NABLUS, West Bank (AFP) — The Fatah faction of Mahmud Abbas would defeat the Hamas movement at the polls, said a survey out on Wednesday, as the Palestinian president threatened to call snap elections in the new year.
The opinion poll by An-Najah University in the West Bank city of Nablus found that the secular Fatah would take 31.4 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections against 14.4 percent for the Islamists Hamas.
The remainder of those who specified a choice were shared among smaller parties.
In a presidential election, 31.4 percent of respondents said they would vote for the Fatah candidate and 13.4 percent said they would vote for the Islamist.
A full 15.9 percent of respondents said they did not know how they would vote in either presidential or parliamentary elections.
A total of 19.9 percent of respondents said they would not vote in a presidential election and 19.4 percent said they stay away from parliamentary elections.
The opinion poll was published three days after Abbas warned that he will call snap parliamentary and presidential elections if Hamas does not rejoin reconciliation talks aimed at healing the rift in Palestinian ranks sparked by the Islamists' seizure of Gaza in June 2007.
But the research on which it was based was undertaken before the Palestinian president made his threat in a televised speech on Sunday.
Opinion polls conducted before the last Palestinian parliamentary elections, held in January 2006, consistently underestimated the Hamas vote and none predicted the Islamists's upset victory.
Hamas has rejected Abbas's threat to call snap parliamentary elections, insisting he has no right to dissolve the legislature before its term ends in January 2010.
But the An-Najar poll found that 51 percent of respondents said it would still be possible to go ahead with the elections regardless, while 44.1 percent thought it would not. The rest ventured no opinion.
A full 61.8 percent of respondents blamed Hamas for the rift between the two largest parties with 22.2 percent blaming Fatah.
The poll was conducted among a representative sample of 1,365 Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza. The pollsters gave a margin of error of three percentage points.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
