President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) approval rating improved slightly last month, but still hovered around 25 percent, a poll in the Chinese-language Global Views (遠見) magazine showed yesterday.
The poll, conducted by the Global Views Survey Research Center, put Ma’s popularity at 26.6 percent, up 2.8 percentage points from last month. His disapproval rating also dropped 4.6 percent, but remained high at 61.4 percent.
Ma’s trust index fell 1.7 percentage points from last month to 37.1 percent, against his distrust index of 44.7 percent — down 2.4 percentage points.
Ma secured a handsome mandate of 58.45 percent in the presidential election two years ago. However, since the fourth month of his administration, his approval rating has remained below 30 percent.
The pollster attributed this phenomenon to what it called an “embedded impression” of poor performance of Ma and his administration in handling crises over the past two years. Crises include the melamine-contaminated milk powder scandal, Typhoon Morakot and the US beef import fiasco.
If Ma wants to restore public confidence in him and his government, then they must produce some clear results and gradually reinstate people’s confidence in state affairs, the pollster said.
On the performance of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) where Ma doubles as chairman, the poll showed that only 21 percent were happy with the party’s performance, up 0.4 percentage points from last month.
The party’s disapproval rating also dropped 0.9 percent to 59.7 percent.
The poll was conducted from April 14 to April 16 and 1,001 adults countrywide were surveyed.
Along with the approval ratings of the president, the center also usually asks questions on cross-strait related issues, but this time the center skipped polls on other topics, such as the economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) the administration seeks to sign with Beijing and preference for unification or independence.
Center Director Tai Li-an (戴立安) dismissed speculation that the poll results on ECFA were unfavorable, saying it was mainly because they were short of manpower because they have been busy on another project and were unable to poll as wide a range of issues as usual.
Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) has said the government wants a 60 percent approval for the proposed pact. Last month’s poll conducted by the center showed that about 46 percent of respondents were in favor of an agreement.
Tai said they needed to question more than 14,000 people over a one-month period. The results of the project on the popularity rating of local government heads is scheduled to be made public next month after the KMT and Democratic Progressive Party announce their nominees for November elections.
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