Sep 19 - How Would Gibraltar Vote? Chronicle Launches Opinion Poll
The Gibraltar Chronicle is conducting a political opinion poll which has been distributed to addresses across Gibraltar. The survey comes hot on the heels of the GSLP-Liberal administration’s celebration of 1,000 days in office and the Chief Minster’s comment there were around 500 days left before the next general election. It is the first opinion poll conducted by the local daily since the GSLP-Libs won the election in December 2011.
We spoke to Chronicle Editor, Dominique Searle, about why he thought it was the right time to conduct the poll.
“With possibly a year or maybe less for an election, we felt a poll was overdue. Actually, we hoped to do it in early June but the self-adhesive ballot was delayed and it got too close to summer when we had them so we held until the 'summer party' was over,” he says.
The Chronicle expects results from the 1,000 question slips to come in over the next two weeks but Mr Searle warns that postal ballots normally struggle to achieve a 30% response rate.
“We will release the result as soon as we have reached the point where we cannot realistically expect more returns,” he explains.
The ballot paper includes several questions ranging from voting intentions to the handling of relations with Spain and, interestingly, it also asks whom voters would like to see as Gibraltar’s Chief Minister.
Among the options available are, as expected, the current incumbent Fabian Picardo, Liberal Party leader Dr Joseph Garcia, Joe Bossano, the Leader of the Opposition Daniel Feetham, his deputy Damon Bossino and Sir Peter Caruana, who is not expected to stand for election next year. However, the ballot also includes the names of Keith Azopardi and Peter Montegriffo, both of whom have retired from frontline politics.
YGTV asked Mr Searle why he chose these political figures.
“In the case of Keith Azopardi, whose party (PDP) is defunct, the question really is which block, if any, might yet see him as someone they want in leading politics. The main question is the party vote. But this is a newspaper poll taking up many of the views that go about. We tried to include the main political figures that people talk about when considering politics. Who knows who might or might not stand at the next election as events unfold in coming months? Logically, the main interest in that question on people rather than parties will be a chance to demythologise much of the debate,” he says.
When it comes to determining the electorate’s preferences regarding the current leaders and other prominent party members, Mr Searle says the aim is to gauge whether Fabian Picardo and Daniel Feetham have cemented their respective leaderships with the party faithful.
“With the Government I imagine the question will be how far Fabian Picardo has consolidated his leadership and image in relation to his predecessor Joe Bossano (or whether the result tells us). With the Opposition, especially one that has the challenge of recovering from loss after 16 years in power, the situation is not really different here to that in UK. You may recall the parades of alternative Tory leaders before we got to David Cameron. The question here is: has Danny Feetham consolidated his leadership or are GSD supporters still not clear where they are going?” he concludes.
