Urecheanu calls BOP results 'an electoral hoax by Barbarosie'

With 2.6 percent garnered in a traditional opinion poll released a week and a half before the parliamentary elections on July 29, the Moldova Noastra Alliance (AMN) is seen surprisingly unlikely to clear the 5 percent needed to enter Parliament. But AMN's leader Serafim Urecheanu doesn't trust the results of the Public Opinion Barometer (BOP). While releasing the BOP on Monday, Arcadie Barbarosie of the Public Policy Institute, which commissioned the poll, argued the AMN's score has been declining since the 2005 parliamentary elections. “It's probably because the AMN hasn't reviewed its policies”, he explained. Urecheanu begs to differ: “The BOP results are an electoral hoax by Barbarosie. The diminution in our party's score is not at all accidental. But even if they wish it were so, we poll increasingly more with each election”, said the leader of the Moldova Noastra Alliance, which gained 9.77 percent in the latest elections on April 5. “I suggest Barbarosie and his team quit the polling business if the AMN enters Parliament”, declared Urecheanu. Political analyst Igor Botan, who is the director of the Participatory Democracy Association ADEPT and concurrently one of the BOP's jury members, also sees the AMN among the prospective parliamentary parties. “If we compare the results of the recently released Vox Populi poll and those of the BOP, we see some intercalating results regarding the AMN, so I think this party has a chance of success”, said Botan. The Public Opinion Barometer was conducted between June 26 and July 10 on a sample of 1,534 persons from 115 locations, except the Transnistrian region. The error margin is 2.5 percent. The BOP was carried out by CBS-AXA and commissioned by the Public Policy Institute.