Alpha Research poll: Bulgarian President Radev has 57% approval rating
Five months after taking office in January 2017, Bulgarian head of state President Roumen Radev has an approval rating of 57 per cent, according to opinion polling agency Alpha Research.
The agency’s Boryana Dimitrova told Bulgarian television channel Nova Televizia on June 26 that only 12 per cent of those polled did not approve of the president.
Radev became Bulgaria’s fifth democratically-elected president after winning the November 2016 elections on a ticket backed by the opposition socialists. The former Bulgarian Air Force commander’s victory over the candidate of Boiko Borissov’s GERB prompted Borissov to resign as head of government, paving the way for the March 2017 parliamentary elections.
The Alpha Research-Nova Televizia poll was done between June 12 and 22 among 1024 adult Bulgarians and is the first done by the agency since the third Boiko Borissov government took office in early May.
Borissov has a 32.2 per cent approval rating, followed by Krassimir Karakachanov (co-leader of the nationalist United Patriots minority partner in the Borissov government, in which Karakachanov is Defence Minister and Deputy Prime Minister) at 28.4 per cent, and opposition Bulgarian Socialist Party leader Kornelia Ninova at 27.3 per cent.
Borissov’s coalition Cabinet had an approval rating of 23 per cent.
In line with the trends of recent years, the level of confidence in Bulgaria’s National Assembly is low. It has an approval rating of a mere 15 per cent. However, the disapproval rating of the current Parliament is, at 39 per cent, lower than the 57 per cent disapproval rating that its predecessor had at its close.
Approval of the Prosecutor-General and the judiciary, which for years has been gravitating around the same low levels, remains extremely weak, according to the Alpha Research poll.
The survey found that 50 per cent approved Bulgaria’s entry into Schengen. At the same time, very few people are convinced of the extent to which the country meets the criteria for Schengen membership. Just 24 per cent of those polled thought that Bulgaria was coping as an external border of the EU, while all of three per cent thought that Bulgaria was affirming the rule of law and two per cent thought it was dealing with corruption.
