Edi Rama’s statement that PD will get as many votes as in 1997 immediately made the rounds of the media.
However, Eduart Zaloshnja, who conducts surveys, immediately reacted, opposing Edi Rama. He says that PD will get 40 mandates and not 25 as Rama said.
“During the speech at the Socialist National Assembly, Edi Rama declared: “In the next elections, the DP will hardly get more mandates than in 1997. Take note!”. He clarified that the SP knows how to read the mind of the people, not only because there are patronageists, but also because it has a proven scientific structure, which conducts monthly surveys of people’s opinions.
Rama does not publish the monthly polls conducted by this proven scientific structure, so that we can judge how well-founded his prediction is for the PD mandates in 2025 (in 1997, he received only 25 out of 140 mandates in total). However, I have published on September 4 a national survey that I conducted for the JAVANEWS portal, which I conducted with a sample of 1,805 respondents determined to vote as of today (1,003 within the country and 802 abroad – I reweighted the sample statistically, for represented as best as possible both the voters inside the country and those abroad).
The survey showed that, if the vote had been held on September 4, the PD would have secured 29.8% of the votes of the participants in the election (see the table below). It is impossible to accurately translate this percentage into the number of parliamentary mandates, because it must be conducted by a separate survey for each district. However, with some approximation, it can be calculated that the DP would have received about 40 parliamentary mandates, if the elections had been held on September 4.
Taking into account today’s figure of 40 mandates, it is very difficult to predict that the DP can go down to 25 mandates after 8 months…” says Zaloshnja.
