If it is Anil Antony who is torpedoing the Left Democratic Front’s (LDF) prospects in Pathanamthitta, the BJP has fielded another ‘spoilsport’ in the Alappuzha Lok Sabha seat.
Shobha Surendran is set to upset the LDF’s apple cart in Alappuzha, which elected the lone non-UDF lawmaker in the state in 2019 - Ariff. The Manorama News-VMR survey predicts that the BJP candidate’s performance is most likely to help the UDF’s K C Venugopal wrest the seat from the ruling front.
The BJP is likely to improve its vote share by 1.69 per cent and the UDF by 2.5 per cent. The LDF is likely to lose 3.23 per cent votes. The UDF’s vote share is likely to increase to 42.18 per cent and the LDF’s vote share will dip to 37.6 per cent while the BJP is likely to get a vote share of 18.91 per cent.
The survey hints that the candidatures of Shobha Surendran and K C Venugopal have been instrumental in the shift in the constituency’s swing from the LDF.
The voters who switched over from UDF after K C Venugopal left the constituency will return to the UDF as he returns to the hustings.
Sitting MP Ariff and LDF have shifted gears in campaigning. Ariff was made the LDF candidate in Alappuzha following his successive wins in the Aroor Assembly constituency, and won by a margin of over 10,474 votes in 2019, defeating Shanimol Usman of the Congress and K S Radhakrishnan of the BJP.
The Manorama New-VMR survey was conducted in March in all the assembly segments which make up the Lok Sabha seats in Kerala. It had 28,000 respondents. The query it posed to potential voters was this: Who would win if elections were to be held today?
