Aurelia Butler

LONDON (Reuters) -Britain’s next government will have to tread carefully to avoid jeopardising the country’s already diminished credit rating with the public finances under heavy strain, a senior analyst with S&P Global Ratings said.Maxim Rybnikov, S&P’s primary sovereign analyst for the United Kingdom, said whoever wins the election expected later this year will have to balance growing demands for more spending on services such as healthcare with the need to fix the public finances.”We do see fiscal risks,” Rybnikov said in an interview on Wednesday. “The picture is improving but we definitely still see them and we think that it’s going to be not an easy position for the incoming administration to manage that.” Britain’s opposition Labour Party, which is far ahead in opinion polls, has promised to stick with the current Conservative government’s target of bringing down debt as a share of economic output between the fourth and fifth year in forecasts produced by Britain’s budget watchdog.Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is barely on course to hit that target and Labour is likely to come under pressure to spend more on public services with polls showing widespread dissatisfaction about the state of healthcare, education and housing.S&P cut Britain’s credit rating by two notches from ‘AAA’ to ‘AA’ after the 2016 Brexit referendum decision and warned of another possible downgrade following former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s ‘mini budget’ huge tax cut programme announced in 2022.That ‘negative’ outlook was restored to ‘stable’ in 2023 after most of Truss’s agenda was dumped by her successor Rishi Sunak.”These things have moved back from the fore to some degree and the focus is really on the fiscal in both the upside potential and downside potential for the rating at the moment,” Rybnikov told Reuters.GROWTH OUTLOOK On the positive side for Britain’s economy, growth is likely to gather pace to around its non-inflationary speed limit of 1.7% a year by 2026, S&P estimates. That would be faster than in the euro zone with Germany – which currently has a potential growth rate of under 1% – likely to be growing by 1.2% in 2026.Britain’s growing population, boosted by migration and which contrasts with expected demographic declines in Germany and Italy, should help to sustain overall economic growth although on a per capita basis the outlook is weaker, S&P senior economist Marion Amiot said.Asked about Labour’s plans to tweak the current government’s secondary budget rule on borrowing levels to allow for more public investment, Rybnikov said public spending that increases the ability of the economy to grow was important.”Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that if there are significant fiscal deficits going into investment, we’re going to disregard them,” he said. “Regardless of what you spend on, the fiscal position is constrained.”S&P expects its measure of net public debt in Britain to peak this year around 96.5% of gross domestic product before falling only very slowly. Official forecasts show debt falling only from the 2028/29 fiscal year.But S&P also expects Britain’s budget deficit to be above 3% of GDP in 2026, down from 6% last year but higher than the official forecasts, given the implausibility of some of the government’s promises to limit spending increases and the likelihood that an expensive fuel duty freeze will continue.”The room for manoeuvre is less than five years ago and much less than it was 15 years ago,” Rybnikov said. “Any future government, regardless of their policy ideas, would have to deal with that.” More

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Expectations of wage growth in UK businesses have fallen to a near two-year low, according to a closely watched Bank of England poll that will ease interest rate-setters’ concerns over sticky domestic price pressures.Chief financial officers predicted wages would rise by 4.7 per cent in the next 12 months, according to a survey conducted by the central bank in March and published on Thursday. The figure was down from an increase of 4.9 per cent forecast in February and the lowest since the question was first asked in spring 2022.Businesses have expected pay to rise by more than 5 per cent for most of the past two years. The BoE has in recent months cited strong pay growth expectations as an indicator of persistent domestic price pressures, which it wants to see easing before it cuts interest rates. Services inflation, which is heavily affected by trends in pay, rose at an annual rate of 6.1 per cent in February. Headline inflation stood at 3.4 per cent, the lowest since 2021. The drop in wage growth expectations will support the view that the central bank will start reducing rates from a 16-year high of 5.25 per cent in the summer. Tomasz Wieladek, economist at investment company T Rowe Price, said that although reported wage growth and pay expectations were still not in line with the BoE’s 2 per cent inflation target, “the progress . . . in the data today . . . will reassure the Monetary Policy Committee”.Alongside easing wage growth in the year to March — it fell to 6.1 per cent from 6.5 per cent in the 12 months to February — businesses continued to report a better outlook for price growth. In a boost to households hit by the cost