hold as factors in voter preferences over the pairing of candidates to run in the July presidential race, a survey released on Thursday by the Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI) concluded.
The survey, which questioned 2,014 people in 33 provinces from April 20 to 27, said voters were abandoning the long-held conviction that joint tickets should strike a balance between representatives from an Islamic party and a secular party, or Javanese and non-Javanese backgrounds.
That is probably good news for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a Javanese who is expected to pick Bank Indonesia Governor Boediono, also a Javanese, as his running mate.
Saiful Mujani, the director of LSI, said voters were becoming more concerned with which candidates were best equipped to deal with the flagging economy.
The attitudes, he said, also extended to the 87 percent of Indonesians who identified themselves as Muslim. "The voters' preference is no longer based on their religion or ethnicity," Saiful said.
The 2004 election, he said, clearly proved that popular Muslim figures like former National Mandate Party (PAN) chairman Amien Rais and Hamzah Haz, former chairman of the United Development Party (PPP), weren't able to translate their religious appeal into votes.
In the April legislative elections, the four Islamic parties – PPP, PAN, the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) and the National Awakening Party (PKB) – pulled in only 24 percent of the votes. On the other hand, non-Islamic parties – the Democratic Party, Golkar, Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra) and People's Conscience Party (Hanura) – gained 58 percent. The Christianity-based Prosperous Peace Party (PDS) garnered only 1.48 percent of the votes and the Catholicism-based Indonesian Democratic Party of Devotion (PKDI) only got 0.31 percent.
Zulkiflimansyah, the deputy secretary general of PKS, acknowledged that the major issue during the election was not religion but economics and other issues. Candidates' popularity, he said, was based on their perceived ability to make real contributions to voters' economic lives, not strong Islamic images.
"As a political party, we understand that we sometimes have to be flexible when dealing with polemical issues," he said.
Thomas B. Pepinsky, a Cornell University researcher who wrote a report titled "Testing Political Islam's Economic Advantage," said Islamic party ideology was neither necessary nor sufficient to attract mass popular support.
Research indicated that Islamic parties must establish favorable economic credentials to have any hope of attracting the mass support necessary to defeat secular parties, he said.
"Indonesian public opinion is clear: for parties seeking mass popular support, Islam alone is not the solution," Pepinsky said.