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Sunday, October 18, 2009

Hamas gaining popularity?

Ma'an reports on a JMCC poll that shows contradictory results from the last one I looked at from AWRAD.

According to this poll, Mahmoud Abbas' popularity has gone down a lot as a result of his Goldstone fiasco; Haniyeh's held steady:
The survey released on Sunday by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre (JMCC) indicates that if an election were held today, Abbas would receive just 16.8 percent of the vote, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh 16 percent. A similar percentage said they would vote for Fatah leader Marwan Barghouthi, who is currently in prison in Israel.

Public confidence in Abbas dropped to 12.1% from 17.8% in another JMCC poll in June. Confidence in Haniyeh held steady at 14.2%.

JMCC also reports that while Abbas’ popularity took a hit, “it seems that the approach of Fatah Leadership to distance itself from the PNA with regards to the Goldstone report helped Fatah in keeping its popularity ahead and more than Hamas’ popularity among the Palestinian public.”

The current poll shows that a 34.6% of the public still trusts Fatah compared with a 17.9% who said they trust Hamas, followed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) which received 3.7%, while Islamic Jihad received 2.3%.

(Google reports that the JMCC site is filled with malware, so I could not check the poll results directly; perhaps the wording of the questions is responsible for the diverse results.)