Today the European Friends of Armenia Organization made public the results of a public opinion poll carried out among 1602 citizens specifically selected in the period from February 29 through March 5, 2012, according to which, in response to a question “If the National Assembly election takes place this Sunday, whom will you vote?” 27% of respondents mentioned the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) and 25% mentioned the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA). The ARF, the Rule of Law Party (RLP) and the Armenian National Congress (ANC) won only 3% of the votes. By the way, the preferential voting, if their preferred party didn’t participate in the election, showed the following allocation of forces – PAP – 15%, RPA – 11%, ARF and RLP – 4%, Heritage Party and ANC – 2%. According to the poll, 78% of respondents are more informed about the PAP, 71% about the RPA, 51% about the RLP, 34% about the ARF, 26% and 16% about the Heritage Party and the ANC respectively.Spartak Seyranyan, the press secretary of the ARF and a member of the party’s Supreme Body, said during a conversation with www.aravot.am that he wasn’t inclined to commenting on any poll. He explained why, “Generally, before every election, as a rule, both Armenian and foreign research centers and sociological institutions conduct public opinion polls and make predictions, but numbers of those predictions made roughly at the same time sometimes differ from each other dramatically and that difference is huge, even predicted numbers before the election and numbers made public after elections have nothing to do with the numbers made public as a result of elections.”
The ARF representative offered all those who published results of public polls, predictions and numbers to make a comment themselves after the election on why their previously published numbers weren’t the case. “It refers both to Armenian and foreign research centers. Let me remind that I offered the same thing in 2007 to an Armenian sociologist who predicted that the ARF would get 3.5% of votes. I offered him after the election to comment himself on how come the ARF had won more than 13% of votes as a result of that election,” stated Spartak Seyranyan.
In response to our question, Seyranyan said that certainly, the party conducted its own public opinion polls, moreover, regularly, it conducted various researches, but those are for inner-party use only. As for the Armenian society’s awareness of the ARF that according to that poll was 34%, Seyranyan said, “In this case, no one can blame me for exaggerating, but the ARF has no problem at least in terms of being known among Armenians.”
Naira MAMIKONYAN
Read also
