The ranks of the unemployed have swelled by nearly 1 million, consumer purchasing power has declined by 20 percent and the economy itself has failed to grow.
Yet as Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva completes his first year in office as Brazil's first working-class president, his popularity among Brazilians remains at a record high.
Da Silva, a 58-year-old former factory worker and labor leader, was elected in October 2002 with 52.5 million votes, more than the total of the winner of any presidential election in a democratic country anywhere except Ronald Reagan. Though da Silva occupies the other side of the political spectrum from Reagan, he now finds himself also being accused of being a Teflon leader.
Recent polls show that barely 40 percent of those surveyed believe that the Workers' Party government da Silva heads is doing a good job. But the president's favorable rating is holding steady at 70 percent, nearly 10 points higher than his share of the vote in October 2002.
"People don't just admire his biography or respect his political trajectory, they genuinely like and trust Lula in a way that has no precedent for a Brazilian president," said Marcos Coimbra, director of Vox Populi, a leading public opinion polling company here. "In spite of everything, he ends the year with more credibility and political capital than he started with, because he has shown that someone with his origins is capable of running the government."
For the most part, da Silva has followed the same economic policies that he criticized when they were being executed by the previous government, and he has failed, at least temporarily, to carry out the promises he made during the campaign. Inflation and interest rates have dropped and the budget surplus has risen, thrilling Wall Street, but the cost has been more joblessness and recession, which disappoints da Silva's supporters.
"I had to wait nine months to be born, 11 months to walk and 12 months to talk," he told restive factory workers in the industrial suburbs of Sao Paulo, where he began his political career 25 years ago, in a typically folksy plea for the patience he said was needed while he did the spadework the country required for a burst of growth. "So why am I going to do things in a hurry?"
At times, though, his Workers' Party has acted as if it is still in opposition and not governing a nation of 175 million people. The education minister has urged students to march on Brasilia, the capital, to protest tight financing for universities. One of the president's closest advisers described a jailed peasant leader as a "political prisoner," a term not used here since military rule ended nearly 20 years ago.
The social agenda, supposedly the greatest strength of the Workers' Party, has proved to be its principal weakness. Though sweeping agrarian reform was pledged, only a quarter of the promised number of families were resettled. Spending on social programs is down 8 percent from the level in the last year of the previous government, according to a recent opposition study, but even at that, da Silva's Zero Hunger program was able to spend only a third of its allotment last year.
"A government of beginners" was the phrase the daily O Estado de Sao Paulo used to describe the Workers' Party administration in an assessment published this week.
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