Party ratings: Reform maintains support gap over EKRE

The coalition Reform Party's support gap over the opposition Conservative People's Party of Estonia (EKRE) remains intact, while Isamaa has widened the gap over the Social Democrats (SDE), according to a recent survey.
In the latest weekly poll conducted by Norstat on behalf of the conservative think-tank the Institute for Societal Studies (MTÜ Ühiskonnauuringute Instituut), 47 percent of respondents pledged their support for one of the three coalition parties: Reform, Isamaa or SDE, while 41.2 percent picked one of the two opposition parties, EKRE and Center. The remaining respondents would have picked either a non-parliamentary party or would have answered "don't know".
By party, Reform, the prime minister's party, polled at 32.9 percent on its own, EKRE picked up 27.1 percent and Center 14.1 percent.
These three are followed by the non-parliamentary Eesti 200 (8.8 percent), Isamaa (7.9 percent) and SDE (6.2 percent).
Eesti 200's support fell by 0.1 percentage points over the past week, while Isamaa's rose by 0.6 percentage points; SDE's conversely fell by 0.7 percentage points.
Should the Riigikogu elections take place as of now, Reform would win 37 seats, up from its current level of 34, while EKRE would win 30 seats, 11 more than the party holds at present. Center would obtain 14 seats, not much more than half its current 26, Eesti 200 would win eight seats – its first ever Riigikogu seats in fact – and Isamaa (seven seats down from 12) and SDE (five seats, down from 10) would both lose mandates.
The actual general election takes place on March 5 2023, a little over 16 weeks from now (preceded by several days' advance voting).
Between this week and last week, according to Norstat, no major changes were experienced in support for any of the major plitical parties – the gap between Reform and EKRE has remained at the 5-6 percentage-point range for three weeks, while Center's support, which fell to a record low a fortnight ago, has stablilized since then, Nosrstat says.
SDE has seen somewhat of a trend towards a fall since late September, when the party was ahead of its coalition partner Isamaa; now it is 1.7 percentage points behind.
The graph below shows the relative support levels for all the major political parties in Estonia, going back to the start of 2019 when Norstat commenced compiling its polls 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 polls on a weekly basis and aggregates them over a four-week period. The latest poll covers the period October 11 to November 5 and polled just over 4,000 Estonian citizens of voting age.
Norstat claims a margin of error in proportion to the overall support of the party in question, so for instance Reform as the most-supported party sees an error margin of +/1 1.46 percent compared with +/- 0.75 percent for SDE.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte
Source: Norstat