The Congress-NCP alliance should scrape through in Maharashtra, a Congress leader said on Tuesday.

Anand Sharma, a member of Parliament and party spokesman, said both he and his party remained hopeful about the coalition returning to power.

"The Congress and the NCP together has a very large support base. Even assuming that due to the incumbency factor, there has been some erosion of that support, what we have in the performance of the government should see the coalition through," Sharma told rediff.com on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

Sharma was in New York as part of a seven-member parliamentary delegation that addressed the 59th UNGA on various issues in the last one week.

Sharma spoke to rediff.com during a luncheon organised by Harsh Vardhan Sringla, counsellor at the Permanent Mission of India to the UN.

Sharma admitted that the election was an important one coming as it does after the national elections in May this year, which saw the Congress' re-emergence.

He said that while assessing the possible outcome of the election, one has to take into account the fact that people have faith and hope in the new coalition government at the Centre.

Sharma, however, admitted that in an assembly election there are always local factors that influence the outcome. These local factors, he said, differed from region to region, from Vidarbha to Mumbai.