This paper investigates the behavior of the Brazilian private consumption over the last 20 years. Private consumption, as a measure of resilience of an economy, has been growing sharply from 2003 to 2014 in Brazil, while it significantly fell since 2014. The country is now experiencing one of the deepest recession in history, leading to a political pressure from the society. The crisis intensified in 2015, the first year after the re-election of President Dilma Rousseff, and eventually concluded in her impeachment in August 2016. Several factors related to the slowdown of the world economy and different policies adopted by recent governments may have contributed to amplify the current recession. In this paper, we study the effects of multiple external and internal variables, including oil and iron prices, exchange rate, unemployment level, and interest rates, on private consumption in Brazil. Using multivariate analysis, our results indicate that the increase in iron ore and oil prices positively impacted private consumption, while rising interest and unemployment rates had negative effects. When analyzing different presidential terms individually, we identified that the factors affected distinctly each government, such as unemployment rate that only until 2002 had a positive influence on private consumption, while for the remain years it had a strong negative impact.