IO DE JANEIRO, Jan. 3 — The ranks of the unemployed have swelled by nearly a million, consumer purchasing power has declined by 20 percent and the economy itself has failed to grow. Yet as Luiz Inácio 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.

Mr. 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 Mr. da Silva occupies the other side of the political spectrum from Mr. 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 Mr. 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 concern 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, Mr. 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.

"I had to wait 9 months to be born, 11 months to walk and 12 months to talk," he told restive factory workers in the industrial suburbs of São 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. Thus the education minister has urged students to march on Brasília, the capital, to protest tight financing for universities.

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, Mr. da Silva's Zero Hunger program was able to spend only a third of its allotment in 2003.

"A government of beginners" was the phrase the daily O Estado de São Paulo used to describe the Workers' Party administration in an assessment published this week.

Mr. da Silva has recently been promising that 2004 will be the year in which Brazil once again experiences "the spectacle of growth." Municipal elections are scheduled for October, and opposition leaders, seeking to turn the vote into a referendum on the national government, have warned that Mr. da Silva's embrace of their political program will not be enough to gain their support.

"This government is going to have to be weaned now," the minority leader in the Senate, Artur Virgilio, said just before Christmas. "This year we gave them a lot of sustenance, but now they are going to have to learn to walk on their own instead of being carried around in our lap."

In one area, at least, Mr. da Silva has been as good as his word: foreign relations. Though he criticized his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, for spending too much time away from Brazil, Mr. da Silva has traveled abroad even more. He has been lobbying for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council for Brazil and pursuing a nationalist foreign policy.

With little to show on the domestic front, Mr. da Silva has been able to placate the left wing of his party by organizing a group of major developing nations to stand up to the United States and the European Union in trade talks. But some of his other initiatives have been faulted as unnecessarily provocative, like a recent Middle East trip on which he visited Libya, where he described its dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi as a good friend, and Syria, where he called on the United States to withdraw from Iraq, but skipped Israel and Saudi Arabia.

"He's playing to the gallery," Celso Lafer, who served as foreign minister in two earlier governments, complained to reporters recently. "If Lula's government transfers to the foreign policy realm its labor union vision of workers versus bosses, I think there is a risk of complicating things. The international scenario is a bit more complicated, diversified and pluralist than that."

Mr. da Silva has also been criticized in the press for diplomatic gaffes during his forays abroad. Addressing businessmen in Lebanon last month, for instance, he gave an imitation of Arab immigrants mispronouncing Portuguese. When he arrived in Windhoek, Namibia, on the last stop of a tour intended to raise Brazil's profile on the other side of the Atlantic, he praised the city for being "so clean that you wouldn't even think you were in Africa."

But as Mr. Coimbra noted, only the elite complains about such blunders, not the common folk. "They know that Lula didn't go to college," he said, "and they know that in the same situation they would make the same mistakes, and so they let it go because of the profound sense of identity he has established with them."