(Bloomberg) -- Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro’s honeymoon appears to be coming to a swift end, as a new opinion poll shows a steady decline in his approval ratings.
Support for Bolsonaro has fallen 16 percentage points since January, and currently stands at just over 50 percent, according to a poll released Wednesday by Ibope Inteligencia. Thirty-eight percent of Brazilians disapprove of his presidency, the survey showed.
In his first few months in government, Bolsonaro has continued to court controversy on social media, much as he did during his successful election campaign. Members of his government and supporters have repeatedly clashed, while questions over his family’s ties to militia groups in Rio de Janeiro continue to surface. At the same time, Brazil’s economic recovery has shown signs of slowing down, and the government has yet to make much progress on its signature reform proposal: an overhaul of Brazil’s pension system.
The poll also show a dip in the public’s evaluation of Bolsonaro’s administration. Thirty-four percent consider his administration good, down from 49 percent in January. The percentage of people who deem his government bad rose to to 24 percent, from 11 percent in January.
The approval ratings are worse than those of former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff during the same period of their first terms in office.,
The Ibope poll surveyed 2,002 people from March 16 to 19 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
To contact the reporter on this story: Mario Sergio Lima in Brasilia Newsroom at mlima11@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Daniel Cancel at dcancel@bloomberg.net, Bruce Douglas, Robert Jameson
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