🤔 How much of it is the economy, stupid?

As Tolstoy wrote in the opening line of Anna Karenina, “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” A recent study suggests something similar about Brazilian voters: every bout of economic pain registers in its own way, and not every president pays the same price for it.

That question — how much the economy will weigh on the government's approval rating — is now front of mind for political analysts as Brazil approaches national elections in October, with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva seeking re-election and a political news cycle that will prevent anyone from dying of boredom along the way.

Combining unemployment and inflation rates into a traditional metric known as the “misery index” is a common way to gauge economic dissatisfaction among voters. Sergio Vale, chief economist at consultancy MB Associados, recently published a model comparing that data with government approval from a poll aggregator, from 1996 to mid-2025.

The timeline covers almost every election since the Real Plan, the set of anti-inflation reforms that introduced a new currency and brought Brazil's inflation rate down from the stratosphere. The sole exception, the 1994 election, came just months after the real's launch, when 12-month inflation still ran above 1,700%…

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