ND suffers double poll shock
Opposition New Democracy received a double poll shock yesterday. Not only did two new surveys give the Socialists’ candidate for Greece’s most highly populated prefecture a crushing lead over the conservatives’ man, but an ultra right-wing MP also appears to be doing better than ND’s Yiannis Tzanettakos. ND is expected to easily win the municipality of Athens in the October 13 municipal and regional elections. According to one of two surveys published in yesterday’s Eleftherotypia daily, 39.4 percent of voters in the Athens and Piraeus prefecture polled over the phone by Opinion from September 16-19 consider PASOK’s Fofi Yennimata best suited to govern the prefecture. Some 14.8 percent named ultra right-wing Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS) leader Giorgos Karadzaferis – a former ND deputy – while Tzanettakos, a 62-year-old journalist, came third at 13.7 percent. World War II resistance hero Manolis Glezos, an independent candidate backed by Synaspismos Left Coalition, came next – second to last, before Communist candidate Thanassis Pafilis – at 9.9 percent. Some 27.4 percent of respondents said the election concerned them «not at all,» and 27.3 percent «not much.» Yennimata, the 38-year-old daughter of 1980s Socialist icon Giorgios Yennimatas, is a PASOK MP for central Athens, having been elected for the first time in 2000. According to the poll, 40.4 percent of Athens and Piraeus voters expect her to win, while 20.1 percent named Tzanettakos. Yennimata also led in popularity (62.8 percent), followed by Glezos at 50 and Karadzaferis at 31.5 percent. Another Opinion poll conducted from September 9-18 found that 33.3 percent of central Athens residents would vote for Yennimata, 17.5 percent for Tzannetakos, 8.4 percent for Karadzaferis, 5.2 percent for Glezos and 2.2 percent for Pafilis.
