To me, they’re more focused on being powerful and making wealth for themselves and of course the upperclassmen/elites.

I’m not sure how it works where you are, but here the middle and upper classes bear a significant share of funding the government through taxes. Those funds support a wide range of programs such as education, healthcare, and social assistance which subsidize the cost of living for lower-income groups. In my country, students from low-income families are exempt from school fees and may receive grants including their family. More recently, there are also free meal programs for students from grade 1 through grade 12. The low-income families here also receive grants for free healthcare while the rest of us has to pay.

Even within this chain of programs, I acknowledge that elites sure find ways to extract benefits and enrich themselves. The core issue here is that distribution mechanisms are not always well-targeted, so support can miss some segments of low-income households that are actually below the poverty line.

In fact, Indonesian has this saying that those who protest on the street are typically unemployed and are happy to get paid to protest. That is indirectly saying that protesters are those on the poverty line rather than those middle to upper class echelons of the society.

What I was pointing is the widely held perception in Indonesia which is those most visibly present in street protests tend to come from economically vulnerable groups as lower-income individuals often have more immediate economic grievances and fewer opportunity costs in participating in street-level demonstration. Whereas the middle to upper income levels have more opportunity cost to go on the street. So, these levels of people have different mode of participation. And the Indonesian saying reflects that distinction between who operates behind the scenes and who shows up on the street, even if it simplifies it.