The Labour Party has strengthened its lead to almost 48,000 votes, as the Nationalist slump continued into its worst result since last September, a MaltaToday survey showed on Sunday.

The survey – which is carried out every month – showed that support for the Labour Party stood at 45.7%, while the PN’s support stands at 29.3%.

In the past month, the PL’s support has increased by 0.9%, while the PN’s support has decreased by 0.8%, meaning that the gap is now over 16 points.

The PN’s performance is its worst since last September, and is even worse than its performance last month, which came while the party was going through its umpteenth internal problem between former leader Adrian Delia and MP Jason Azzopardi.

The issue was resolved some days later, but the polls don’t seem to have forgiven the opposition party yet.

Most worrying for the PN – besides being behind Labour in all regions – is its vote retention rate: while 82.1% of PL votes say that they will vote for the same party, only 70.1% of PN voters say they will keep voting blue if an election were to be held tomorrow.

A small positive light perhaps is that out of those who didn’t vote in 2017, 13.9% said they would vote for the PN, while 5.9% said they would vote for the PL.  31.9% are still unsure, while 39.5% insist they won’t vote if an election were to be held tomorrow.

When it comes to trust ratings, both leaders saw an increase in trust, with PN leader Bernard Grech making a more significant improvement in the past month.

Still, Robert Abela’s trust rating is now over the 50% mark – with 50.4% - after an increase of 0.8 points in the last month.

Bernard Grech’s trust rating meanwhile stands at 29.3%, an improvement of almost 4 points. 

16.7% of respondents said that they trust neither leader.