Reuters
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is holding on to her wide lead over potential rivals and would win a second term outright in the October 5 general election, according to a poll.
Despite Brazil’s lacklustre economic performance and stubbornly high inflation on her watch, Rousseff would be re-elected in the first round if the vote was held today, the Ibope poll showed.
The survey of voter intentions found Rousseff has 43% of the electorate’s support, against 15% for senator Aecio Neves of the main opposition party PSDB and 7% for Eduardo Campos, governor of Pernambuco state.
Brazil’s presidential election race will get serious after the soccer World Cup ends in mid-July and while no one has officially declared themselves a candidate, all three are expected to run.
The results are virtually unchanged from the previous Ibope poll in November, with Neves gaining just one percentage point.
While Rousseff is the front-runner, the Ibope poll found 64% of Brazilian voters want the next president to change the way Brazil is governed.
Of those, 63% said they want the change of course to come with another president at the helm. That is not likely to happen, according to the Ibope poll published online by the Estado de S.Paulo newspaper.
Even if there was a runoff, Rousseff would defeat Neves by 27% points (47 to 20). If Campos made the second-round instead of Neves, Rousseff would beat him by 31 percentage points (47 to 16), the poll showed.
Rousseff’s popularity plummeted last June due to massive street protests by Brazilians angered with poor public services, corrupt politicians and the cost of building stadiums for this year’s soccer World Cup. Though she steadily recovered her numbers by the yearend, recent polls have shown a dip in her approval ratings, with rising prices, crime and inadequate health and education services ranking high as the main concerns of Brazilians.
The polls show most Brazilians believe the money spent hosting the World Cup would have been better spent on solving the country’s problems.
Rousseff suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands of her coalition allies in Congress last week when they voted to set up a committee to look into allegations that a Dutch company bribed officials at state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA when then minister Rousseff was chair of the board.
The committee has no teeth but the case can provide fodder for Rousseff’s opponents on the campaign trail.