Ruling SYRIZA party gained little in the form of public opinion support despite the recent announcements by PM Alexis Tsipras that he would give 1.6 million pensioners a 13th bonus pension, according to MRB’s trends study. The poll showed opposition party New Democracy (ND) leading with 26.1% compared to SYRIZA’s 14.1% on the question of how the respondents intended to vote for. MRB had carried out a poll before the announcements which showed that ND had 29.1% support and SYRIZA 16.2%, revealing that the ruling party actually lost support, with the gap between the two parties marginally closing by a mere 1.5%. The first survey was carried out between December 2 and 9 prior to the Tsipras announcements, while the second one on December 10, after Tsipras had made his promises. The overall poll results before the announcements showed ND leading with 29.1%, followed by SYRIZA (16.2%). Extreme right Golden Dawn (GD) came in third with 8.3% of those polled expressing their intention to back the party, followed by Democratic Alignment (6.5%), the communist party (KKE) with 6.4%, Freedom Sailing- former Parliament president and SYRIZA MP Zoe Konstantopoulou’s party- 3.1%, and Centrists’ Union (3%). On the question of “who you consider to be the most suitable candidate to be MP” 19.3% responed in favour of current PM Alexis Tsipras, while 30.7% said they preferred ND President Kyriakos Mitsotakis. 31% said they believed the major opposition party could handle the country’s problems more effectively, compared to 15.6% who believed SYRIZA could. 56.2% assessed the PM’s announcements to susoend the rise in VAT in the Aegean islands and the bonus pension to the pensioners announced by Tsipras. A bleak figure for the government is that a whopping 92.9% believe that the situation in Greece was either going extremely bad or bad, while 93.5% judged the economic situation in Greece was either bad or very bad.