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Red C poll capturing post-budget reaction for Sunday Business Post with previous poll (22nd Nov) in parentheses: FF 27% (23%), FG 34%(36%), Lab 17%(17%), SF 8%(10%), Green 5% (5%), Ind. 9% (9%).
These results are not easy to interpret.
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P,
They’re not that hard to interpret – people like certainty. They also like governments that do what they say they are going to do, since that breeds certainty. That’s at the most simplistic level.
The other side of it is that the opposition haven’t put their case very well; in fact if you look back at the pre-budget statements, they’ve put it very badly. In FG’s case you can’t proclaim one line of action and then proceed to vote against it line by line in the Budget. In the case of Labour, all I’m surprised at is that they haven’t fallen in the poll.
We have a totally unpopular government, which will most definitely lose the next election, right now gaining a temporary blip in the polls most likely from the middle classes on foot of their performance in standing up to the trades unions before the Budget, for example. I think it’s a temporary gain; the electorate will not want FF in power after the next election irrespective of whether or not they perform well as a government on the economic front in the meantime. Electorates don’t do gratitude. But the real problem is that the alternative to the government is so poor, particularly in terms of economic analysis, that there’s a real problem looming for the credibility of our entire political class.
true veronica. Fine Gael and Labour are very very poor opponents There is a real reluctance for them to engage and fight with FF. Caution does not help their cause.
I think it has more to do with the hold FF have on the people here, Stockholm syndrome, where people develop a liking for their kidnappers and those who torture them and are slow to part from them, as they depend on them and have to butter them in order to live. I think this has a bit to do with Cowen & Brown trying to rescue the NI talks,FF always win on the green card in times of recession. But people are in the long grass for them, they have ruined out country with their builder and banker friends.Twas in the times , and during the reign of Bertie , McCreevy & Cowen the harm was done, poor Lenihan has not that baggage and he is a good man. FF have rujined the country twice in gthe last thirty years and people forgive them- we get what we deserve
The bounce could possibly have been influenced by a vote of confidence in or encouragment for Brian Lenehan which is understandable—could the people possibly support the payout of €1M EXTRA to Roddy Molloy or the favourable treatment of the highest payed civil servants —or could they????
Nothing summed up the stifling caution of the opposition as much as Enda Kenny’s rambling and evasive non-answer to the water charges question in that Newstalk interview last week.
Cringe-making was the only way to describe it.
What’s so hard about saying either:
yes of course we’ll charge you for the water you use, ain’t no such as a free lunch!
or else:
no of course not, you’ve already paid for that water through general taxation!
But the we-haven’t-discussed-it-yet evasion? What else have they not discussed, public sector pay cuts, social welfare cuts, tax rises, any other potentially unpopular policies?
Prop. Joe
“stifling caution” – sums up perfectly the opposition approach.
Add in the rather confusing focus of FG on the dissident republicans over the last weekend when talking about unemployment and this stifling caution seems to be dosed with a lack of awareness of the world in 2010.
No point in relying on the current “opposition” who claim they would do the same things as FF only they would do them differenly.
We live in an age of political consensus. It could be called an oligarchy – power being passed from one generation of the monied class to the next (a study of the Russian experience would be helpful).
Can this be changed? Not when the whole apparatus of state and the media are on the FF/FG/Lab/Green/PD side it seems.
So it seems we have no option but to grin and bear it.
Eddie,
A small point – the percentage of the electorate who would give a first preference vote to FF/FG/Lab/Greens (PDs are gone, politically dead and buried by the way)stands at 83% in this poll. It’s a pretty overwhelming number, representative of all cohorts of the electorate, so it might be a mistake to blame it on ‘the whole apparatus of the State’ or ‘the media’.
Veronica: 83% ! Proves my point that the “Oligarchy” have it all sewn up. Otherwise who other than a brainwashed mind would fall for the notion that only the current established political parties have sufficient experience to run the country as we are now being told at every election.