President Volodymyr Zelensky would still trounce his major opponent and predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, if elections were to be held this weekend, according to a new poll.
A survey published by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Razumkov Center on June 14 found that Zelensky would get 31% of votes while Poroshenko would get only 18.6%. The gap between the two politicians’ levels of support has narrowed slightly since the 2019 presidential elections, when Zelensky won with 30% of the vote against Poroshenko’s 16%.
The two think tanks jointly conducted nationwide polls of Ukrainians’ political preferences from May 14-19. Sociologists questioned 2,020 people all across the country except the occupied territories of Crimea and the Donbas. The theoretical sampling error does not exceed 2.3%.
Other presidential candidates trailed behind the top two.
Yuriy Boyko, co-chairman of the pro-Kremlin Opposition Platform – For Life Party, placed third with 12.7% of votes, just one point below his 2019 election result. Yulia Tymoshenko, leader of the Batkivshchyna party and former prime minister of Ukraine, got 11.7%, almost two points less than in the 2019 election.
The popularity of Zelensky and Poroshenko closely reflects the popularity of their parties.
If parliamentary elections were held soon, Zelensky’s Servant of the People party would get 28% of the total votes. This is much worse than the party’s performance in the polls before the 2019 parliamentary election, when it got the support of 43% of the electorate.
Meanwhile, 18.6% of Ukrainians would vote for European Solidarity. In 2019, support for Poroshenko’s party was weaker, at 8%.
The latest survey predicted that Opposition Platform – For Life would get 14.1% of votes and Batkivshchyna would get 12.6%. In the 2019 election, the parties got 13% and 8%, respectively.
