SDP Trails its Leader With 7% of the Votes

Adrian Nastase is the best possible option for a candidate to the Presidency the ruling Social Democrat Party has. The Metro Media Transilvania polling institute made the finding through an "empirical research" conducted nationally, between 22 July and 1 August, on 1,105 people. div class=smalltext>By DANA PICIU

Vasile Dancu, who coordinated the research [and also heads the Executive’s Department for Strategic Studies] said yesterday that Nastase got the first position with 61.2% of the votes, with Mircea Geoana [minister of foreign affairs] coming second, with 49% of the votes.

The next in line came Mugur Isarescu [Governor of the National Bank of Romania], with 20% votes, Ioan Mircea Pascu [minister of defense], with 9.3% votes, Miron Mitrea [minister of transportation], with 6.4% votes, Nicolae Vacaroiu, SDP senator, with 5.7% votes, Dan Ioan Popescu [minister for the economy], with 5.5% votes, and Radu of Hohenzollern-Veringen [son-in-law of former King Michael I], with 3.4% votes.

Nastase is deemed to have the biggest influence on drawing votes for the party, getting 7% more votes than the SDP. Nastase also leads when compared to the presidential candidates of the other parties. However, Nastase is still at fewer than 50% of the votes. If Geoana would be the SDP presidential candidate, the party would get 1.4% fewer votes, and if Isarescu would be the candidate, SDP would get 6.4% less votes.

The polling also showed that SDP voters would chose Nastase with 88.8% votes, over Geoana, with 6.7%. The voters for the Alliance would go for Nastase at the Presidency with 26.1% of the votes, and give Geoana 24% of the votes. This time, the voters for the Greater Romania Party would prefer Geoana over Nastase, giving the first one 30.4% of the votes, and the second 27.7% of the votes. The voters for the Romanian Humanist Party would go with 46.2% of votes for Nastase, and 23.1% votes for Geoana.
The voters of the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania would vote 46.7% for Nastase and 11.1% for Geoana.