JakartaPost-Sept 20, 2022
The latest public opinion poll found that President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s approval rating has taken a 10 percentage-point hit, as a result of his administration’s decision to raise subsidized fuel prices. While the drop is not yet an immediate cause for alarm, experts have said more needed to be done by Jokowi to keep his approval rating from plummeting even further. An Indikator Politik Indonesia survey, which polled some 1,200 respondents across the country between Sept. 5 and 10, two days after the fuel price hike announcement, found that Jokowi’s approval rating now stands at 62.6 percent. The figure is a 9.7 percentage-point drop for Jokowi’s popular rating, which previously stood at 72.3 percent, according to a previous Indikator survey done in August. “Jokowi is shrewd enough to carry out this unpopular policy when his approval rating is high,” Indikator Politik executive director Burhanuddin Muhtadi said on Sunday. While a majority of respondents still disagreed with the fuel price hike, the survey found that there has been a 6 percentage-point increase in the number of respondents who supported the decision, from 18 percent in the August survey to 24.1 percent. One of the factors for the shift in public opinion, Burhanuddin said, was due to an increase in public awareness that fuel prices globally were still more expensive than in Indonesia even after the government increased the prices of subsidized fuels. The government said it had no choice but to cut subsidies of Pertalite gasoline and Solar diesel brands on Sept. 3 to rein in ballooning energy subsidies despite the risk of mass protests and amid rising food costs with the economy still reeling from the impacts of the pandemic. Read more at: https://www.thejakartapost.com/paper/2022/09/19/fuel-price-hike-hits-jokowis-popularity.html.
