PLAID CYMRU leader Leanne Wood visited Carmarthen on Saturday (Apr 9).
Ms Wood visited Carmarthen Town Centre to support the campaigns of Assembly candidate and Shadow Education Minister Simon Thomas and Police and Crime Commissioner hopeful Dafydd Llywelyn.
After a brief speech at the Guildhall, where Ms Wood backed a campaign by the local party to secure a meeting with the Justice Minister about the building’s future, she joined locals and campaigners at Yr Atom on King Street for a quick cuppa.
Given that recent polls have showed the Party of Wales enjoying a surge in the region, we took the opportunity to ask Ms Wood what she thought about Plaid’s current position, with the Assembly elections only three weeks away.
The latest Political Barometer poll showed Plaid Cymru on course to gain two seats in Carmarthenshire – Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire from the Conservatives, and Llanelli from Labour.
Both these seats have seen Plaid defeated by voter numbers in the low hundreds recently. In 2007 John Dixon came within 250 votes of winning Carmarthen West, while in the 2011 Senedd election, while Labour’s Keith Davies beat the incumbent, Helen Mary Jones, by a mere 80 votes in Llanelli in 2011.
However, Ms Wood was unwilling to speculate on these gains: “The latest poll predicted [Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire] to switch from Conservative to Plaid Cymru, but we’re not complacent, we’re not taking anything for granted,” she added.
However, she pointed out that the strong showing in these constituencies was ‘breaking new ground’ for Plaid Cymru.
We pointed out that, if the preelection wave of the 2016 Welsh Election poll was accurate, that Labour would not hold a constituency seat west of Swansea, and asked Ms Wood for her thoughts on this: “That’s an interesting proposition, and we’ll have to wait and see, but for a party that claims to be for the whole of Wales this makes that claim somewhat questionable,” she pointed out.
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