Macedonian Ruling Party Leads Opinion Poll

The party of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski would secure 51 seats in the 120-member parliament if elections were held now, slightly less than the 63 seats it won in the 2008 early elections.

The main opposition party, the Social Democrats, would do a bit better than in the past election. The opinion poll showed that the party would secure 32 seats if the ballot were held now, as opposed to the 27 they won in 2008.

This year the parliament will have three more legislators because the diaspora will elect representatives for the first time.

The poll was commissioned by Macedonia’s most prominent daily, Dnevnik, and carried out this month by the local agency Rating on a representative sample of 1,560 respondents.

According to the survey, the junior ruling Democratic Union for Integration, DUI would again have no trouble winning in the ethnic Albanian bloc. This party would crush its main opponent, the Democratic Party of Albanians, DPA, by winning 14 seats as opposed to seven for the DPA.

Ethnic Albanians make up one quarter of Macedonia’s population.
 
If the election were held now, the smaller ethnic Albanian opposition New Democracy party would win four seats, and the newly formed Albanian opposition National Democratic Rebirth, the rightist opposition United for Macedonia and the opposition Liberal Democrats would win three seats each, the survey suggests.

The remaining seats would be distributed among other minor parties.

72 per cent of respondents said that they would go out and vote, while the poll also showed that a relatively high 33,2 percent of them were not sure for whom they will vote.

Compared to the last Dnevnik survey in March, VMRO DPMNE's popularity rating has declined by 0.8 per cent. The opposition Social Democrats rating increased by the same percentage.

The daily concludes that the VMRO DPMNE will be able to form a stable government after the June polls, especially if it renews its coalition with the DUI.

24 per cent of respondents said that the VMRO DPMNE government is better suited to deal with the country’s painful problems of unemployment and poverty. 15 per cent said that the Social Democrats would better handle this task.

55 per cent said that both parties would be unsuccessful in dealing with these problems, while the remaining respondents said they do not know.

The snap polls in Macedonia come after the opposition began a boycott of parliament in January, and several months of political gridlock followed. The opposition demanded early elections, blaming the government for curbing democracy, devastating the economy and keeping the country at an arm's length from NATO and the EU.