Carlos Paath, Jakarta – Roughly a month after Indonesians across the archipelago elected a new president, defeated candidate Prabowo Subianto, who has spent the weeks after the election focused on challenging the official results released by the electoral commission, has seen his popularity drop, a survey shows.

"If the presidential election were to be held today, support for Joko Widodo and Jusuf Kalla would stand at 57.06 percent, while support for Prabowo and Hatta Rajasa would only be at 30.39 percent," Ade Mulyana, a researcher from the Indonesian Survey Circle (LSI), said on Thursday. He added that "12.55 percent of respondents did not know, or did not answer."

Ade also said that assuming the votes of undecided voters were to be equally distributed between both camps, Joko would earn 65.25 percent of votes, while Prabowo would earn 34.75 percent.

Ade said the institution had conducted the post-election survey to assess whether or not the public's perception toward the candidates had shifted after the General Election Commission (KPU) announced the official results of the election on July 22.

In its survey released two days before the election, LSI showed Joko leading with 47.8 percent over Prabowo, who earned 44.2 percent.

The official results by the KPU, announced some three weeks after the election, declared Joko a winner with just over 53 percent of votes over Prabowo, who earned less than 47 percent. Prabowo has subsequently filed a lawsuit to the Constitutional Court, challenging the KPU's results.

"This result shows that support for Joko and Kalla is stronger than support for Prabowo and Hatta. If a rerun of the presidential election was to be held, surely Joko and Kalla would win again," he said.

Ade attributed the former Army general's dwindling popularity to mounting negative perception towards Prabowo's refusal to accept the election result.

"A majority of them [Prabowo's voters] live in cities and are educated. They believe the KPU's tally and appreciate the people's choice in the July 9 presidential election," he said. "Prabowo and Hatta's distrust of the KPU and the decision [to challenge the results with a lawsuit] has led to a negative response from the public."

Ade said the long electoral process has exhausted most Indonesians, and that a majority of voters had high hopes that the court's decision would mark Prabowo's final effort to overturn the election results.

In a court hearing on Wednesday, Prabowo had called on the Constitutional Court to annul the KPU's results, emphasizing he had won the election by 52 percent.

Prabowo was adamant that the election had been tainted by systematic, structural and massive violations, and challenged the court to order a rerun of the election if it declined to meet his requests.

The LSI survey was conducted between Aug. 4 to 6 with 1,200 samples from all Indonesian provinces.

Source: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/post-election-survey-shows-prabowos-popularity-dropping/