Party ratings: No change in support gap between Reform and EKRE
No significant change in support levels for any of Estonia's major political parties was seen in the past week according to a recent survey, with the gap between first-placed Reform and the Conservative People's Party of Estonia (EKRE) in second remaining static.
Support for the three coalition parties, Reform, Isamaa and the Social Democrats (SDE) combined stood at 46.8 percent, while 41.2 percent of respondents to the survey, compiled by Norstat on behalf of conservative think-tank the Institute for Societal Studies (MTÜ Ühiskonnauuringute Instituut), picked one of the two opposition parties – the Center Party and EKRE. The remainder would have chosen a non-parliamentary party – Eesti 200, the Estonian Greens, the Parempoolsed or TULE - or would have answered "don't know".
Last week was also the school break and may have brought a change in day-to-day routines for many of the respondents.
By party, just under a third, 32.6 percent, pledged their support to the Reform Party, the prime minister's party, 27.4 percent chose EKRE and 13.8 percent picked Center.
Reform's support saw a small drop of 0.5 percentage points on the preceding week, Norstat says, while Center (up by 0.6 percentage points) and EKRE (0.1 percentage points) both experienced fractional rises in their support.
The "top" three parties were followed by Eesti 200, which recently acquired a new leader in Lauri Hussar and which polled at 8.9 percent, ahead of the two junior coalition partners, Isamaa (7.3 percent) and SDE (6.9 percent).
Eesti 200 saw a negligible fall in support on the previous week, of 0.1 percentage points, SDE's rose by 0.4 percentage points and Isamaa's fell by 0.3 percentage points.
The Estonian Greens polled at 1.2 percent and the Parempoolsed, recently incorporated as a party, picked up 0.7 percent.
The graph below shows the relative changes for Estonia's current political parties, going back to early 2019 when Norstat started compiling its results in their current format (Key: Yellow = Reform, green = Center, black = EKRE, royal blue = Isamaa, red = SDE, light blue = Eesti 200, light green = Estonian Greens).
Norstat conducts its surveys on a weekly basis and aggregates them over a four-week period. The latest survey covers the period October 4 to October 31, and around 4,000 Estonian citizens of voting age were polled.
The next elections are to the Riigikogu, on March 5.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte, Barbara Oja
Source: Norstat
