MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Caruana would win fourth consecutive election, says poll

Caruana leds poll for General Election

Gibraltar Social Democrats would be returned to power with a comfortable 17-18 point lead if an election were held now, according to the results of an opinion poll conducted by marketing and PR company Copywrite Ltd.

In what would be a two-horse race the GSD obtained 57.38% while the official Opposition GSLP/Liberals scored 38.88% of the vote. The fringe parties would be wiped out, with Keith Azopardi's PDP obtaining 2.56% and Others just 1.18%. The full result including 'don't knows' and spoilt ballots that were excluded from the above computation (as would be the case in an actual general election), was GSD 54.54%, GSLP/LIB 36.95%, PDP 2.43%, others 1.13%, don't knows 4.58%, spoilt ballots 0.37%. The poll gives the ruling GSD party a lead of 17.59% or 18.50% excluding the 'don't knows' and the Spoilt Papers. The poll results have been made public last week. Copywrite explained the methodology used in the poll and said it had been carried out on behalf of a commercial client. A company spokesman said: "Every 5th voter on the 2003 electoral role was sent a questionnaire, so in total 3704 (20% of the electorate) were sent out. Included was a prepaid envelope for the return of the questionnaire. A time period of 2 weeks was given for the questionnaires to be returned. 1069 questionnaires were returned, representing a 28,86% rate on questionnaires sent out or 5.77% of the total electorate. The question in the poll was: "Which party would you want to see in government after the next general elections?" (Gibraltar Chronicle)