Opinion polls indicate Palestinians’ support for the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and a failure of Western efforts to portray the uprisings as secular.

A survey conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD), published on February 2, showed a bulky 74 percent of the Palestinians support pro-democracy protests in Tunisia, which toppled President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali after 23 years in office.

Some 18 percent of the participants opposed the Tunisian revolution as negative, whereas eight percent did not have a special opinion about the historic move, reported the poll conducted on January 19-20 this year on 1,200 Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

A separate phone survey conducted in late January by Paris Match institute showed that 35 percent of people in France predicted an Islamic leader to replace the ousted pro-Western rulers in Egypt and Tunisia.

Twenty-seven percent of the 2,362 respondents did not expect a major change in the foreign policies of the new governments.

On the contrary, another 27 percent expressed optimism that the revolutions would serve as a start point for the liberation of Arab nations from Western influence.

More than half of the 1,648 Russians interviewed February 1-3 by a domestic media studies institute predicted that an Islamic establishment would be formed in Egypt.

Twenty percent did not speculate any major changes at the end of the day, 19 percent predicted a democratic government while six percent did not have an idea about the North African nation’s future state.

On Friday, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned after 18 consecutive days of continued protests against his three-decade-long grip on power.

The former general, however, transferred power to the country’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces despite widespread popular calls for a civilian government in the country that has been under a military rule over the past 20 years.

(Press TV)