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There are only two reliable polling organizations that work in Panama: CID, the Latin American affiliate of the Gallup Poll, and Dichter & Neira, the regional affiliate of the Harris Survey organization. But comparing numbers in one organization’s polls to that in the other’s is quite frequently misleading, because they use different techniques.

CID-Gallup, for example, includes an option of “ordinar” when it asks voters what kind of job a president is doing, whereas Dichter & Neira give “good,” “very good,” “bad” and “very bad” as the only options. Earlier this year a Dichter & Neira polls commissioned by La Prensa showed President Torrijos riding high in popularity, nearly at the level of a year before, when his standing had not been diminished by unpopular tax and social security policies. But only a few weeks later, El Panama America published a CID-Gallup poll that the paper characterized as saying that the president’s popularity was “in the basement.”

Indeed, the negatives had a three-point lead over the positives according to CID-Gallup, 29 to 26 percent. But 45 percent of those surveyed considered the president to be putting in an ordinary performance or declined to express an opinion.

What it suggests, which can also be gleaned from looking at the swings in the president’s popularity shown by the Dichter & Neira polls over the past year, is that the nation is politically volatile. It seems that nobody has captured the public imagination as a desirable alternative to the leader we have, but about 59 percent of Panamanians, according to CID-Gallup, think that the country is headed on the wrong track. Unemployment and inflation are the chief complaints, and a 49 percent plurality says that the country hasn’t changed on Martín Torrijos’s shift.

The poll also shows that the nation’s most popular politician is Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro, who has a 70 percent approval rating; that nearly two-thirds of Panamanians support the idea of expanding the canal; that a 49 to 30 percent plurality oppose a free trade agreement with the United States; and that this president’s standing in the polls at this point in his administration is a bit better than that of his predecessor, Mireya Moscoso.