The General Liberation and Development Party (ABOP) states that the IDOS polls have shown that the party has experienced 100 percent growth in five years. According to the IDOS poll of February 2015, the ABOP accounted for four percent of the votes in Paramaribo. The IDOS statistics now indicate that the ABOP has grown by just over one hundred percent in Paramaribo, from four percent in 2015 to 8.3 percent in 2020.
The combination won 9,207 votes in Paramaribo during the 2015 elections. This means that around 7.8 percent of the citizens (113,515 valid votes) then voted for the ABOP in Paramaribo. The difference between the actual election results of May 2015 and the IDOS poll of February 2015 was therefore at least 3.7 percent or 4000 votes. A significant difference, says the ABOP.
But the IDOS polls are just a snapshot and do not lead to the final election result, but a possible under-representation of the ABOP voters and can give a distorted picture of the elections, the ABOP states. According to the number of registered voters that the party currently has in Paramaribo, the second seat has already arrived. In 2020 the ABOP in Paramaribo aims for the third and fourth seat.
The ABOP participated for the first time in the elections in 1996, but did not win any seats. The first seat came in 2005, when party chairman Ronnie Brunswijk joined the National Assembly (DNA) in the Marowijne district. During the 2010 elections, the party won three parliamentary seats with 6,000 votes.
In 2015, the ABOP took part in the elections nationwide for the first time and won a total of five seats across four districts. At the 2015 elections, not only maroons, but also prominent Javanese, Creoles, Mixed, Hindustanis, and Indigenous Surinamese were of all sorts of beliefs and backgrounds on the candidate lists. According to the official counts, the ABOP received 25,000 votes in 2015. This is a growth of more than three hundred percent compared to 2010.
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