Yanukovych ahead in the polls, has slim lead over Yushchenko (10/17/04)

Yanukovych ahead in the polls, has slim lead over Yushchenko

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Two weeks prior to election day, one of the final polls allowed to be published prior to the presidential vote of October 31 showed that Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych had taken the lead over Viktor Yushchenko in the race for the presidency.

A Democratic Initiatives Foundation rolling poll conducted on October 9-10 showed that the Ukrainian prime minister now maintained a slim 34 percent to 31.6 percent lead over Mr. Yushchenko whose campaigning abilities had been limited in the last weeks as he fought to recuperate from the effects of a mysterious poisoning.

Ilko Kucheriv, director of DIF, said the lead change at the close of the presidential horse race was the result of an effective although quite populist strategy used by Mr. Yanukovych in the last weeks to appeal to older voters and Communist Party sympathizers by dramatically raising pensions and calling for official status for the Russian language in Ukraine while also promising dual citizenship with Russia for those Ukrainians who would opt for such.

Mr. Yanukovych's ratings have risen gradually over the course of the year from about 16 percent in January, but have spiked since the end of September after he began to assert a more Communist-friendly policy in his appeal to voters.

The Ukrainian prime minister has watched as his new strategy has resulted in a rise in popularity of nearly 7 percentage points since September 22, a period of slightly more than three weeks.

Mr. Yanukovych's increased popularity has come at the expense of Communist Party Chairman Petro Symonenko, whose ratings have plummeted from 7.4 percent to 3.4 percent in the same time span, and Socialist Party leader Oleksander Moroz, who has come down to a 4.8 percent rating from the 6 percent popularity level he retained on September 22.

None of the other 19 candidates that will be listed on the October 31 presidential election ballot managed to register even 1 percent support, with Progressive Socialist Party candidate Natalia Vitrenko coming closest at 0.9 percent.

Perhaps most importantly, however, 21.6 percent of the respondents said they still hadn't decided for whom they would cast their ballot. Unusually the number of undecided voters has risen since the beginning of October.

In a second survey on how a run-off between Mr. Yanukovych and Mr. Yushchenko might look, the prime minister also would get the nod, according to the DIF poll, by a margin of 40.8 percent to 39.4 percent.

The margin of error for both surveys was +/- 2 percent.

The September 10-11 DIF poll was to be the last one it would publish before Election Day because Ukrainian election law forbids the publication of election survey results in the last two weeks prior to an election so as not to influence the thinking of individual voters.

| Home Page |