While PN Celebrates New Voting Survey, This Is The Worrying Reality For The Opposition
Judging by the reaction of the Nationalist Party’s media and some of its MPs to yesterday’s political survey, one could easily be led to believe that the tide has finally started to turn in favour of the PN and its leader Adrian Delia.
The survey, published by It-Torċa, shows the gap between the Labour Party and the PN has gone down from 28.9% in November to 17.5% now.
“The road is long, but Delia is leaving an impact and is starting to make progress, and this result calls for cautious optimism about the PN and its leader’s successes,” was the assessment of PN presenter and MEP candidate Frank Psaila.
But what do the numbers really show?
The latest survey indicates that 46.6% of the Maltese public intends to vote Labour in the next election, while 28.9% intends to vote PN, and the rest are either undecided, don’t intend to vote, or plan to vote for a small party. This can be extrapolated into an election victory for Labour with a huge margin of some 60,000 votes.
And this is where things must be taken into a bit of perspective.
By all means, Delia’s PN has registered some progress since November, when It-Torċa forecast a ridiculously massive Labour lead of 75,000 votes.
However, November’s survey had come hot on the heels of last summer’s bitter and divisive PN leadership campaign, meaning several PN voters who had backed Delia’s rival Chris Said were likely still refusing to throw their weight behind the elected leader. Now that the PN’s open warfare has considerably cooled down and Delia’s internal critics have started to get in line, it is only natural for those voters to start to warm up to the new party leader.
It-Torċa’s survey makes it quite clear that Delia is simply recapturing lost ground and not making significant inroads amongst people who had voted Labour in last year’s election.
The survey includes a trust barometer between the two leaders, in which 47.2% of respondents said they trusted Prime Minister Joseph Muscat the most, while only 22.9% opted for Delia. In a resounding show of faith in the Prime Minister, every single Labour voter sampled in the survey said they trusted Muscat more than Delia, while only 72.5% of PN voters said likewise about their leader.
At 17.5% behind Labour, Delia’s PN is still quite some way behind where it was under his predecessor Simon Busuttil. The final 2017 election gap between PL and PN stood at 11.36%, a result no survey had managed to predict – although It-Torċa came closest with a forecast 9% margin.
It is also worth noting that Delia has not yet managed to get as far as Simon Busuttil’s lowest ever trust rating (26.3%), let alone start eating into Muscat’s trust.
With only 15 months to go until Delia’s first test as PN leader in the MEP and local council elections, these numbers should be seriously worrying the strategists at Dar Centrali. All signals are pointing to the biggest ever loss for the Nationalist Party.
Is there any way Adrian Delia can turn the numbers around in his favour?
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