1. Maximize spending on education and technology subsidies (but not faith schools; defund those to eliminate the religious who will inevitable hate you).
2. Maximize spending on popular law and order programs. Prisons, police, and community police are all extremely effective and popular policies. Surveillance will not be appreciated, however, so hold back on that.
3. Institute environmental incentives. Avoid the environmental policies that restrict people as most will hurt GDP. Instead, do things like recycling and clean energy subsidies. Not only will this actually boost your economy in the long run, they are quite popular policies as well.

With these three large changes your country should begin to fix itself quite nicely and your popularily should soar.
Up to this point you should be mostly ignoring your deficit. Once your initial policies are implemented however, you should begin to adjust taxes to make up for the deficit. Do not raise taxes that hurt GDP. In fact, if later in the game you are running a budget surplus, it would be beneficial to do away with these taxes (capital gains, corporation) entirely. Instead, you should:

4. Increase income tax and property tax. Neither affect GDP, and property tax will actually boost equality, so these taxes are good to have. Overall, these taxes will still hurt your popularity, but the money will be paying programs that will increase popularity by a much higher amount.
Sales tax could also be raised if necessary, but this will increase poverty and lower tourism, so it isn't helpful economically long-term.

So, if you take these steps in your first term you will have a country filled with happy, prosperous citizens for all of time.