Adrian Delia’s trust rating plummets

Adrian Delia’s trust rating has plummeted in the wake of May’s election results and the internal party turmoil he has faced since, a MaltaToday survey found.

The Nationalist Party leader’s trust rating crashed back to 15.8% in a survey held a month after the disastrous showing at the polls.

The result is on par with the trust rating Delia registered in March, just before the warring factions in the PN declared a truce of sorts in the run-up to the election campaign.

In the last survey held a week before the European Parliament election, Delia registered a trust rating of 22.8%. He has experienced a seven-point drop since then.

The trust gap between Delia and Prime Minister Joseph Muscat stood at almost 37 points.

Muscat saw his trust rating increase by two points to 52.6% since the end-of-May survey, trumping Delia across all age groups and regions.

The Prime Minister retained his strength among those who voted for the Labour Party in the 2017 general election with 96.2% re-confirming their trust in him.

Delia is less fortunate among Nationalist Party voters in the 2017 election. The PN leader only managed to capture the trust of 38.8% of those who voted for his party in 2017.

A more worrying factor is that 50.3% of PN voters said they trusted none of the two leaders and 5.8% trusted Muscat.

Muscat enjoyed an absolute majority of trust across all age groups, with his strongest showing being among those aged between 51 and 65 where he scored 56.1%.

Delia’s best showing was among those aged 65 and over, where he scored a trust rating of 24.1%. His worst performance was among those aged under 35, where he registered a rating of 7.3%.

Among the under 35s, Muscat registered a trust rating of 52.3%.

Muscat soars in the south and Gozo

The regional results paint an even bleaker picture for Delia, confirming the outcome of the May elections that saw the PN lose ground in large swathes of the country.

Delia’s worst performance is in the South-Eastern region where he could only muster a trust rating of 6%.

His best performance was in the Western and Northern Harbour regions where he registered scores of 23.8% and 23.4%, respectively.

Muscat’s trust rating shot up in the South-Eastern and Southern Harbour regions in Malta, and impressively in Gozo. The Prime Minister registered a trust rating of 69.9%, 63.4% and 68% respectively in these three regions.

Muscat also scored a trust rating of 49.3% in the Northern Harbour region and 47.7% in the Western region.

The Prime Minister’s worst showing was in the Northern region where he only managed 29.9%. But this is also the region with the highest number of people who trusted none of the two leaders (61.9%).

It has to be noted that St Paul’s Bay, which is the largest locality in the Northern region, has been plagued by a lasting waste problem and lack of enforcement, which may have contributed to the disaffection with both political leaders.

Methodology

The survey was carried out between Tuesday 25 June and Monday 1 July. 653 respondents opted to complete the survey. Stratified random sampling based on gender, region and age was used to replicate the Maltese demographics. The estimated margin of error is 5% for a confidence interval of 95%.