of living crisis, survey respondents said they expected to lift prices by 3.7 per cent in the year ahead, down from 4.1 per cent in February and the lowest since September 2021. CFOs said they raised their prices by an annual rate of 4.8 per cent in March, down from 5.4 per cent in the previous month and the lowest since September 2021, before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Businesses also reported weaker employment growth over the past year and the next, which is consistent with cooling domestic price pressures.In March, the BoE forecast that headline inflation would temporarily fall below the 2 per cent target in the second quarter. Financial markets are pricing that the BoE will start cutting its benchmark rate in June or August, taking the cost of borrowing to 4.5 per cent by the end of 2024.  Wieladek said that before the BoE started cutting rates, it would want to assess the effects of the 9.8 per cent rise in the minimum wage and changes in migration restrictions in April. This data will not be available before May.Separate figures published on Thursday showed that the final UK S&P services purchasing managers’ index, a measure of the health of the services sector, was 53.1 in March. This was marginally weaker than the initial reading of 53.4 and down from 53.8 in February. The figure was, however, well above 50, which indicates expanding activity. The survey also showed that businesses in the sector — which makes up 80 per cent of the UK economy — lifted prices at the slowest pace in six months. Tim Moore, economics director at S&P Global Market Intelligence, which compiles the survey, said: “The recovery in service sector output lost a little bit of momentum during March, and more so than suggested by the flash PMI results, but the overall picture remains reasonably positive.” More

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(Reuters) – Dan Ariens laid off workers, cut shifts, and halted nearly all hiring last summer after sales slumped at his company, best known for making bright orange snow blowers and lawnmowers sold around the world. Headcount fell 20% to 1,600 people, and he doesn’t see business improving until 2025.The experience of the Ariens Company, a fourth-generation family-owned firm in Brillion, Wisconsin, shows the stark contrast between U.S. factory employment – essentially flat-lining for more than a year – and the four-year boom in the wider job market.President Joe Biden’s industrial policy, headlined by legislation passed in 2022 that sparked a surge of factory construction, is aimed at boosting semiconductors, electric vehicles and green technologies, as well as other sectors.As the presidential campaign shifts into higher gear ahead of November’s election, Biden is touring factories to tout his accomplishments, especially to voters in battleground states.Even as construction is booming and some segments of heavy industry continue to hum, such as those that supply goods for government-funded infrastructure projects, the larger outlook for jobs in manufacturing is weak. Economists mostly attribute that to a combination of high interest rates, a slowing economy, and the end of the COVID-19 demand surge for many kinds of manufactured goods.The Biden administration contends it’s too soon to see the full fruits of its efforts. It takes about six to eight quarters for manufacturing investments to translate into factory jobs, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors told Reuters in an interview. And as the Federal Reserve moves to cut interest rates, which is expected later this year, more jobs will follow.”If you look in different pockets of the country – in North Carolina or Georgia – companies are already hiring before they’re breaking ground,” said Elisabeth Reynolds, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology manufacturing and economic development researcher, who previously served on Biden’s National Economic Council. “That’s a sign of things to come.”For now, Deere (NYSE:DE) & Co, Whirlpool Corp (NYSE:WHR), 3M Co and other large producers have announced layoffs, though for the most part the reductions have been targeted rather than the recent mass cutbacks in technology.  Many factories have opted to curb or eliminate hiring. Kondex Corp., a 280-employee producer of blades used mostly on farm machinery, not long ago was paying three times its normal pay rate to bring in workers from as far away as Georgia, putting them up in hotels near its Lomira, Wisconsin, plant.That’s long over. Kondex’s President Keith Johnson said he expects attrition to cut headcount by about 5% this year without layoffs.COMPOUNDED IMPACT The impact of hiring freezes and targeted cuts is compounded when they occur at multiple locations in rural areas and small towns. Deere last month said it would cut 150 workers at its sprawling campus in Ankeny, Iowa – a relatively small hit in a factory that employs about 1,700 people. Just days later Tyson Foods Inc (NYSE:TSN) said it would close a nearby pork-packing plant, leaving 1,200 workers jobless.Manufacturing’s share of U.S. employment accounted for roughly a third of all jobs after World War Two. It has been in steady decline for decades as the economy re-oriented around services and as efficiency improvements and automation meant fewer bodies were needed on production lines. More recently, U.S. manufacturers faced increased competition from China and other cheaper sources of production. The erosion in factory jobs had leveled off in the run-up to the COVID-19 pandemic but resumed in late 2022 after the binge in goods consumption faded.   