Majority Of Nationalists Believe Their Leader Is Corrupt, According To Lovin Malta’s Survey
PN leader Adrian Delia seems to be in the wrong political party. More than half of PN voters believe he is corrupt and two-thirds of them did not agree with his decision to ask former leader Simon Busuttil to step down following the Egrant inquiry findings, according to a scientific survey by Lovin Malta. Meanwhile, Delia’s trust rating among PN voters is almost equivalent to his trust rating among PL voters: extremely poor.
Here are the numbers in more detail, from a survey conducted a few days after the Egrant inquiry was released. The survey was conducted by research company Esprimi through a mix of online responses and random telephone calls, using a base of 1,100 respondents.
Trust in the two party leaders
Asked how much they trusted the two leaders of Malta’s biggest political parties, 34.7% of respondents gave full marks to Prime Minister Joseph Muscat while only 5.7% did the same for Adrian Delia, a difference of 29 points between the two leaders.
Rate of trust, 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest
Much of the mistrust towards Delia is coming from within his own party. While 69.6% of respondents who voted Labour in 2017 gave Muscat the highest trust rating, only 10.8% of PN voters gave the same to Delia. A whopping 41% of PN voters gave the lowest possible trust score to Delia, compared to just 2.75% of PL voters giving the same to Muscat.
Perhaps most significantly, the number of PN voters who say they do not trust Delia is now almost equivalent to the number of PL voters who share that sentiment, with 45.1% of PL voters (compared to 41% of PN voters) giving Delia the lowest marks when it comes to trust.
Trust rating among PN voters
Trust rating among PL voters
On the plus side for Delia, PL voters trust him more than PN voters trust Muscat. In fact, among PL voters, Delia gets an average score of 2.73, while among PN voters, Muscat scores an average of 2.03.
Is Adrian Delia corrupt?
Worse still, more PN voters than PL voters believe Delia is corrupt. Asked whether they believed Delia was corrupt, 41.6% of all respondents said yes, 24% said no and 34.4% said they were not sure. But among PN voters in 2017, the perception is even worse. A whopping 50.3% of PN voters believe Delia is corrupt while only 23.5% do not and 26.3% are not sure.
Among Labour voters, only 33.9% believe Delia is corrupt, while 38.4% are unsure and 27.6% believe he is clean.
Was Adrian Delia right to ask Simon Busuttil to suspend himself from PN group?
Interestingly, Delia’s call for Busuttil to step down after the Egrant report was supported by 59.6% of respondents, but the majority of PN voters (64.7%) disagreed. The score was pushed up by the 91.7% of PL voters who supported this call wholeheartedly.
More findings from the Lovin Malta survey, including the other corruption ratings, will be published in the coming days.
Delia was elected party leader last year after a fraught internal contest during which now-assassinated journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia accused him of laundering money from a Soho prostitution ring. Delia sued Caruana Galizia but dropped the case soon after she was killed.
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