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oters should start looking into politicians'€™ track records rather than depending on survey results to determine their votes during the 2014 general election, political party leaders said.

United Development Party (PPP) secretary-general Muhammad '€œRomy'€ Romahurmuziy said that the recent trend of using survey results as a basis for political campaigning had severely undermined political development in terms of ideology understanding and program development.

'€œIt seems that survey results have become the point of reference for voters during elections,'€ Romy told reporters on Monday.

'€œI truly regret this condition in which political parties and politicians have lost their common sense due to surveys. They are the ones who should be upholding the importance of ideas and values, yet all they care about is garnering support without delivering any concrete ideas on programs,'€ he added.

Romy said that the trend of using surveys as a basis for campaigning had given birth to a new breed of legislative candidates and political leaders with no political ideology but were popular nonetheless.

'€œIn politics, voters need to see how parties can implement its ideas based on their respective political values but this idealism has now gone because all that we can think about is doing well on political surveys,'€ Romy said.

Therefore, Romy urged all parties and its leaders to return to the basic idealism of politics so that they could produce legislative and presidential candidates who had the capability to implement ideologies in the form of concrete programs.

'€œRealistically speaking, all presidential candidates will carry various vested interests from their main supporters. It is therefore important for political parties to study these interests to see whether they are actually in line with each party'€™s ideology. Parties must not back candidates who react to opinion polls and must back those who are consistent in their political stance,'€ he said.

Romy also advised parties and voters to back presidential candidates who possessed strong leadership skills.

'€œIndonesia needs a president who can develop the country into one of the top five global forces. Presidential candidates who can only depend on surveys will not have the adequate leadership skills to reach this goal,'€ he said. Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) deputy secretary-general Fahri Hamzah suggested that the public should have learned from history that voting for candidates based on survey results had done more damage than good with regards to the country'€™s governance.

'€œSurveys can create a false image of candidates. In the last five years, we have been criticizing imagery politics because it has done nothing toward the improvement of the majority of Indonesia'€™s society,'€ Fahri said.

Fahri added that he had also noticed a perpetual trend of cult worship of certain political figures among the public and within various parties, a situation that he believed would continue to devalue the voting mechanism in general elections.

'€œHistory has shows that political cult figures have had an adverse effect on legislative election results,'€ he said. '€œExtremely popular politicians who have achieved cult status among their supporters open the door for legislative candidates with questionable track records to be elected. We have seen this with Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Megawati Soekarnoputri. Both were extremely popular during their time in office but both had failed to monitor the improper conduct of their party members,'€ he explained.

SBY won the presidential election by a landslide in 2009 after his Democratic Party earned 21 percent of the vote, mainly driven by his popularity as the incumbent President. However, even with this political legitimacy, SBY'€™s second term has been marred with numerous corruption scandals involving his party'€™s elite members.