(Bloomberg) -- At the market open in Jakarta, it looked bad — but the kind of losses that wouldn’t raise traders’ eyebrows given the volatile nature of Indonesian stocks.

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Then it got worse. Selling intensified into the late morning Tuesday, pushing Indonesia’s benchmark Jakarta Composite Index down by as much as 7.1%, the steepest intraday decline since 2011.

Circuit breakers triggered trading halts in Jakarta on a day when the rest of Asian equity markets rallied. Traders said the selloff wasn’t driven by any single catalyst, but rather a combination of factors including concerns over President Prabowo Subianto’s populist measures, forced liquidations and uncertainties over the finance ministry’s leadership.

“Foreign investors are clearly rattled by Prabowo’s troubling signals on budget reallocation and the Finance Ministry’s ability to maintain the overall fiscal discipline,” said Homin Lee, a senior macro strategist at Lombard Odier Ltd. in Singapore. “The recent weakening of the government revenue collection and the resulting early deficit appear to be reviving the market’s worry about the future in the cabinet.”

The stock selloff triggered a 30-minute temporary suspension after losses in the benchmark index exceeded 5% for the first time since 2020. As shares slumped, the 30-day volatility for the JCI climbed to the highest level since the Covid era in May 2020.

Factoring in Tuesday’s plunge, the nation’s stock market has tumbled 12% this year, the second-worst major equity index in the world after Thailand. Overseas investors have sold a net $1.6 billion of the nation’s shares this quarter, more than erasing all of last year’s inflows.

While Southeast Asia markets as a whole have declined since US President Donald Trump’s election in November bolstered the dollar, what makes international investors worry most about Indonesia, the region’s largest economy, is the largely unanticipated accumulation of power by Prabowo.

The new president has sought to divert funds into his priority projects, while cutting back on expenditure elsewhere, rattling investor confidence. As an example, the newly launched sovereign wealth fund Danantara — which has a direct reporting line to the president — said last month it would take over management of seven state-owned enterprises. Indonesia posted an unlikely budget deficit for February due to a more than 20% slide in state revenues, adding to concerns about the health of government finances.