Election survey shows Megawati still front-runner

Election survey shows Megawati still front-runner

Slobodan Lekic
Associated Press
Jakarta

President Megawati Soekarnoputri remains the front-runner in
Indonesia's presidential race, but former dictator Soeharto's
Golkar Party may emerge as the largest party in parliament,
according to a new nationwide poll.

Sixteen percent of potential voters picked Megawati as their
choice in the July 5 ballot, the first direct presidential
election in Indonesian history, according to the poll
commissioned by the Washington-based International Republican
Institute (IRI) released on Friday.

With about 24 percent of the electorate still undecided,
Megawati's nearest competitors were former president Abdurrahman
Wahid with 7 percent and Golkar head Akbar Tanjung with 6
percent.

A number of other candidates garnering from 2 percent to 3
percent accounted for the rest of the potential votes.

Still, Megawati's rating was only about half of what her
Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) won with in the
country's first democratic elections in 1999, after the end of
Suharto's 32-year reign.

Megawati's party received 34 percent of the vote in the 1999
election that ushered her into power. In that ballot, an
electoral college chose her as head of state.

Her party's victory was then seen as a reflection of her own
popularity as the daughter of the country's founding president
Sukarno, and as leader of the pro-democracy movement that ended
the iron-fisted 32-year reign of former dictator Suharto.

"Megawati still has a basis of support from what she stood for
going into the '99 elections," said Thomas Garrett, who heads the
IRI office in Jakarta.

"Those people who were loyal to her then, remain loyal to her
now," he added.

But Garrett said the outcome of the elections was still too
early to call.

Golkar, used to be the main political pillar of Soeharto's
dictatorship, is not slated to pick its presidential candidate
until after the April 5 parliamentary elections.

According to the new survey, in the campaign for Indonesia's
550-seat parliament, Golkar is maintaining a clear lead with 24
percent of the vote.

Megawati's party came in second with 19 percent, followed by
Wahid's National Awakening Party (PKB) with 10 percent, and two
moderate religious parties that garnered 5 and 7 percent. The
remaining 5 percent went to other parties.

The poll showed that nearly 30 percent of eligible voters
remain undecided with regard to the parliamentary race. Almost 98
percent of those polled said they planned to cast their ballots.

The survey, conducted by the international polling firm
Taylor, Nelson Sofres, was based on interviews with 2,540 likely
voters across Indonesia. It had a margin of error of just under 2
percentage points.