Expert: Prabowo Needs Reshuffle to Improve Electability

President Prabowo Subianto’s electability has dropped sharply in the latest survey by Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting (SMRC). Jamiluddin Ritonga, a political communication expert at Esa Unggul University, said Prabowo needs a massive evaluation to reverse the slide, including a cabinet reshuffle.

The SMRC survey results show that over the past nine months, Prabowo’s electability in a semi-open simulation fell from 34.9 per cent in November 2026 to 14.5 per cent in the July 2026 survey. Over the same period, the electability of West Java Governor Dedi Mulyadi rose from 19.7 per cent to 35 per cent.

The survey results align with declining public satisfaction with Prabowo’s performance. In November 2025, public satisfaction with Prabowo’s performance stood at 81.2 per cent, falling to 51.1 per cent by July 2026.

According to Jamiluddin, the decline in electability should put Prabowo on alert. “This is certainly a yellow warning light for Prabowo if he intends to run again in the upcoming presidential election,” he said in a statement on Friday, 30 July 2026.

He said that if Prabowo’s declining electability persists, his chances of being re-elected in the 2029 presidential election would be relatively small. Indeed, if Prabowo fails to fix the economic, political and law enforcement situation, his electability could plummet further.

Therefore, Jamiluddin said, Prabowo has no choice but to seek fairly drastic solutions quickly. One of them is evaluating all ministers in the economic, political and legal fields. “Prabowo must be firm and brave enough to reshuffle ministers in these three areas,” he said.

Jamiluddin said that without the courage to replace ministers in those three fields, it will be difficult for Prabowo to restore public trust. “Because ministers in these three areas are the cause of declining public satisfaction with President Prabowo’s performance,” he said.

That choice, Jamiluddin said, is extremely difficult. “But it appears it must be taken if Prabowo genuinely wants to boost his electability again,” said the former dean of the Faculty of Communication at IISIP Jakarta.

Prabowo’s electability was beaten by West Java Governor Dedi Mulyadi in the survey conducted by SMRC on 5–19 July 2026. “This is interesting because Prabowo, as the incumbent who not long ago won the presidential election, has seen his electability weaken so severely,” said SMRC Executive Director Deni Irvani on Wednesday, 29 July 2026.

Deni explained that the survey population comprised all Indonesian citizens of voting age, with 749 respondents selected at random. Citizens with telephones were interviewed by phone (83.8 per cent), while those without telephones were interviewed face to face (16.2 per cent).

These proportions correspond to the population of mobile phone users and non-users. The SMRC survey’s margin of error is approximately 3.7 per cent at a 95 per cent confidence level.