By: Peter Jančič, Spletni časopis
Levica party would not enter parliament, while Janez Janša would form the government, as SDS would win the election by a wide margin. This was revealed by a Mediana poll, the results of which were published last night by POP TV. The outcome comes as a major surprise.
After the debacle of the ruling parties in the referendum on pension privileges for the elite, Mediana’s polls initially showed that support for Robert Golob’s Svoboda and Asta Vrečko’s Levica was increasing, and that Golob’s party was closing the gap with SDS. But now the results have suddenly shifted completely, and they are even worse for the ruling coalition than the results measured a week ago by Parsifal for Nova24TV. According to Mediana, both SDS and Svoboda have gained higher shares compared to Parsifal, while NSi, still led by Matej Tonin, and especially Levica, have dropped significantly. The results are catastrophic for Levica as it would not even make it into the National Assembly.
Even though this is an exceptionally striking piece of data, POP TV largely downplayed it and did not highlight Levica’s drop below the parliamentary threshold either in its televised reporting or on its online portal. One might conclude they consider it a marginal event.
Here are Mediana’s poll results compared with Parsifal’s:
The last three Mediana polls, published by Delo and POP TV, initially suggested that after the referendum failure, support for Svoboda and Levica was rising. But now there has been a dramatic reversal, Levica would not even enter the National Assembly, and has almost been caught by SLS party led by Tina Bregant.
SLS has managed to climb despite its past internal disputes and financial troubles. The scenario in which Levica fails to enter parliament may explain its attempts to form a pre-election coalition with Vesna. But merging parties does not necessarily mean merging voter bases. The opposite can happen: Levica’s voters might be alienated by Vesna’s presence, and Vesna’s voters might feel the same about Levica – leading to an even worse combined result.
Meanwhile, Mediana’s polling shows a steady decline over three surveys for the SD party under Matjaž Han, who now ranks behind the Democrats of Anže Logar, who, according to Ninamedia’s recent poll for Dnevnik, has already overtaken Han. Mediana’s poll also shows that Resni.ca, led by former SNS official Zoran Stevanović from Kranj, would enter parliament, whereas Parsifal last week showed Resni.ca just below the threshold.
Public opinion polls should not be blindly trusted. They often miss the mark, even in the final week before elections. They all completely failed to predict the outcome of the referendum, where not a single poll foresaw that 92.5% of voters would reject the ideas supported by Svoboda, SD, and Levica. None came even close to predicting the scale of disaster that befell the governing parties.
A longer-term comparison shows that the gap between SDS at the top and Svoboda in second place has widened again, with all other parties lagging far behind.
In the charts and article on Spletni časopis, party support shares are recalculated based only on decided voters (those who chose a specific party). This allows better comparison between polls and with actual election results. The category “other party” is also included among decided voters – these are typically parties not offered in the poll but mentioned spontaneously by respondents. The original support percentages from various polls, as published by the respective media, and used for recalculation, are listed in the table (which can be enlarged with a click).
I provide all the base data for recalculations because it helps clarify differences between polls and allows for verification in case of data transfer or processing errors.