Thanks to Vox Populi contributor Dr. Andrija Henjak at the University of Zagreb, we can present our poll of polls for the first round of the Croatian presidential election before the election night drama would unfold.
While the official campaign period only started in early December with the announcement of which 11 candidates qualified to enter the ballot, the set of relevant candidates was correctly identified by the polling companies around mid-June 2019. Hence we chose mid-June as the starting date for our summary chart. Apparently, none of the candidates is likely to clinch victory in the first round on 22 December, when an absolute majority is required. Most probably the incumbent center-right president, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović and the former social democratic prime minister Zoran Milanović will make it to the runoff on 5 January – unless Miroslav Škoro, a pop-singer, radical nationalist, and former MP of Grabar-Kitarović’s own party, HDZ, causes an upset.
As the chart shows, it was the rise of Škoro in the polls that eliminated the impressive lead that Grabar-Kitarović initially had over Milanovic. For the last ten days or so, polls varied quite a bit about Škoro’s standing. Should he finish third, we would expect his voters to give Grabar-Kitarović an edge over Milanovic in the second round. But all bets are off if Škoro himself makes it to the runoff. Most polls already featured questions about whom the voters may support in the second round under various pairings of the three top candidates, and the results suggests that the maverick independent may well prevail over either Milanovic or Grabar-Kitarović.
Further technical information about the surveys, information sources and the rating of the other candidates can be found in our Excel data base.
Vox Populi 