Camilo Santana says his campaign strategy is to compare biographies and remind the population about what Bolsonaro's government was like

"If you compare it with the insecurity of the Bolsonaro government, which had the worst unemployment rate in the country, the lack of investment. This is the reality that we want to show now in this campaign, in this second round." In the senator's assessment, a Flávio Bolsonaro government would be a continuation of his father's mandate.

Santana cited his experience at the time, as governor of Ceará, during Jair Bolsonaro's government. "I never received a payment from the Ministry of Education when I was governor for school works. I had to go to the Federal Supreme Court to pay the resources," he said. "There was not the slightest institutional relationship between the federal government and respect for the Brazilian states."

The campaign coordinator also spoke about the pandemic, the country's return to the Hunger Map and, according to him, the dismantling of Brazil's social policies. "We cannot forget this," he said. According to Santana, the first moment of Lula's current mandate was the reconstruction of measures such as Farmácia Popular, Mais Médicos and Minha Casa, Minha Vida.

Asked about Lula's worsening performance in the Northeast, the former governor of Ceará replied that the campaign does not have enough time to assess in the coming days whether there was any error in communication or strategy. "The fact is that we now have to set a goal of recovering these votes, right? Not only in the states of the Northeast, but also in the states where the content has decreased compared to 2022. I think the only way we can recover this, in my opinion, is by comparing biographies, showing who Flávio Bolsonaro is."

The Northeast continued to be Lula's (PT) main electoral stronghold in the first round of 2026. The president was the candidate with the most votes in the nine states in the region, but ended the vote with fewer votes than he had received four years earlier.

A significant part of the drop occurred in the Southeast, where Lula lost around 1.7 million votes in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais compared to the 1st round of the 2022 presidential election. At the same time, Flávio Bolsonaro (PL) obtained 1.3 million more votes in these three states than his father, Jair Bolsonaro (PL), four years earlier.