Two months before early parliamentary elections, HDZ’s new president will have a lot of ground to cover to have any chance of forming the next government.
If early parliamentary elections were held today, SDP would get 30.9 percent of the vote, while HDZ would win only 21.5 percent of the vote. MOST would be third with the support of 12.1 percent of voters. These are the most interesting findings of the latest poll conducted by Nova TV after the latest dramatic political events, reports dnevnik.hr on June 29, 2016.
The poll was conducted after First Deputy Prime Minister and HDZ president Tomislav Karamarko resigned from both posts, and after Parliament adopted a no confidence motion against Prime Minister Tihomir Orešković, which led to the dissolution of Parliament and new elections being called probably in early September.
The poll was conducted by phone on a total of 1,219 respondents from Saturday to Tuesday.
The poll brings several interesting points. The first is that HDZ has been strongly punished by voters, mostly due to their unsuccessful attempt to conduct a coalition reshuffle in Parliament and for bringing down their own government. This is roughly as low support for HDZ as it had in 2011, when the party lost the elections and went to the opposition. At that time, it enjoyed the support of 24 percent of voters.
Another point is that SDP is now definitely a stable political option with more than 30 percent of votes and that MOST has managed to regain some of the lost support. In earlier polls, they were at times below eight percent of support, so for them this is a good result. The fourth place belongs to Živi Zid with the support of 7.7 percent of voters.
Although the difference between HDZ and SDP is now substantial, HDZ leadership claims that the only poll is the one conducted on election day. They are convinced that after HDZ gets the new president there will be positive effect on their ratings. SDP says that their opponents should not be underestimated because there are still two months until the next elections.
According to the poll, all other parties are well below the electoral threshold of five percent. Milan Bandić’s party has the support of 2.3 percent, and is followed by Pametno Party (2.0), HSP AS (1.6 percent), HSS (1.5), IDS (1.4) and HNS (1.3 percent).
