Overall Monthly Report
Both FOCUS and MVK released their numbers in the last 48 hours, and while it is difficult to talk about bad news for a coalition with over 60% of the likely vote, September was not a particularly good month.
As the overall graph below shows, Smer dropped slightly from its plateau, though it still remains well above past plateaus and shows a slightly upward trendline over the past 2 years. The bigger changes came within SNS, which posted its biggest monthly drop in years, down to just above 10%. There are also some questions about HZDS’s slight gain that I will deal with in the next post (the party’s gains in the UVVM survey are sharply at odds with its losses in FOCUS and MVK surveys.)
For the current opposition, there was no particularly encouraging news but SDKU did turn up slightly after nearly a year of downward trend (of course it has turned up slightly in other months during the overall decline) and both the Christian Democrats and the Hungarian Coalition remained stable, as has been their habit.
The overall news is therefore reversion toward the two year mean for both coalition (dropping to just over 60%) and opposition (rising above 30%). The remaining 9% or so remains divided among parties across the party spectrum and both Slobdne Forum and the Communist Party posted slight gains this month but remain at the 2% mark. HZD and ANO, not pictured here, face an even less hopeful prospect, with numbers around 1% and perfectly flat trendlines.
Within the framework of (rather artificial) party blocs, these changes put the parties of the “Right” ahead of the “Slovak National” bloc, which has fallen by this standard to its lowest level ever (which is not to say that “Slovak National” ideas are at their lowest ebb since these have clearly been incorporated into the rhetoric of Smer.
In terms of the overall consequences for electoral politics, the report of these results remains a broken record: Smer remains in a strong position to chose a single party as its post-election coalition partner.
As always, the actual polling numbers are available online at Google Docs:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pdhlCClsiyAMi39bLFpY_Zg
And the most recent three months are below in tabular format (using “iframe” which may not work on all browsers).
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