Sociologist Aharon Adibekyan met with journalists for the third time since the start of the election campaign to present the results of the survey conducted by his “Sociometer” center.
This time the surveyed were citizens of Yerevan, and it turns out that only 56% of them are going to participate in the elections. Eighty-three percent of the possible voters have already decided whom they are going to vote for during the election to be held on May 12. This served as a basis for Adibekyan to conclude that the campaign target of the political parties are the remaining 17%, the “undecided voters”, and the remainder of the struggle is aimed at getting these votes.
The main point did not differ from the results of the previous survey and can fully fit in the following sentence declared by Adibekyan: “The population of Yerevan has two layers-one layer consists of the sympathizers of the Armenian Republican Party and the other consists of the sympathizers of “Prosperous Armenia.”
The following is the results of the survey taken on April 21: the party with the most votes is the Armenian Republican Party (28.6%), “Prosperous Armenia” comes in second (26.4%), then “Country of Law” (11.8%), “Heritage” (8%), the ARF (6.4%) and lastly “National Unity” with 4.6%. Let us recall that these are only the results of the surveys in Yerevan. Artashes Geghamyan’s party had 7% of votes in the national survey.
According to Adibekyan, the Republican Party, “Prosperous Armenia”, “Country of Law” and “Heritage” will definitely be in parliament. The ARF, “National Unity” and Tigran Karapetyan’s Popular Party will exceed the 5% needed if they manage to steer the undecided voters towards their party.
Based on the social status of voters, the distribution of voters is the following: 4.8% of the 16% voting bloc of state workers prefer the Republican Party. The Republican Party and “Prosperous Armenia” are also trusted by the private sector workers and the unemployed, while housewives mostly trust “Prosperous Armenia”. What’s also interesting is the distribution of the potential voters of separate political parties based on the level of education. In this sense, it can be considered that the most intellectual is the electorate of the ARF-58% of their voters has a university education, and the mid-professional level and middle school education make up 21% respectively.
“Heritage” has 42% of voters with a college education, while the Republicans have 40%. The “Prosperous Armenia” party mainly has voters with a middle school education (52%). The voters with middle school education of the “Country of Law”, “National Unity” and Popular Party have equal specific weights, with 44% for each.
According to Adibekyan, 42.9% of citizens of Yerevan believe the election will be conducted with serious violations; 20.6% believe that there will be violations but small, while 22.1% are of the opinion that the upcoming elections will be fairer than the previous ones but not enough to be at a satisfactory level.
Adibekyan did not touch upon the other small political parties because they have a minimum amount of votes.
“Small political parties get offended a lot,” confessed the sociologist, explaining that they simply don’t get enough ratings in the survey; only 1-1.5% can have a significant effect on the elections, and that is why he didn’t consider it right to touch upon them.
There were some things that had not changed since the previous press conference. The sociologist once again imitated Raffi Hovhannisyan (true, it was much shorter this time, but if it goes at this rate, it could turn into a habitual act). Of course, he separately touched upon Tigran Karapetyan (or as he said, Tigranich) and the great love that the people have for him after hearing his announcements.
One of the new concepts was that the size of a person’s body may play an important role during the election campaign. For example, there was a lot of sympathy for the “Prosperous Armenia” party in the beginning because “the “Prosperous Armenia” party has a lot of populist slogans and many promises. Perhaps they compare them with Mr. Tsarukyan’s body size and say that that’s the way it is going to be. ‘If a person with a small body size makes these promises, then what?’… said sociologist Adibekyan.
In response to the observation of journalists that if we go along with that logic and take into consideration the “body size” of Serge Sargsyan, the rating of the Republican Party has to be very low, Adibekyan replied that that is not the rating of Serge Sargsyan, rather the rating of the Republican Party. Let us mention that Aharon Adibekyan was rather offended that they accuse him of being bought, inventing statistics and, in general, “sutibekyan” {play on words, “sut” meaning fraudulent in Armenian}…copyright laws to the latter belong to T. Karapetyan. Mr. Adibekyan reminded those present that he has been conducting surveys for many years, he did not just “come out of nowhere” and that he is working with very serious companies. He was especially offended by the fact that the “childish politicians suffering from ignorance” did not respond to the results of the survey taken by the “Populus” sociological center, meanwhile his results portray almost the same image-the frontrunners are the Republican Party and “Prosperous Armenia”. Adibekyan characterized that kind of conduct as “psychosis” and explained that it is little different from actual schizophrenia.
However, perhaps he shouldn’t be that offended that they are not saying anything to “Populus” and instead are telling him everything. After all, such a massive response shows that Mr. Adibekyan is popular. Besides that, the name “Populus”, unlike his last name, is not that appropriate for an eloquent play on words.