JakartaPost-Jan 16, 2025
A survey from a Europe-based think tank suggests that most Indonesians are still unsure about how the upcoming second presidency of Donald Trump will affect the current geopolitical situation. The majority of the Indonesian public is still unsure about how a second Donald Trump administration in the United States would affect Indonesia and the current geopolitical landscape, although many also think that Americans will mostly benefit from his second term, as suggested by a recent survey. While they are optimistic that the US will either maintain or increase its global influence under the Republican president, the Indonesian respondents also believe that it will fall behind China as the world’s strongest nation in the next two decades. The survey, titled “Views in a Trumpian World”, was launched by think-tank European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) to measure how the international community felt about a second Trump presidency in relation to current geopolitical precarities, such as the US-China rivalry, the war in Gaza and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Over 28,000 people from more than 20 countries were surveyed in mid to late November 2024. For Indonesia, the think tank, in cooperation with Jakarta-based research agency Deka Insight, picked 1,000 respondents from the pool of people selected to reflect the country’s basic demographic proportion based on age, gender and location. The selected respondents live in 11 major cities, including the Greater Jakarta area, Bandung in West Java, Banjarmasin in South Kalimantan, Medan in North Sumatra and Makassar in South Sulawesi. Almost half of respondents from Indonesia indicated uncertainties about Washington’s future, with them conveying their beliefs that a civil war may break out in the US over the next two decades. Nearly seven out of 10 surveyed Indonesians believed that China would become the strongest country in the world by 2045. Despite such a view, around 60 percent also thought that the US would continue to hold a significant sway over world events by increasing or at least maintaining its global influence. Read more at: https://www.thejakartapost.com/world/2025/01/16/most-indonesians-still-unsure-about-trump-survey-says.html.