Since late 2022, factories have accounted on average for just over 2,000 of the nearly 250,000 jobs of all types added monthly. In February, factory work fell to a record low 8.2% of U.S. employment, a 13.8 point drop from the 1979 peak of 22%.Data from the Institute for Supply Management this week showed manufacturing employment contracted for a sixth straight month in March, an unusually long run outside of a recession.To be sure, manufacturing jobs and output can grow with the aid of new technologies while also becoming a smaller share of the total economy – because other parts of the economy have grown even faster.For Jason Andringa, the chief executive of Vermeer, a Pella, Iowa, machinery maker with 4,500 employees which is still hiring, the job market comes as a relief. “We can be more selective now,” he said.JOBS ON THE HORIZONScott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a group that promotes domestic producers, said the boom in factory construction is creating jobs for builders and those producing materials they need, including cement and steel.”The actual factory jobs that will come from all of this are still down the road,” he said, “A lot of it will be in 2025 and out.”Paul said the job picture could be worse. After the extreme labor shortages during the pandemic, many employers have been hesitant to shed workers. “There’s a different philosophy in the sector compared to what they did years ago,” he said.Ariens Company, the lawnmower maker, is an example. While shrinking its headcount, for three months last year the company required workers to take one week off for every week they worked.The company’s CEO said this helped avoid further layoffs. Workers earned roughly the same as they would have gotten from unemployment insurance during this time and kept their health insurance.Office workers and those in distribution jobs continued working full time.As a privately owned business, Ariens Company doesn’t face the same pressures to cut costs to get through a slump. The CEO acknowledged these efforts hurt profits.Then there’s the weather. Ariens said two winters of light snow in the Eastern U.S. and summer droughts added to the sales slump. “We’re different in that weather affects as much, if not more than the economy,” he said. More

On reaching a savings milestone, your first thought might be to preserve the real value of your capital. This is most likely to happen when you scale back on work after a lifetime of investing, but might also occur when you reach your first £10,000 or £100,000 saved.Inflation’s assault on consumers is easing. Some commentators, such as consultancy Oxford Economics, think UK inflation is returning to its 2 per cent target. The Bank of England has recently made some optimistic comments, though it said it can’t rule out another global shock that keeps inflation high. Even if it goes away in the short term, there’s always the worry that it might return — with even low levels a concern for retirees.Investing in shares is good inflation protection when you’re accumulating funds. This is because listed businesses that are making or doing things can adjust the prices of their goods or services to align with inflation. But once you’re drawing an income from investments, you may need a new perspective.Wealth managers usually advise retirees to “de-risk” their investments by reducing levels of equity exposure. This ensures your investments don’t fluctuate in value as much as they did while you were accumulating them. Sharp falls can be hard to recoup when you draw down a regular income from investment. But if the stock market crashes at the start of your investment drawdown, it can have a devastating impact on your long-term income.Most de-risking involves some exposure to gold, simply because the price of gold doesn’t always move in the same direction as share prices. However, on Wednesday, the gold price reached a record high of $,2,295 per troy ounce. I think that’s a “klaxon” signalling it’s time to examine the reasons for holding it.“There have been a range of reasons for the all-time high gold prices, however, they nearly all come back to the fact that gold is a stable investment,” says Rick Kanda, managing director at The Gold Bullion Company. “Gold has historically been seen as a reliable store of value during economic and political uncertainty, making it unsurprising that a record number of investors backed gold in 2023.” Gold is protection against war or economic crisis. But some investors also hold gold as protection against inflation. This seems debatable.On the one hand, Schroders looked at data from March 1973 to December 2022 and found on average, over a 12-month period, gold returned 21 per cent above inflation during times of high and rising inflation.However, Laith Khalaf, head of investment analysis at AJ Bell, says: “Gold has spent long spells in the doldrums, going sideways or down, and it’s pretty volatile, so I think the argument it’s an effective hedge against inflation is quite tenuous.”The alternative for investors who want to de-risk away from equities but also build in inflation protection is index-linked gilts. These assets, backed by the UK government, will provide inflation protection if you hold them until maturity and can pick up a positive real yield — which isn’t always the case, but is today.