Carried out earlier this month, the Vilmorus poll for the Lietuvos Rytas daily revealed that 55.7 percent of people in Lithuania have a favorable opinion about the president and 27.5 percent have a negative one. A month earlier, the numbers were 66.5 and 18.5 percent respectively.
49 percent now trust the presidential institution, down 9.1 percentage points from the previous poll.
“There’s no other explanation. The president has lost 10 percentage points of positive evaluation over that email exchange. And the negative evaluation increased by the same number,” Vilmorus director Vladas Gaidys told BNS Lithuania.
The drop in the president’s popularity pushed Kaunas Mayor Visvaldas Matijosaitis to the top spot, with 61.2 percent having a positive opinion about him, up from 58.5 percent in April. And the number of people with a negative opinion about him inched down from 11.8 to 10.4 percent.
The Kaunas mayor’s popularity has been rising for eight months in a row, Gaidys noted.
The Vilmorus public opinion and market research center polled 1,030 people for the Lietuvos Rytas daily on May 4-12.