The PSOE would win the elections today with an advantage of 4.5 points over the PP. This is what the September barometer from the Center for Sociological Studies (IEC) chaired by the socialist Jose Felix Tezanos. The party led by the President of the Government, Pedro Sanchezwould get 33% of the vote, while the PP would only collect 28.5%. The distance between the two parties is two points greater than that revealed by the organization’s July survey.
Vox appears in the barometer as the third force with a voting intention of 13.1%. The party of Santiago Abascal It increases by almost one point compared to the previous barometer. Two months ago, the CIS estimated that Vox would have received 12.2% of the votes.
The organization also reflected an increase in Sumar. The party founded by the second vice-president of the Government, Yolanda Diazprogresses by more than one point, going from 6.6% to 7.8% of the votes. The other side of the coin is Podemos, which falls by 4 tenths: the purple formation goes from an estimate of votes of 4% to 3.6%.
The professional forger is placed above the nationalist parties Alvise PerezThe CIS estimates its support at 2.9%. This is an increase of barely two tenths compared to the data published by the organization in July.
The Catalan pro-independence groups would obtain a similar result. While ERC would obtain 1.4% of the votes, Junts would obtain 1.3%. On the other hand, the CEI grants Bildu 1.1% of the votes. This result would place those of Arnaldo Otegi above the other Basque nationalist force, the PNV, which would only reach 0.9%.
The Tezanos bias
Tezanos began his term as president of the Centre for Sociological Research in 2018. The sociologist from Santander has been affiliated with the PSOE since 1973. Between the 80s and 90s, he held different positions within the socialist formation. Before his arrival at the CEI, he was secretary of studies and programs of the PSOE of Pedro Sánchez.
Experts agree that there is a favorable trend towards the left after the last elections. Of the 42 elections that have taken place since Tezanos chaired the CEI, 41 of them have produced a better result than the one he finally obtained at the polls. So much so that in some of them, the result of the sum of the left-wing parties was four points lower than what the public body estimated.
The last failure of the CEI was the European elections. On the last day that the surveys could be published, the Centre for Sociological Research named the PSOE as the leading force in the Spanish delegation to the European Parliament, while it was the PP that obtained the most votes and therefore the most seats, when it comes to single-district elections. The CEI was wrong in all the ranges it gave to the parties.
Tezanos declared himself a “victim” of a “lynching” by PP representatives. The president of the CEI had to appear last week before the Constitutional Commission of Congress, during which he was held responsible for the “manifest bias” that the PP denounces and that exists with regard to the CEI.
In this intervention, he admitted that “it is true that in the CEI surveys there is generally a tendency to estimate more the vote of the sumar and the left in general.” “There are more voting intentions,” said the former senior socialist official, “than what finally reaches the polls.”
“I think it has a lot to do with the power of a certain media apparatus that obviously supports you and tries to dissuade this progressive electorate from going to the polls,” he mused, pointing directly to the press.
