On Wednesday, the results of a poll conducted for the purposes of the early parliamentary elections due to be held on April 12th by the Macedonian Center for International Cooperation (MCIC) and the Institute for Democracy Societas Civilis – Skopje (IDSCS) were announced. This is the third and final part of the survey that deals with citizens’ trust in politicians and parties, i.e. their ratings.
Most respondents (41.3%) said they do not trust any politician, and 8.5% refused to answer this question or answered “I do not know”, with almost half (49.8%) of citizens reporting total distrust of the current political elite. The other half of the citizens have the highest confidence in Zoran Zaev (16.5%) and Hristijan Mickoski (14.2%). They are followed by DUI leader Ali Ahmeti with 6.9% and State President Stevo Pendarovski with 4.2%.
There is almost no difference between the ratings of the two largest political parties in the country, i.e. it is on the margins of statistical error. The incumbent party SDSM (22.1%) has a slight lead over the opposition VMRO-DPMNE (20.4%). DUI’s rating is 6.6%.
The overall results of this poll with the question “if parliamentary elections are to be held tomorrow, for which political party would you vote?”, are SDSM 22.1, VMRO-DPMNE 20.4, DUI 6.6, Albanian Alliance 2.6, Left 1 , 7, BESA 1.5, Alternative 0.8, DPA 0.9 percent. The majority of respondents responded that the current Government did not meet their expectations – 64.5%, and 53.9% believe that it does not deserve to be re-elected in April. The field survey was conducted from November 15 to December 1, 2019, on a nationally representative sample of 1,000 respondents from the agency M-Prospect. It is very logical to ask the question of the timing of data placement, even 25 days after it has been implemented.
As a reminder, since June, the public has been marred by dozens of scandals and affairs, such as the cases of racketeering and corruption “Racket” and “Racket 2”, “Virus”, “Insulin”, and the internationally-announced date for starting negotiations with the EU has also failed. Given all this has happened in the period between June and December, the question arises as to whether this indicates that the poll released today has been rigged, as already announced in the media.
