"GALLUP" PRESENTS OBJECTIVE DATA
Armen Tsatouryan

Hayots Ashkhar Daily
29 Nov 08
Armenia

What has changed over the past 10 months?

The large scale-social survey conducted in the capital city and marzes
by the representatives of the Lithuanian department of "Gallup"
organization and the Georgian IMP organization 10 months after
presidential elections and the end of the 2008 "spring-fall" political
season are important in terms of clarifying the post-electoral
dynamics.

It should be noted from the outset that this social survey presents
large-scale, conscientious and thorough work whose separate parts
are even like a scientific research.

The section concerning the domestic policy issues contains information
about the population’s awareness of and attitude to the political
figures and organizations, presenting concrete and clear-cut data
in numbers.

What immediately attracts attention in the first section entitled
"The Population’s Awareness of the Political Figures" is that no new
politician apart from Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan has been in the
domain of visibility of our citizens over the past 10 months.

And because the Prime Minister is not actually a newcomer on the
political arena either, our voters’ awareness can be considered
strictly unsatisfactory as restrict their knowledge about the
politicians to those activists whose names became well -known during
the 2007-2008 electoral marathon.

This is first of all accounted for by the fact that the radical
opposition together with its leader L. Ter-Petrosyan has blocked
the way of the newcomers, having captured the political arena after
the presidential elections. But we believe this situation, which
is quite normal for the first 10 months following the elections,
will not last long. With regard to the three best-known activists,
the picture here is exactly the same as it was before the presidential
elections: Serge Sargsyan, Levon Ter-Petrosyan and Arthur Baghdasaryan.

Quite interesting are the results recorded in the section entitled
"The Population’s Awareness of Political Organizations".

The top party in this list is "Prosperous Armenia" (with a rating of
98.19%) which, despite being the best-known political organization
and even having higher records than the Republican Party (97.41%),
does not have the highest electoral rating. Such phenomenon is
probably accounted for by the party’s pompous name which sounds more
impressive to the ordinary voters of the marzes than the names of
other political parties.

But what attracts attention is that 60 percent of the voters are
not simply "insufficiently informed" of the leading parties of
Armenia. They have only "heard" something about their existence. This
is also a precise observation which testifies to the conscient
iousness of the authors. This may probably account for the fact that
the name of Gagik Tsaroukyan, leader of "Prosperous Armenia" party,
was ticked in the list of the 10 Republican activists, and the name
of Raffi Hovhannisyan, leader of "Heritage" party, was ticked in the
list of the more prominent figures of "Prosperous Armenia".

More important is the third question which runs as follows, "Which
politician’s attitudes and views are more or less close to you?" The
absolute leader in this list is incumbent President Serge Sargsyan
with a rating of 44.4 percent. Such a high record stands in contrast
to the 10 percent rating of L. Ter-Petrosyan. Leader of "Heritage"
party Raffi Hovhannisyan has surpassed the ex-President with his
rating of 18.57 percent.

That’s to say, the 53 percent of votes obtained by the incumbent
President on February 19 has reduced only by 9 percent over the past
10 months while his main contender’s rating has reduced exactly twice
as much in the same period. Taking into consideration the fact that
this is not a pre-election survey but rather, a survey conducted
in a period between two elections, we can definitely arrive at the
conclusion that S. Sargsyan’s rating has even recorded a certain
growth in comparison with February 2008.

The 44.4 percent rating recorded at present equals at least a 60
percent rating20recorded at election time.

In the meantime, the rating of the incumbent President tends to
increase further, because in response to the question "Who will you
vote for during the next presidential elections if the things continue
to develop in the same spirit?", 59.9 percent of the respondents
mentioned the name of S. Sargsyan and only 6.7 percent gave the name
of the ex-President. Our citizens do not trust L. Ter-Petrosyan
even in the role of the contender of the incumbent President. As
seen from their responses to different questions, they pin hopes on
"some other activist", i.e. they look forward to the appearance of
a new opposition leader who is still unknown to society.

Of course, a single analytical report is not enough for summarizing
all the repeated regularities and new tendencies found as a result of
the recent "Gallup" survey. However, as shown by the general picture
of such studies, the overall rating of the main political parties
has remained unchanged, but there have been noticeable changes in
the ratings of the political leaders.

Our society’s little trust in L. Ter-Petrosyan, an activist who
suffered defeat in the presidential elections and continued the
electoral struggle till autumn, has reduced more than twice, whereas
the rating of the authorities and hence – the incumbent President,
has steadily increased.