Polls support Australian PM Gillard’s rival Rudd

SYDNEY — Kevin Rudd’s bid to lead Australia again was boosted Saturday when opinion polls showed he remains more popular than Prime Minister Julia Gillard and likely Labor’s best chance of winning an election.

Rudd will face off against colleague Gillard on Monday in a ballot taken by the 103 members of the Labor Party caucus after a divisive battle that has seen the ruling party engage in unprecedented infighting.

Gillard has said she is confident she will win the vote but Rudd has called on his party to accept the “cold, hard, stark reality” and reinstate him as leader to prevent Labor from being dumped by voters at the next election.

Rudd, who was thronged by people seeking photographs, autographs and even hugs as he visited a Brisbane shopping area with his wife on Saturday, said the polls were “out there in black and white for everyone to look at”.

His campaign also received a shot in the arm Saturday when influential Labor minister Anthony Albanese defected to his camp, saying he believed Labor’s best chance of winning the next election was with Rudd as leader.

A Nielsen poll of 1,200 voters published in the Sydney Morning Herald found that Rudd was overwhelmingly the preferred party leader, garnering 58 percent of the vote compared with Gillard’s 34 percent.

The poll also found that Labor’s overall support remained below the opposition’s, with only 47 percent of votes likely to go to the government compared to 53 percent heading to the opposition if an election were held now.

A Galaxy poll, published in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, showed Rudd ahead of Gillard as best placed to lead the Labor party by 52 percent to 26 percent.

The survey of 1,020 voters also found that if Rudd were Labor leader, the party’s share of the vote would jump from the current 34 percent to 37 percent.