By Ben Tavener
SAO PAULO
A record two-thirds of Brazilians are now against acting presidents being allowed to stand for re-election, according to a new poll released Tuesday.
Sixty-seven percent said they were opposed to a president being re-elected while 30 percent favored re-election in a nationwide survey of 2,840 people conducted last week by Brazilian pollster Datafolha.
The pollster said it is the first time that a majority of respondents are against a president standing for a second consecutive term in office -- the maximum currently set by the Constitution.
The results are almost the exact opposite of a 2005 poll when 65 percent were in favor of re-election and 33 percent opposed.
Brazil's last three presidents -- incumbent Dilma Rousseff (on picture) and predecessors Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Fernando Henrique Cardoso -- were all re-elected to second terms.
The poll comes after the Lower House of Brazil's Congress passed a first reading of a political reforms bill that would outlaw re-election for any elected government position, if eventually signed into law.
The bill, which includes a raft of changes, also limits all elected posts to five-term terms, and is expected to easily pass both chambers.
"The level of rejection toward [President] Dilma [Rousseff] weighs heavy on this issue, but it's not alone. There has been a very strong underlying sense of rejection toward politics generally, which has been present since June 2013," Datafolha general-director Mauro Paulino said, referring to mass street protests in 2013 when hundreds of thousands of Brazilians demanded change, including political reforms.
A Datafolha poll released Saturday also showed Rousseff's approval rating had plunged to an all-time low of 10 percent, with rejection at 65 percent. Only President Fernando Collor saw a lower level of disapproval – 67 percent in 1992 – as his impeachment proceedings were getting underway.
Protests against Rousseff's government have continued, with two major events this year seeing hundreds of thousands of disgruntled Brazilians taking to the streets, many angry at a major corruption scandal currently embroiling the government and Brazil's biggest company, the state-run oil company Petrobras.
Some protesters have demanded Rousseff's impeachment and even a "constitutional military intervention" to remove by force her and her Workers' Party from power.
A third major event is scheduled for Aug. 16.
The lackluster performance of the country's economy -- widely expected to contract by more than 1 percent this year -- is also exacerbating disapproval toward Rousseff, as well as an ongoing investigation into how the government balanced its accounts in 2014.
The new Datafolha poll also showed that the number of Brazilians against compulsory voting had grown significantly to 66 percent from 54 percent in October 2014. Thirty-two percent remain in favor of the mandatory vote for 18- to 70-year-olds.
Were the vote optional, the poll found 58 percent of eligible voters would not cast a ballot during the next presidential election.
The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.
