President Pervez Musharraf and the party backing him for the past five years, Pakistan Muslim League (Q), are consistently on the downward slide in the eyes of the people, public opinion polls and analyses say. The slide in popularity began, when Musharraf sacked the former Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and the protest movement by lawyers and civil society members that spread like a jungle fire.
The public opinion polls carried out by international agencies indicated the biggest drop in Musharraf’s popularity, while PML-Q slipped behind Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). The government has rejected all such public opinion polls saying these lacked credibility, while the agencies continued to carry out public opinion polls from time to time. The latest poll by International Republican Institute (IRI), a United States-based agency that released the results three weeks before the parliamentary elections, was another set back to Musharraf and his supporters as they saw their popularity graph falling even further.
Public opinion polls may not be accurate but they reflect the mindset of large number of people and these basically indicate the prevailing public sentiment. There is always room for error in such polls but credible agencies like IRI and Gallop carry a lot of weight when they release their public opinion poll. First of all, the method of conducting public opinion poll matches all international standards and, secondly, these polls are judged by how accurate their previous polls have been. In an effort to counter the negative influence of IRI opinion polls, which show Musharraf and PML-Q popularity hitting rock bottom, the Musharraf regime also issued a public opinion poll in the name of an unregistered, unknown agency, which had no past experience of conducting opinion polls.  
It showed Musharraf’s popularity in Pakistan jumping to 75 per cent with more than 50 per cent supporting his emergency rule. However, this United States-based agency, as was found out later, had not been registered in America and it had no previous record of conducting polls in Pakistan or anywhere else. Some newspapers in Pakistan highlighted this fact and challenged the poll conducted by it. No one from the agency came forward to respond to the challenge pr prove the authenticity of the poll. The government of Pakistan-sponsored public opinion poll came at a time when the IRI had portrayed a bleak picture of the ruling Janta in it latest survey.
IRI said in its most recent poll that voters overwhelmingly opposed Musharraf’s decision to impose emergency rule. “Musharraf’s move polarized the country, and this polarization carries through the other attitudes and opinions of the Pakistani electorate. This line of polarization splits the electorate into two parts, at roughly the two-third and one-third divide. Throughout the poll, 25 to 33 per cent remained supportive of President Musharraf and were positive about the condition of the country. Seventy-five to 66 per cent expressed anger at the current state of affairs, desired change and were anti-Musharraf,” according to the IRI survey.
The survey said majority of Pakistanis did not accept Musharraf’s stated rationale for the state of emergency declaration. When given a choice between two options, 25 per cent said that they thought Musharraf declared the emergency in order to fight terrorists in better manner, while 66 per cent said that it was to prevent the Supreme Court from overturning his re-election to another term as president. In the survey, Pakistani people were also opposed to the various measures that accompanied the state of emergency declaration. The IRI said 71 per cent opposed the suspension of the constitution; 77 per cent opposed the detainment of the former Supreme Court judges; 76 per cent opposed the closure of news television channels; 73 per cent opposed the swearing in of new Supreme Court judges; 70 per cent opposed the ban on political rallies; and 76 per cent opposed the crackdown on lawyers and civil society, and the house arrest of opposition leaders.
The IRI poll was conducted between November 19-28 after the imposition of emergency rule; when Musharraf quit as the army chief and a day before he took oath for a second five-year term. The randomly selected sample consisted of 3,520 adult men and women from 223 rural and 127 urban locations in 51 districts in all four provinces of Pakistan, according to IRI, which has conducted surveys in Pakistan since 2002, including five national polls over the past 12 months.
While Musharraf claims that the elections will be free and fair and the controversial Election Commission of Pakistan, which allowed and validated Musharraf’s election as president in uniform, tries to pacify public sentiments by saying it would ensure transparent elections, the public mood is quite the opposite and the people are not ready to buy the rhetoric that the king’s party won’t get undue favours. In fact there is a strong belief among the independent observers that pre-poll rigging has become order of the day as the previous PML-Q government and the caretaker regime, which is essentially its extension, have taken steps to ensure the king’s party gets favourable environment in the elections. The opposition parties allege that both the king and the king’s party benefited from emergency rule. Musharraf was able to get rid of the judges, who he feared might rule against his candidacy as the president, while the PML-Q benefited from a gagged media. In the absence of an independent media, there is no other way to monitor the fairness of the elections, opposition parties say.
According to IRI 66 per cent of people surveyed in the opinion said elections held under a state of emergency won’t be free and fair, compared with 24 per cent who said these would be fair, while 62 per cent of them were ready to support a boycott of the elections by the opposition parties.
However, the most important aspect of the survey as the election date nears was the disapproval of the previous PML-Q government and its policies. Only 31 per cent of the people surveyed approved the previous government’s policies while 68 per cent were against it. When asked if the ruling coalition had done a job good enough to deserve re-election, 24 per cent said yes and 70 per cent no.
In head-to-head match-ups, Bhutto topped the list with Sharif coming in second and Musharraf in third, the IRI survey said. However, over the course of the poll being taken, Bhutto’s numbers were trending down, indicating that they had been higher. Sharif, on the other hand, trended upwards over the course of the fieldwork. IRI’s last poll conducted between August 29-September 13 was taken in the days leading-up to his first return and subsequent deportation, and Nawaz’s numbers were very high. However, after he was deported, his numbers deflated, as is reflected in this most recent poll. IRI’s fieldwork for this poll was largely completed before Sharif’s most recent return and it does not capture the extent to which his popularity increased as a result.
However, his numbers did tick up slightly in the portion of the fieldwork conducted after his return, indicating that he is now trending upwards.
The most disturbing aspect of the survey was that the popularity of the Army has also dropped, which the IRI said was because of Musharraf. “The army has long been the most respected institution in the country. In IRI’s first few polls its favourability rating was consistently at the 80 per cent level. In the last poll, however, the Army’s rating dropped 10 points to 70 per cent and slipped to third behind the media and the courts. In this poll, the Army dropped 15 percentage points to a rating of 55 per cent. The media remained on top with 78 per cent.
The drop in the Army’s prestige is likely due to the unpopularity of Musharraf. When Pakistanis were asked if the performance of Musharraf affected their opinion of the Army, 31 per cent said that they now had a higher opinion due to his actions and 20 per cent said that their opinion had not changed, while a plurality of 41 per cent said that Musharraf’s performance caused them to now have a lower opinion of the Army,’’ according to the survey.