By: T.F.
As many as 56.8 percent of the respondents said that they will certainly attend the upcoming parliamentary elections, according to the latest public opinion poll conducted by the Parsifal Agency, which measures the support for political parties for several media outlets, including Nova24TV. If the elections to the National Assembly were held this Sunday, the majority of the voters would support the largest parliamentary party – the Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS), which would receive 19.9 percent of the votes of all respondents. Second place would go to a party that does not currently exist yet; according to Parsifal, the Robert Golob List would receive 10.4 percent of the vote, while the Left (Levica) party would come in third place with 6.6 percent of the vote. According to the poll in question, only two other parties would manage to get into parliament at all. These are the Social Democrats party (Socialni demokrati – SD) with 6.5 percent of the votes and the List of Marjan Šarec (LMŠ) with 4.4 percent support. As many as 23.9 percent of the respondents do not yet know which party they will vote for at the end of April, while only 8.7 percent of respondents insist that they will not go to the polls at all.
The latest public opinion poll conducted by Parsifal also shows that sixth place among the parties would go to the political project Let’s Connect Slovenia (Povežimo Slovenijo), which currently has 3.4 percent of support, but the overall result does not include the new party Concretely (Konkretno), whose support amounts to 0.6 percent, as the party in which Zdravko Počivalšek and Alojž Kovšca united, has not yet officially joined the movement. However, if we assume that this will happen soon, the total sum of the Let’s Connect Slovenia amounts to 4 percent, which would mean that the party would get into parliament. Surprisingly, according to the latest Parsifal’s survey, the second-largest government party, New Slovenia (Nova Slovenija – NSi), would not get into parliament, as it only received 2.8 percent of support this time.
And the same would happen to the Party of Alenka Bratušek (Stranka Alenke Bratušek – SAB), which is currently in eighth place among the parties, with 2.3 percent support, as well as the Slovenian National Party (Slovenska nacionalna stranka – SNS), which currently has 2.3 percent support. In tenth place is the Democratic Party of Pensioners of Slovenia (Demokratska stranka upokojencev Slovenije – DeSUS), which continues to sink further and further under the leadership of Ljubo Jasnič and due to all of the deputies that are leaving it – the party currently only has a 1.2 percent support. The only other party that would receive more than one percent of the votes is the Pirates (Pirati), which would receive 1.1 percent of the vote; however, that would not be the case with the new party of Aleksandra Pivec (Our Country – Naša dežela), for which only 0.9 percent of support was recorded. The survey also recorded minimal support for the party Vesna (0.8 percent) and the Good State (Dobra država) led by Bojan Dobovšek. It should also be noted that 2.9 percent of the respondents said that they would not vote for any of the parties mentioned above.
The SDS party has the highest support among the voters who already know who they would vote for – namely, as many as 31.2 percent of these would vote for the largest government party, which is more than the support of the following two parties, the Robert Golob List and the Left party, combined. The Robert Golob List received 16.4 percent of the votes in this poll, while the Left received 10.3 percent. The Social Democrats came in fourth place with 10.2 percent of the vote, followed by the LMŠ party with 6.8 percent of the votes. Let’s Connect Slovenia got 5.4 percent of the votes among the voters who already know how they will decide at the upcoming elections, but if the party Concretely joins the movement, the support for the joint list would increase to 6.3 percent.
Judging only by the votes of the voters who already know who they would vote for, the NSi (4.4 percent) and SAB (4 percent) would also reach the parliamentary threshold and thus enter the parliament. The SNS party, led by Zmago Jelinčič, comes close (3.6 percent), while DeSUS (1.9 percent), Pirates (1.8 percent), and Our Country (1.4 percent) are still a little too far behind.
Support for the current government has been growing for the second month
The government is supported by 33.9 percent of the respondents. More than half of the respondents – 60 percent – do not support it. But for the second month in a row, a trend of growing support for the government is noticeable. Support for the government was the lowest in November last year when less than 30 percent of respondents supported the government, but after the rise in popularity in December, the support for it is even higher in 2022 – namely, support for the government rose by 5.4 percent in two months. There are also fewer people who are dissatisfied with the government, as compared to November, as 5.5 percent fewer respondents said that they do not support the government. This time, 6.1 percent of the respondents said that they could not decide what they think.
The survey included 725 respondents, of which 49.4 percent were women. The average age of the participants is 53.7 years. The majority of the respondents are from the oldest age group – over 55 years old (46.5 percent), a slightly smaller share of participants belongs to the middle age group – from 35 to 54 years old (37.2 percent), and the smallest number of respondents is from the youngest age group – from 18 to 34 years old (16.4 percent). Most of the respondents are from Central Slovenia (26.5 percent), followed by the Podravska (15.8 percent) and Savinjska (12.4 percent) regions. The majority of the respondents currently reside in a small village or hamlet (55.1 percent), followed by those who live in the city (28.1 percent) or a smaller town (16.8 percent).
