MONTREAL – Pauline Marois has bounced back – big time.
Practically written off a month ago because of internal party turmoil and her failure to connect with voters, Marois and her Parti Québécois have rebounded in public opinion, a new poll shows.
And it has come at the expense of François Legault’s Coaltion Avenir Québec which continues to plunge the more Quebecers look at what it has to offer. After leading the other parties for weeks, the CAQ has now slipped into third place in voter intentions.
Premier Jean Charest’s Liberals meanwhile are stagnating with voter dissatisfaction in his government still very high. It’s unclear today that he would have the momentum now to call a spring election with these numbers.
According to the latest public opinion poll conducted by the CROP firm for La Presse, support for the PQ is up nine percentage points from last month (21 per cent in Janurary to 30 per cent today).
And Marois – who earned the nickname the “concrete woman,” for having survived her own party’s turmoil – is once again scoring high among Quebecers on the poll question of who would be the best premier.
She now scores 19 per cent in the category compared with 21 per cent for Legault and 21 per cent for Charest.
Here are the poll’s overall numbers. The big three parties are still relatively close.
While the PQ is at 30 per cent in voter intentions, the Liberals are at 29 per cent and the CAQ 26 per cent after distribution of undecided voters.
For the CAQ, that’s a drop from 31 per cent from a month ago, a decline which has turned up in other polls over the last few weeks.
According to CROP vice-president, Youri Rivest, the CAQ’s problem has been a lack of coherence in its message. There have been a number of incidents recently of CAQ MNAs making their own policy statements.
Aware of the problem, Legault this week told his troops to stop talking until they have all their policies hammered out.
The poll was bad news for the Liberals too which is stagnating at 29 per cent, the same score as a month ago.
Despite an armada of government announcements over the last two weeks, dissatisfaction in Charest’s government is pegged at 70 per cent.
The Liberals are still in big trouble among francophone voters alone. The PQ is way out front here with 36 per cent of the vote compared with 31 per cent for the CAQ and 18 per cent for the Liberals.
That’s especially bad news for the Liberals given the fact francophones form a majority in 100 of the province’s 125 ridings.
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