TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Gen Z, millennials comprise majority of 2024 voters
Young voters and Javanese voters will be on the mind of all politicians looking to win next year's elections, as they make up two of the largest groups in the final voter roll.
Change Size
Population and Civil Registration officers at Sragen, Central Java, take a photo of a student for identification purposes at SMK 1 vocational school in Sragen on May 24, 2023. The General Election Commission (KPU) announced that around 106 million young people, or about 52 percent of the total voter roll, will dominate the 2024 elections. (Antara/Mohammad Ayudha)
With people aged 40 and under expected to make up the majority of voters in the 2024 general elections, political parties and presidential hopefuls alike cannot spare any expense in making themselves appealing to a demographic already apathetic about politics, experts have said.
In about three months’ time, registration will open for would-be participants in next year’s grand celebration of democracy, with politicians vying for a place in the legislature and to form the next Indonesian government.
The candidates will have to rely on the votes of a burgeoning younger population, according to the finalized national voter roll that the General Elections Commission (KPU) painstakingly verified and announced on Sunday.
During its plenary, the KPU presented the final list of voters for the 2024 simultaneous elections, following a lengthy verification process that involved hundreds of regional KPU employees, Kompas daily reported.
The election body has recorded 204 million eligible voters, including 1.7 million Indonesians living abroad, who can participate in next year’s race, a roughly 12 million increase compared with the figure for the 2019 elections.
A closer look at the voter roll shows that 106 million of these voters, or around 52 percent of the total, are people younger than 40. When categorized by generation, a third of all registered voters are millennials, which officially refers to those born from the early 1980s until the late 1990s, while a further 22 percent belong to Generation Z, or those born in the late 1990s and onward.
With youth confirmed to make up the majority of voters, political parties are beginning to draw up their strategies to compete for the attention of these younger age groups, which observers insist will be a key factor in the successful bid of any presidential hopeful.
