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Political Analyst: SaS Sees Drop in Popularity Due to Leaders' Behaviour
Monday 27 September 2010 Zoom in | Print page
Bratislava, September 27 (TASR) - A significant drop in popularity of the Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) party is caused mainly by its unfulfilled election promises and the behaviour of SaS chairman and Parliamentary Chairman Richard Sulik and other party representatives, political analyst Juraj Marusiak told TASR in reaction to the election polls published on Monday.
According to the polls, SaS would gather only 8.3 percent of votes if the general election had taken place earlier this month – down from the 12.14 percent the party enjoyed in the June 12 election.
"It's plain to see that its political style cost SaS a significant degree of support – mainly due to the behaviour of its leaders and the way they have abandoned their own promises and aims," said Marusiak, who expects an even greater drop in popularity to take place in the wake of the Hayek Consulting Group case.
Marusiak thinks that the popularity of the Coalition parties can be adversely affected by the economic measures planned by the Government. Also, Marusiak added, the apparent lack of unity among the Coalition doesn't help either.
The latest poll by the Focus agency shows Robert Fico's Smer-SD (now the strongest opposition party) would have won a general election on 39.7 percent earlier this month. The strongest coalition SDKU-DS would be the runner-up, enjoying voter support of 16 percent.
Another coalition party, Christian Democrats (KDH), would have garnered 10.8 percent. The poll featured a sample of 1,040 adult respondents.
The other coalition party, the ethnic-reconciliation party Most-Hid would also have been under 10 percent (7.3 percent). The last of those who would have made it into Parliament (i.e. gaining more than 5-percent voter support) is nationalist SNS on 6.1 percent.
The showing of the other four parties included in the poll is as follows: ethnic-Hungarian SMK (3.3 percent), LS-HZDS (3 percent), the Communist Party (2.5 percent) and socialist SDL (1.1 percent).
Roughly seven out of ten (68.3 percent) of the respondents in the poll said they would go out and vote, while 18.1 percent stated the opposite. The remaining 13.6 percent either didn't want to say or couldn't say if they would make it to the polls to vote.
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