By Helena Bedwell

Two months of street protests have raised the approval rating of a political party led by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, whom the opposition seeks to force from office, a poll shows.

The approval rating of Saakashvili’s National Movement Party rose 1 percentage point from March to 37 percent in the poll, more than twice as much as the nearest opposition party.

The poll of 1,200 Georgians was conducted May 1-9 by Washington- based research firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.

Among the former Soviet republic’s opposition parties, the Alliance for Georgia, led by former United Nations envoy Irakli Alasania, received 16 percent approval, followed by Giorgi Targamadze’s Christian Democrats with 15 percent. All other parties polled in single digits. The poll had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

The opposition has held daily demonstrations in the capital Tbilisi since April 9, calling for Saakashvili’s resignation and new elections. They blame him for Georgia’s defeat in a war with Russia last August over the separatist region of South Ossetia that caused about $1 billion in damage to the economy, and say he has clamped down on democracy and freedom of speech.

Source: www.bloomberg.com

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