Markus Junianto Sihaloho & Robertus Wardi – Joko Widodo, the governor of Jakarta, may be the pollsters' favorite to win the 2014 presidential election, but the final decision and the makeup of the future government remains firmly in the hands of his party's chief, an analyst says.

Jeffrie Geovanie a member of the board of advisers for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank, said on Thursday that the question of whether Joko ran next year and, more crucially, who he ran with would be determined by Megawati Sukarnoputri, the chairwoman of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P).

Jeffrie said that with Joko topping recent opinion polls, other parties without a clear figurehead or whose own candidates were flagging in the surveys were naturally interested in hitching themselves to the PDI-P's bandwagon.

"It makes sense that many figures are starting to approach Megawati. The wheels of politics are really turning now," he said, adding that the PDI-P chairwoman would be undoubted kingmaker in 2014.

Among the parties whose officials have publicly expressed interest in having Joko on their ticket is the ruling Democratic Party, which does not have a prominent figure to put forward and will hold a convention next year to decide on its candidate.

Another is the Golkar Party, which has formally decided to nominate its chairman, Aburizal Bakrie, and which has toyed with having Joko as his running mate in order to make up for Aburizal's poor showing in the opinion polls.

Agung Laksono, a deputy Golkar chairman, confirmed that the party would decide on its vice presidential candidate after next year's legislative election, but did not rule out the option of going with Joko.

"Joko obviously belongs to the PDI-P, so you should ask them first. But that's something that we'll talk about after the legislative election," he said on Thursday. However, analysts say that the PDI-P, if it allows Joko to run for president, is unlikely to let him play second fiddle to another party's candidate.

In that case, Jeffrie said, a possible tie-up with Golkar could see Joko running with Ginandjar Kartasasmita, one of the stalwarts of the party who is aligned with Akbar Tandjung – the former Golkar chairman who has publicly questioned the wisdom of choosing Aburizal as the party's candidate and shutting out the possibility of nominating a more popular figure.

Jeffrie, a former Golkar legislator, said that if Megawati chose instead to team up with the Democrats, she could decide to pair Joko with Trade Minister Gita Wirjawan, who is being widely touted as one of the favorites to emerge as the winner of the Democrats' convention.

Tjahjo Kumolo, the PDI-P secretary general, agreed that Joko's candidacy was in Megawati's hands, saying on Wednesday that regardless of his overwhelming popularity, he was only one of several potential candidates being considered for the party's nomination by the chairwoman.

He added that the PDI-P would not be rushed into announcing its candidate for 2014, arguing that with the election still a year away, there was a lot could happen in local and international politics in that time that could impact voter sentiment.

"We can't make that decision now because the regional, national and international dynamics keep changing," Tjahjo said in Jakarta.

"We don't know what the situation will be like in 2014. We can only hope that the results of the surveys that we're seeing today will be consistent with the outcome of the polls in 2014."

Tjahjo was speaking in response to a poll by the Soegeng Sarjadi School of Government, published on Wednesday, that showed Joko was the most popular public figure in the country by far.

Some 25 percent of respondents named him the most popular figure of 2013, far ahead of Prabowo Subianto, the founder and chief patron of the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra), who got just 10 percent. Megawati was a distant seventh with around 2 percent.

The poll comes a week after a survey by the United Data Center (PDB) affirmed that Joko had the highest electability of all potential presidential candidates.

Joko was the candidate of choice for some 26 percent of the 1,200 respondents from 30 provinces, while Prabowo was second with 20 percent, followed by Megawati with 13 percent.

The lineup was unchanged from a PDB poll conducted in January, which gave Joko 21 percent, Prabowo 17 percent and Megawati 11 percent.