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Soaring prices of staple goods dent Jokowi’s approval
Indonesians have become more pessimistic about the economy in recent public opinion polls as they pay more for gasoline and food amid rising inflation made worse by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
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This handout photograph taken and released by the Presidential Palace on March 15, 2022 shows Indonesia’s President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo looking on at sunrise after spending the night at a campsite in Penajam Paser Utara, East Kalimantan, where the government will build its new capital city replacing Jakarta. (AFP/Presidential Palace)
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ublic approval of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has fallen nearly 12 percentage points in the past two months, according to a survey conducted by Indikator Politik Indonesia at the height of soaring prices of basic commodities, particularly cooking oil.
The survey interviewed 1,220 people of voting age in person nationwide between April 14 and 19, before the government announced a ban on exports of cooking oil and its raw materials. It was also conducted before the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) named suspects in the alleged corruption case reportedly related to a scarcity of cooking oil and its subsequent high price on the local market.
The poll found that Jokowi’s approval rating had fallen to 59.9 percent in April from 71.7 percent in February and 75.3 percent in early January, when the prices of staple goods, particularly cooking oil, were relatively low.
“Not to mention that people at the time [in January] were happy with how [the government] handled the pandemic [as the Delta fueled-wave of coronavirus infections subsided],” Indikator Politik executive director Burhanuddin Muhtadi said on Tuesday.
The January rating was the highest in Jokowi's seven years in office, while the April rating was only slightly higher than his last year's record low of 59.3 percent in July, during the worst of the Delta-fueled wave.
The government had introduced a price cap for packaged cooking oil in early January to keep the staple food affordable despite soaring global crude palm oil (CPO) prices, but revoked it in March in favor of a direct cash transfer scheme. The revocation led to soaring cooking oil prices that month.
Read also: Palm oil crisis shakes up Indonesia's politics, global supplies
