The latest Megafon poll for Politiken and TV2 shows voters moving away from the Social Democrats again after a couple of weeks in which the he polls had seemed to indicate a turning point for the centre-left government.

According to the poll, the Social Democrats would garner 18.7 per cent of the vote if an election were held today, a drop of 1.1 percentage points compared to the November poll and a 6.1 percentage point drop on the election result. The poll is the worst result for the Social Democrats since June.

“Unsatisfactory,” retorts the Social Democratic Finance Spokesman John Dyrby Poulsen who suggests the drop in voter sympathy is the result of new economic forecasts suggesting lower growth and increasing unemployment over the next few months.

“I still believe we have the right policies. If we hadn’t protected employment it would have been even greater than it is at the moment and that would have been a disaster for the country. Politically we have to continue the long, hard grind and both growth and employment will increase. Then we can see whether voters reward us,” Dyrby Poulsen says.

The poll says an election now would give the centre-left a total of 78 seats in the 179 seat Folketing, with the centre-right in a clear majority with 97 seats.

The Liberals of former Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen would take 30.8 per cent of the vote as Parliament’s largest party by far. The poll also shows the Conservatives – the former Liberal coalition partner – on 2.8 per cent, a mere 0.8 percentage points from the electoral threshold.

“Of all of the parties, the Conservatives would rather be without opinion polls at the present time. Each new poll simply pours petrol on the bonfire that the Conservatives are currently lighting,” says Party and Voter Behaviour Researcher Sigge Winther Nielsen of Copenhagen University.

The poll is based on 980 responses from over-18s who were contacted between the 18th and 20th of December.

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