Brasília - AFP
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's approval rating has skidded to a record nine percent, according to a poll released Wednesday amid anger over corruption, a stagnant economy and growing unemployment.
It was the worst showing for Rousseff since she came to power in 2011 at the helm of the world's seventh largest economy, succeeding the wildly popular leftist leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Rousseff began her second term just six months ago after winning re-election by a thin margin, and things are already looking grim.
She is under siege from a corruption scandal at the state-run oil giant Petrobras which has also implicated the ruling Workers' Party. She used to chair the board at the company, from 2003 to 2010, a period in which the corruption allegedly flourished.
A survey released June 21 by pollster Datafolha put her approval rating at 10 percent.
Now, the new CNI/Ibope survey, one of the most closely watched in Brazil, found that while nine percent of those polled approve of Rousseff, 68 view the government as bad or very bad, 21 percent as average and 1 percent say they do not know. The numbers do not add up to 100 percent because of statistical rounding.
In the previous survey by this same pollster in March, Rousseff's numbers were at least a bit higher, at 12 percent.
The new poll said only 20 percent of those questioned trust her, down from 24 percent in March.
The pollster said Rousseff's biggest declines were among the people who tend to like her the most -- low income people, those with lower education levels and people aged 55 or more.
The poll was conducted June 18-21 and had a margin of error of 2 percentage points.