Election Enters Final Week (Background)

By , 27 May 2018, 14:19 PM Politics
Election Enters Final Week (Background) JL Flanner

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STA, 27 May 2018 - The election campaign has reached the home stretch with only one week until voting day. Established parties and newcomers, which have fielded more than 1,600 candidates, have until Friday to convince voters to back them come 3 June. 

All our election coverage can be found here, while our profiles of the major parties are here.

The campaign, which officially began on 4 May, will end at midnight on Friday when the election blackout sets in. Campaigning is then prohibited until polls close at 7 PM on Sunday.

Parties will thus expected to come out in force this week to try and convince voters.

Most of them will hold conventions and rallies, with the Social Democrats (SD) counting on a visit by Andrea Nahles, the head of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), to give them some momentum in the final stretch. They will end the campaign with an event on Thursday.

Similarly, the Democrats (SDS), New Slovenia (NSi) and People's Party (SLS), will gather for a joint event on Wednesday under the auspices of the European People's Party (EPP).

Since these events will likely only serve to fortify their support among decided voters, the parties count on televised debates to court undecided voters.

Things already got pretty heated in previous debates, but they are expected to intensify further in parties' final efforts to get ahead before around 1.7 million voters have their say on Sunday.

Those who turn out will decide among 1,631 candidates fielded by 25 lists, including all parliamentary parties, to fill 88 seats in the National Assembly. The remaining two seats are reserved for the Italian and Hungarian minorities, which will decide among three and two candidates, respectively.

According to the polls, all parliamentary parties bar the party of former Prime Minister Alenka Bratušek will almost certainly make it to parliament, while most newcomers are unlikely to make it across the 4% threshold.

The Marjan Šarec List (LMŠ) is an exception, as it currently polls in second place, behind the SDS, which is firmly in the lead. The SD trails in third place.

But analysts say it is too soon to say anything about the final outcome, because many voters are still undecided.

According to the first tracking poll commissioned by the newspapers Dnevnik and Večer, the share of those who are undecided or would not tell their pick stands at 41%. The majority of polls puts the figure at between a quarter and a third of respondents.

Meanwhile, the share of women standing in the election stands at 44%, while the average age of the candidates is 50.6 years. As many as 68 incumbent MPs are hoping to return to parliament.

Voters will get the chance to pick their candidates at one of more than 3,000 polling stations, while they can also vote by mail or cast their vote early, between Tuesday and Thursday.

The first unofficial results will be revealed on Sunday evening and the new line-up of the National Assembly will be largely clear as soon as the polls close, when exit polls are revealed.

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