BRASILIA: President Dilma Rousseff's popularity remains in the single digits in the midst of recession and most Brazilians are not willing to pay more taxes to help her plug a gaping fiscal deficit, according to an opinion poll published on Tuesday.
The CNT/MDA poll showed that 80.6 percent of respondents believe Rousseff is unable to pull the country out of its worst economic slump in 25 years, and 86.7 percent do not want to pay higher taxes to help recover its overdrawn finances.
In particular, the poll found that 70.5 percent of Brazilians oppose her government's plan to revive a tax on financial transactions known as CPMF as it strives to compensate for falling tax revenues.
Brazilian lawmakers have so far refused to approve the tax that the government says it needs to erase the deficit in its primary budget balance and avert a second downgrade to junk status by another major credit rating agency.
The primary budget balance shows how much revenue is available to meet interest payments, and as such is closely watched by investors as a a gauge of a country's capacity to service its debt.
The Rousseff government's approval rating barely budged in October, edging up to 8.8 percent compared with 7.7 percent in a previous survey in July, while 70 percent rate her government negatively compared to 70.9 percent in the previous survey. The variation is within the margin of error.
The latest poll did not ask respondents whether they favored the impeachment of Rousseff that her opponents are seeking in Congress.
The survey by pollster MDA, commissioned by the national transport lobby group CNT, surveyed 2,002 people between Oct. 20-24 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.2 percentage
points.
Reuters