“In the current market you can pick up index-linked bonds yielding between 0 per cent and 1 per cent above inflation, depending on maturity,” says Khalaf.These “linkers” may complement your gold holdings too. Sam Benstead, deputy collectives editor at investment platform Interactive Investor, thinks of the difference this way: “Overall, gold could be viewed as a defence against very high inflation (or hyperinflation); and inflation-linked bonds a defence against sustained higher than expected inflation, so long as the bonds offer a positive real yield when purchased and investors are wary of the risk that bond prices can move up and down.” Ideally, you would construct a ladder with individual UK linkers that mature at intervals. But investors without advisers to do it for them may not have the time or the inclination. Despite the varying efforts of the platforms to explain and identify index-linkers, many find it mind-bogglingly difficult.Meanwhile, although you can easily add gold to your portfolio by buying an exchange-traded product, such as iShares Physical Gold ETC Acc (recommended by four investment platforms: AJ Bell, Interactive Investor, Fidelity and Charles Stanley Direct), be cautious around the exchange-traded products that give exposure to UK index linkers.The passive index-linked gilts index has a very long average maturity, essentially because issuance was designed to meet the need of pension funds, which have long-duration liabilities. Almost 50 per cent of the iShares Index Linked Gilts ETF is gilts with maturity of more than 15 years. But ETFs with big proportions of long-duration gilts can be volatile when prices fluctuate. For example, from December 1 2021 to September 27 2022, the iShares Index Linked Gilts Ucits ETF dropped 50 per cent. Benstead explains: “This was the period when markets began pricing in higher inflation and interest rates, causing index-linked bonds to drop in value even as inflation soared. While your coupons would have seen an uplift, the capital value of your index-linked bonds would have crashed.”To find shorter average maturity than the UK passive index-based products, you can widen your search to active management and global linker funds. Fidelity includes Royal London Short Duration Global Index Linked Fund M Inc in its “Select 50” list of recommended investments, saying: “The loans are made over short periods (under five years usually) and this also helps reduce the fund’s risk. The manager has displayed skill in running the strategy and the fairly low cost reduces the drag on modest expected gains.” However, with only 30 per cent exposure to UK linkers, this fund might not be what you need if you’re worried about UK RPI inflation.Again you should be wary, as some of the actively managed UK index-linked gilt funds have high exposure to long duration, too, and do come with higher expenses than trackers.Enter the relatively new CG UK Index-Linked Bond Fund with costs of 0.15 per cent — an actively managed fund close to the price of a passive fund. With 14 UK index-linkers in the portfolio and an average duration of 5.5 years, it looks promising.It launched in October 2023, but its managers have experience in this area — the multi-asset fund they also manage, the Capital Gearing Portfolio Fund, aims to protect clients’ capital and has big exposure to index linkers while holding 1 per cent in gold. “If you deflate the gold price over the past four decades, it hasn’t held its value in real terms,” says Emma Moriarty, investment manager at CG Asset Management. “Where gold adds value is in the apocalypse scenario — that’s why we hold the 1 per cent.”You may feel apocalypse planning requires a higher level of gold. But inflation planning gives a reason to cash in a little of your gold gains in favour of linkers. Moira O’Neill is a freelance money and investment writer. She holds none of the funds mentioned. X: @MoiraONeill, Instagram @MoiraOnMoney, email: moira.o’[email protected] More

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.This article is an on-site version of Martin Sandbu’s Free Lunch newsletter. Premium subscribers can sign up here to get the newsletter delivered every Thursday. Standard subscribers can upgrade to Premium here, or explore all FT newslettersGreetings; I hope everyone has spent Easter in a relaxing way. During the long weekend I came across a number of examples of economic policy views that seem widely held even though their logic to me seems comprehensively flawed. Economists such as John Quiggin and Paul Krugman use the term “zombies” for ideas that keep coming back to life no matter how many times they have been killed. So below are three zombies of my own — though I’m not sure they quite fit the zombie metaphor, since they may not have been properly killed in the first place. If you have a good idea for a better term, send it my way.The first idea is the western sense that China’s huge capacity boost for producing green tech — above all electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels — is a threat. This fear has been palpable in Europe