Portuguese General Election

[Insula Dei]

What are opinion polls at? The Socialist government getting ransacked, repeatedly ravaged and thrown in the mud without an afterthought by a band of plundering Mongolian warriors, I presume?

[Insula Dei]

Hmmm, about what 1991 looked like, only with the PS being the incumbent this time. While this is a serious kicking, it's not an end of the party style result like 1985 (BTW the 1987 no confidence vote must really have been a 'turkeys voting for an early christmas'-style event, just reading the Wikipedia article is a major wtf about what the PRD and the CDS thought they were doing).  The difference seems to be the PSD doing ever so slightly worse than back then. Or else it's like 2005 in reverse. Anyway, if my uninformed wikipedia-based guesstimate isn't too far off that'd make 120-130 PSD to 65-80 PS, or am I wrong?

Another unrelated remark about this is that while leftwing (government) parties have been taking a kicking in Europe troughout the crisis, we haven't actually seen any complete meltdowns, now have we? Labour got teh best result for a defeated government since, what, 1974? The SPD got kicked out of government vehemently, but the CDU also is hurting now. The Dutch PvdA in fact got punished for its role in government by coming in a close second in an important election. And the PS seems to be on course for a heavy, yet within the range of the normal, defeat. This is not to mention those parties who were lucky enough to profit from the depression's impact on thei national government (Irish Labour, the French PS, the Wallonia PS to some degree) Seems more like people flocking around what they perceive to be stability, than a Great Depression GOP-style reallignment against us. Anyone else with thoughts on this?

[Insula Dei]

The PS winning this election, albeit narrowly, would be quite the upset

[Insula Dei]

New Polls for Portugal

INTERCAMPUS (12 May 2011)

PS - 36.8%
PSD - 33.9%
CDS-PP - 13.4%
CDU - 7.4%
BE - 6.0%

Marktest (10 May 2011)

PS - 33.4% 
PSD - 39.7%
CDS-PP - 9.0% 
CDU - 6.5%
BE - 4.8%


Normally INTERCAMPUS is the better institute for Polls. It will be a close result and nobody can say who wins. 13,4 % for the CDS-PP seems a little bit to much. In the last years the CDS-PP was underpolled, maybe this time overpolled

I can't understand how two polls conducted almost at the same time can diverge so much. Either one of them is crap, or both are, or portuguese politics are especially random.
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Probably one of the joys of being a relatively small country noone outside really cares about that much. Flemish polls are worse than this.