Landslide win for SBY if he stays out of trouble: Survey

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is likely to win the July 8 presidential election in a single round victory if he makes no blunders until then, a survey by Indonesian Survey Circle (LSI) suggests.

“These blunders ... like corruption or [an affair with a] woman would quickly affect support numbers,” Arman Salam, the LSI research director, said.

He said the survey showed Yudhoyono was likely to win 63 percent of votes, a decrease from the 70 percent the LSI found in a similar survey in May.

The survey revealed that Megawati Soekarnoputri, the former president who lost to Yudhoyono in 2004, would finish second in the election, followed by Vice President Jusuf Kalla.

The same pattern was visible with popularity figures: Yudhoyono is the most popular, followed by Megawati and then Kalla.

The survey involved 4,000 respondents nationwide, who were interviewed face-to-face using the multistage random sampling method with a sampling error of 2.4 percent. (dre)