Estu Suryowati, Jakarta – A national public survey by Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting (SMRC) shows that the majority of people do not believe that there is a revival of banned Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in Indonesia.
SMRC researcher Sirojudin Abbas said that this view is held by 86.8 of respondents in the survey.
“We asked people’s opinion on whether there is currently a revival of the PKI in the motherland. Do you agree or not with this view? 86.9 percent said they did not agree”, said Sirojudin during an explanation of the survey findings at the SMRC offices in Jakarta on Friday September 29.
Meanwhile only 12.6 percent stated that they agree that there is a PKI revival and 0.6 percent of respondents stated they did not know or did not answer.
“Meaning that the overwhelming majority of Indonesian citizens don’t agree with this view. They do not believe that there is a revival of the PKI at the moment”, said Sirojudin.
Out of those that stated that they agree that there is a revival of the PKI, some 39.9 percent believe that the revival of the PKI is a threat to the country.
“39.9 [percent] of this 12.6 percent represents 5 percent of the total population. If taken from the adult population only this is around 10 million [people]”, he said.
Sirojudin said that if this is compared with the number of respondents that stated they did not agree, the figure of 5 percent of the total population is very small.
“But in terms of political movements (there are 10 million people), perhaps this has to be interpreted more carefully”, said Sirojudin.
The survey represents corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the party of the SMRC. The survey involved 1,057 respondents out of a sample of 1,220 people, with a 3.1 percent margin of error and a confidence level of 95 percent.
The demographic profile of the sample reflects Indonesia’s national population and is proportional based on demographic characteristics and regional spread.
The proportion of categories based on sex, place of residence, religion, ethnicity and province reflects the national population. Respondents were interviewed directly by trained interviewers on September 3-10, 2017.
Quality control of interview results was done by means of a 20 percent random sample out of the total sample by supervisors who revisited the selected respondents. No meaningful errors were found in the quality control.
[Translated by James Balowski. The original title of the article was Survei SMRC: Mayoritas Warga Tidak Percaya Sedang Terjadi Kebangkitan PKI.]
