The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which put an end to the three-party dominance in Punjab’s electoral politics after humbling the ruling Congress, Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2022 Assembly elections, faces a fresh poll test as the state gears up to send 13 members to the Lok Sabha in the upcoming general elections.
Spearheaded by Bhagwant Mann, the incumbent chief minister, the AAP won a historic mandate in 2022, an election that saw many political heavyweights fall by the wayside and rookies or greenhorns emerge to the front and centre of the state politics.
However, heading into the Lok Sabha elections, can the ruling AAP pull off a similar stunner on its seasoned opponents as it did in 2022? Or, will the Congress, SAD and the BJP script an electoral turnaround this time?
According to an opinion poll survey by ABP-CVoter, the AAP is projected to win 6 seats while the Congress is shown to be bagging one less.
Though there’s no official word from either camp yet on whether they would contest the upcoming polls separately or in alliance, the Akalis and the BJP are projected to bring up the rear in the final tally for the state, winning one seat each.
However, in terms of the vote share, the AAP, according to the survey, is shown to be receiving fewer percentage of the total votes polled at 27 per cent, with the Congress faring marginally better at 30 per cent.
The BJP and SAD 16 and 17 per cent of the total votes polled, according to the survey.
If the numbers, as projected by the survey, hold, it would mean a reduced seat tally for the BJP, possibly on account of the ongoing farmers' protest.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress, which held the reins of Punjab at the time, took the majority of the electoral spoils, winning 8 of the 13 Lok Sabha seats.
The Akalis and the BJP, which were partners in the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) at the time, won 4 seats while the AAP had to be content with just one.
However, the political sands have shifted since as the Congress ceded space to AAP after being decimated in the 2022 elections while the Akalis, too, suffered heavy losses.
While the AAP and the Congress finally arrived at a seat-sharing deal for the national capital, Delhi, and some other states after several rounds of negotiations, there was no similar arrangement for Punjab.
With neither party willing to set aside seats for each other in the key border state, the AAP and the Congress officially conveyed their decision to contest the Lok Sabha polls separately in Punjab.
The ruling party in the state, on Thursday, announced candidates for 8 of the 13 Lok Sabha seats, putting 5 sitting ministers in fray.
[Disclaimer: Current survey findings and projections are based on CVoter Opinion Poll Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) conducted among 41,762 adults, all confirmed voters. The surveys were conducted from February 1 to March 10, 2024. The data is weighted to the known demographic profile of the States. Sometimes the table figures do not sum to 100 due to the effects of rounding. The final data has socio-economic profiles within +/- 1% of the demographic profile of the states. We believe this will give the closest possible trends. The sample spread is across all 543 electoral constituencies in the country. The margin of error is +/- 5% and the vote share projections have been done with 95% confidence interval.]