Nine days after the early election call, polls show that Justin Trudeau, interim Prime Minister of Canada and leader of the Liberal Party (PL), is losing popular support and they are starting to question his victory on September 20.
A poll carried out by the firm Abacus Data and made public on Tuesday indicates that the voting intention of the Trudeau Liberals has stagnated at 33%, a result they obtained in the previous general election of 2019, when the two main parties of the opposition continue to gain support.
The Conservative Party (PC), the largest in the opposition, gained 1 percentage point last week and is running with 29% of voting intention. For its part, the Social Democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) also gained 1 percentage point and now enjoys the support of 23% of those questioned.
Another problem for the Liberals is that the poll indicates that Trudeau’s image has deteriorated: 39% have a good image of Trudeau, 1 percentage point less than a week ago, and 42% say they have a bad impression of the interim prime minister.
The Abacus Data poll was conducted between August 17 and 22 among 2,000 Canadians and has a margin of error of 2.2%.
Another poll released today, conducted by Nanos, further reduces the Liberal lead. The poll, with a 2.8% margin of error, indicates that the Liberals are technically tied with the Conservatives at about 33% of popular support.
The average number of polls conducted so far paints a troubling scenario for Trudeau and the Liberals. The polls compiled by the Canadian public broadcaster, CBC, place the PL with 33.3% of voting intention while the Conservatives have 30.8% and the NDP 20.1%.
The sovereignist Bloque Quebequés (BQ), which appears only in the province of Quebec, would have a voting intention of 27.5% in the French-speaking territory, which translates into 6.4% at the national level.
Since Trudeau called an early election on August 15, the Liberals have lost 9 percentage points of support in the polls while the Conservatives have gained almost 2 percentage points.
Even with these numbers, and thanks to the peculiarities of Canada’s direct-suffrage electoral system, the Liberals could win the election comfortably, but without achieving the absolute majority that was Trudeau’s goal by calling a snap election just two years after the previous ones. elections.
At best for Trudeau, the Liberals could win 158 MPs in the lower house, which has 338 seats. The Conservatives would be content with 112, the NDP with 38 and the BQ with 29.
But several media outlets today said that among the liberals nervousness is starting to spread over the possibility that the PL will win another simple majority or even lose the election.
Several liberals have anonymously pointed out that the Trudeau campaign has so far failed to justify the need to dissolve Parliament and call an early election amid the fourth wave of the pandemic, damaging its image with Readership.
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