RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Seventy percent of Brazilians believe that there is corruption in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing leader elected in 2018 with the promise to combat the diversion of public resources.
According to the survey by the Datafolha firm, while 70% of Brazilians consider that there is corruption in Bolsonaro’s government, 23% believe there is not, and 7% claim not to know.
Datafolha, which interviewed 2,074 people over 16 years of age in different country regions on July 7 and 8, assures that its poll has a margin of error of two percentage points.
According to the survey, 63% of Brazilians believe that corruption in the Ministry of Health and 64% assure that the head of state knows about the deviations in this portfolio.
Suspicions of alleged negotiations over non-existent vaccines have been exposed, with allegations of bribery published by one of Bolsonaro’s most powerful arch-enemies, the left-leaning newspaper Folha.
Datafolha, which conducted this poll, also belongs to the same Folha Group owned by the Frias family, the second-largest Brazilian media conglomerate after Grupo Globo.
On Saturday, another Datafolha poll showed that a slight majority of Brazilians (54%) support that Congress open an impeachment trial against Jair Bolsonaro for the crimes of responsibility of which he is accused. The investigations against the president have only just begun, and their outcome is open.
The president receives support from older people (49% impeachment disapproval), evangelicals (56%), the upper-middle-class with earnings of 5 to 10 minimum wages (62%), wealthier people (59%), and business people (68%).
The president denied the accusations of corruption.
“It’s been two and a half years without corruption. They want to charge me now with a crime of corruption even though not a single dose of these vaccines was bought,” said the head of state on Saturday in statements made to supporters in the southern city of Porto Alegre.
According to the president, the suspicious contracts were suspended by the supervising agencies because “we have a filter, we have control”, which prevented the purchase of vaccines in the investigated businesses.
On the allegation that he did not ask the police to investigate the corruption after being alerted to it by Congressman Miranda, Bolsonaro said that he could not take preventive measures based on his information.
“This is a fantasy story that only serves for three senators (members of Covid CPI) to promote themselves politically,” he said. The majority of Covid CPI members are self-described political independents or opponents of the president.
Before he was besieged by corruption allegations, Bolsonaro’s image had already deteriorated due to his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which was not approved by the international community.
He did not follow the mainstream narrative of Covid-19 control where isolation, containment, forced business closures, masks, and other preventive measures are the rule.
Bolsonaro’s opponents claim it is the President’s fault that Brazil has more than 520,000 covid deaths and became one of the countries most affected by the pandemic in the world.
520,000 is an enormous number, but Brazil is a country of continental dimension. If the number of deaths per million is considered, Brazil ranks seventh among the ten most affected nations, better than Peru, the Czech Republic, Colombia, Argentina, Italy, and Belgium.