Irish PM’s party steadies slide in support ahead of Friday’s election

DUBLIN (Reuters) – A slide in support for Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris’ Fine Gael party showed signs of stabilising in the last opinion poll before Friday’s general election that if repeated would likely see the centre-right led coalition return to government.

Fine Gael fell 2 percentage points to 20% in the Business Post/Red C poll but that was above the 19% it dropped to in a different survey on Monday after a series of campaign missteps eroded its pre-election lead.

Harris’ main coalition partner, Fianna Fail, was the most popular party on 21%, unchanged from the last Red C poll taken at the start of the campaign, while the opposition Sinn Fein party was up two points to 20%.

Two of the three main parties will need to join together to form a coalition government if those numbers are broadly repeated on Friday. The last election in 2020 produced a similar result.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have both pledged to govern again without Sinn Fein, meaning the left-wing party, which had a commanding opinion poll lead until earlier this year, needs to finish well ahead of both to change the dynamic.

The poll was conducted from Nov. 20 and Nov. 26, the first survey to more fully take into account an incident last Friday in which Harris was filmed walking away from a care worker who was complaining about disability service.

Harris has since apologised repeatedly for the exchange, a clip of which went viral.

An exit poll due shortly after voting ends at 2200 GMT on Friday will give a firm sense of the outcome, ahead of the main results that will come over the weekend.

(Reporting by Padraic Halpi; Editing by Sandra Malern)