Thursday, August 05, 2010

More Piñera numbers

More bad news for Sebastián Piñera, this time from Adimark.  In the past month, his approval dropped from 52% to 46%, while disapproval jumped from 34% to 40%.  Approval of the government's job in general fell from 57% to 49%.

A senator from Renovación Nacional tried to blame Piñera's numbers on problems--particularly healthcare and Transantiago--he inherited from Michelle Bachelet.  Yet Bachelet was popular despite these issues.  And anyway, fair or not it's irrelevant.  He's the president now.

Yet there is an upside for him.  While 41% approve of the governing coalition (with 43% disapproval) there is only 33% approval of the Concertación (and 52% disapproval).  So Piñera has problems, but the Concertación is not in a good position to take advantage of them.  The funny thing is that I've written that many times when the coalitions were in opposite positions.  And as a political scientist, I also have to admit that these numbers can't tell us much about long-term trends.  But they're fun.

1 comments:

boz 8:51 AM  

A lot of times you see all institutions/parties/people rise and fall together on the approve/disapprove numbers. It says something about the sentiment of the country.

To test that, I would want to see the approval numbers on the church, military, police, media, Congress, labor unions, etc. I bet most if not all have dropped in the last few months, showing growing dissatisfaction with the direction of the country as a whole. Just a hypothesis.

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