for some time; the complaints of the carmaking industry are well known. It is now clear the US is following Europe’s example, with Treasury secretary Janet Yellen warning China not to “flood the world with cheap clean energy exports”, as the FT reporting puts it. These are, of course, the very same governments that think it is important to decarbonise their economies and get to net zero carbon emissions in very little time. China has been willing to put in place the green tech subsidies and other government support that the west has until recently shied away from. What, precisely, is not to like about the resulting flood of cheap clean energy exports? Would it be better to reduce the flood to a trickle, so we have less of the kit it takes to decarbonise? Or to have a flood of expensive rather than cheap green tech supplies, to make decarbonisation costlier?The intellectual short-circuit that offends me is to simultaneously complain that it is too hard or expensive to decarbonise and that the tech to do so is too cheap and abundant. You can’t have this both ways. And the way to take it should, of course, be to celebrate cheapness. My favourite story over the past week was my colleagues’ reporting that Dutch and German homeowners are using Chinese solar panels for wired-up garden fences — that’s how cheap they have become. What the photovoltaic garden fence story shows is also something more serious: that it is too difficult or expensive to find roof installers at the scale needed. This hints at a more general problem, which is what the detractors really seem to have in mind: western countries don’t actually intend to install or buy as many panels or batteries or EVs as they need for their net zero ambitions; they would rather reserve their custom to local companies for those insufficient numbers. For the dirty secret is this: the Chinese “overcapacity” (see my colleagues’ chart for PV cells below) is measured relative to actual demand. But our actual demand is far too low for our supposed goal of decarbonising fast. So our real task is to boost demand, not to limit supply. In practice, this would mean something like accelerating limits on selling internal combustion engines, massively training green tech installers and ensuring much bigger orders of green tech, whether through subsidies or directly through public procurement. Make demand sufficient, and there will be contracts also for western manufacturers so that they will find it viable to keep their factories open, even expand. (Of course, the EU’s carbon tariffs should be widened to cover finished manufactures, just in case China’s factories have a higher carbon footprint than European ones.)The second idea is the illusion that debt has to be repaid. This came to mind with the latest news of the slow-rolling insolvency of at least some companies in the convoluted corporate structure of Thames Water, the supplier of water to the people of London and its surroundings. (FT Alphaville’s Bryce Elder has as good a guide to the corporate engineering as you will find anywhere.) But it is a deep current of policymaking everywhere. As I have explained in a book, the European sovereign debt crisis became hugely more costly than it needed to be because politicians resisted writing down the excessive debts of governments and banks. Exactly the same misguided policy approach was on display with the bank failures in the US and Switzerland last year. And repeating the west’s mistakes by resisting to force losses on lenders is, in my view, the biggest thing holding back China’s growth. In the case of Thames Water, there is some debt owed by the companies that own the water company but do not themselves supply water. Part of this is coming due soon, hence the urgency in the news. But no harm needs to come to the water supplies if this debt can’t be paid — conversely, there would be harm if any money was extracted from the actual water company to pay this debt — as in the case of a default, normal insolvency procedures could simply wipe out the shareholders and make the creditors the new owners. There is also an amount of debt owed by the actual water company. But here, too, we should not worry too much about doing the same thing: wipe out the owners and turn the existing creditors into the new shareholders. People will point out a variety of complications and the need for fresh money to invest in upgrading the decaying infrastructure (don’t go swimming in the UK without checking the latest sewage discharges). The owners and any potential investors would like the regulator to put more of the costs on (captive, let’s note it) consumers through higher bills. But the main point, which keeps getting lost, is: Thames Water with no debt (because debt has been written down and creditors replacing former shareholders) is both a better investment prospect than with the current indebtedness, and one that has less need to charge its customers more. Any proposal for Thames Water should show how it takes on board that simple but rarely admitted truth.My third bugbear is a particular form of opposition to the minimum wage. The policy is in the news because it is 25 years since it was introduced in the UK, and it has now achieved the longtime aspiration level of two-thirds of the median wage for workers above 21 years of age, and has not reduced employment. As