Rousseff’s popularity plummets
SAO PAULO (AP) — Public approval of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s government has suffered a steep drop in the weeks since massive protests broke out across this country, according to Brazil’s first nationwide poll released since the unrest began.
For the first time, polling shows she would be forced into a second- round runoff vote in next year’s presidential election.
Published Saturday by Folha de S. Paulo, the country’s biggest newspaper, the Datafolha survey found 30 percent of respondents rated Rousseff’s government as “great/good,’’ a sharp fall from the 57 percent who gave it that rating three weeks ago before the demonstrations began.
The government’s popularity was down throughout the country, including in the northeast where the ruling Workers Party is strong.
The poll also found that 30 percent of voters say they’ll cast their ballot for Rousseff in October 2014 — that is down from 51 percent just a few weeks ago.
If no candidate wins an outright majority, a second-round vote is held between the top two vote winners.
In the Datafolha poll, that secondround candidate would be Marina Silva, a former Workers Party environment minister who split with the party in 2009 over policy differences and joined the Green Party. She ran for president in 2010 and won a surprising 20 million first-round votes, but it wasn’t enough to get her to the second-round ballot.
In the most recent poll, 23 percent of respondents said they’ll vote for Silva, up from 16 percent a few weeks ago.
Datafolha interviewed 4,717 people on June 27 and 28, and the poll has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.