Gavin Kelly explains in an FT op-ed, “this is what a policy triumph looks like”. (For the benign consequences of minimum wages more universally, see the seminal paper by Doruk Cengiz, Arindrajit Dube, Attila Lindner and Ben Zipperer.) I may exaggerate slightly about the minimum wage, which is now widely accepted as something that is not harmful to employment and could even boost productivity. But old habits die hard and there is still an instinct in policy circles, let alone in business circles, to assume that stricter rules for how employers treat their workers are ipso facto a brake on productivity. A case in point is how the UK Labour party’s promise to increase worker protection has ruffled a lot of feathers among those the party wants to be its new corporate friends — to the point where Labour itself is treading cautiously.Two things should be clear. It cannot be an argument against enforcing the laws already on the books that it would be inconvenient for businesses to have to follow them. Weak enforcement (Kelly points out that hundreds of thousands are paid below the legal minimum in the UK) only serves to undermine law-abiding companies. And when strengthening labour standards makes it more economical to invest in machinery, or in more rational work processes (such as planning shifts in advance), then making it harder for businesses to stick to their unproductive habits is a feature, not a bug. Other readablesEconomics is a notoriously imperialist discipline that is much more likely to colonise other fields than be colonised by them. The exception was Daniel Kahneman, the social psychologist who revolutionised economics, and who died last week. Read my obituary of Kahneman here.Religion and politics don’t mix well, says the FT’s editorial board.The New York Times has a nice write-up of the debate around what path poorer countries can take to economic development when manufacturing requires fewer and fewer hands. Oppenheimer in flip-flops: last week’s FT magazine profiled the entrepreneur who is leading the use of artificial intelligence in weapons systems.Recommended newsletters for youChris Giles on Central Banks — Your essential guide to money, interest rates, inflation and what central banks are thinking. Sign up hereTrade Secrets — A must-read on the changing face of international trade and globalisation. Sign up here More

JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesia’s president-elect Prabowo Subianto will be prudent in fiscal management and uphold laws that limit public debt and annual budget deficits, the head of the biggest party backing Prabowo told Reuters on Thursday.Foreign investors have been monitoring details of the incoming government’s fiscal stance, after ratings agencies warned programmes that Prabowo had pledged during his campaign would be costly and could undermine the country’s hard-earned reputation of fiscal discipline.”We will manage the macroprudential side,” said Airlangga Hartarto, chairman of Indonesia’s second-biggest party Golkar, which is part of a coalition of four parties backing Prabowo. Airlangga is also the current chief economics minister.”We will follow the law: public debt cannot exceed 60% (of GDP), (annual budget) deficit ceiling at 3% (of GDP),” he said in an interview.The government’s guidance for next year’s fiscal gap is between 2.48% to 2.8% of GDP. This was decided in a meeting headed by outgoing President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, with Prabowo in attendance, said Airlangga. While this year’s fiscal deficit may swell to 2.8% of GDP, according to Airlangga, Indonesia’s government typically manages deficits at around 2% of GDP, except for during the pandemic.Jokowi has included Prabowo in many economic meetings, such as policy discussions on food prices, to smooth the transition of power, Airlangga said, describing Prabowo’s upcoming term as a continuation of Jokowi’s 10-year tenure in office.BROADENING COALITIONIndonesia’s strict rules on fiscal limits were introduced in the aftermath of the late 1990s Asian financial crisis to reform public finance management.Prabowo’s flagship programme of free lunches and milk for students and pregnant women has been a particular concern among analysts. When fully implemented, the programme is expected to cost more than $28 billion.Prabowo’s coalition won 48% of seats in parliament, but Airlangga said he is confident there would not be much opposition against his programmes.Prabowo may broaden his coalition and control more than 60% seats in parliament if NasDem, a political party currently backing losing presidential candidate Anies Baswedan, jumps ship, Airlangga said.Such a move is likely to come after the Constitutional Court rules on ongoing election disputes, Airlangga said. Talks of changing alliances and political jockeying have made headlines in Southeast Asia’s largest economy after the election commission last month officially announced the outcome of presidential and parliamentary votes.Prabowo also has plans to meet the chairman of Indonesia’s biggest political party PDI-P to talk about a possible coalition, according to media reports.”The way I see it, there is little chance of existing parties not to negotiate joining the government … Most of political parties in Indonesia are used to working within the government,” Airlangga said. More