Senator Rogério Marinho (PL-RN), opposition leader and campaign coordinator of Flávio Bolsonaro (PL-RJ), presented on Tuesday (23), representations to the Federal Audit Court (TCU) and the Attorney General’s Office (PGR). In the documents, the parliamentarian accuses the federal government of having exceeded the advertising spending limit in an election year.
According to the calculations presented by the senator, the government has already committed R$785.7 million to institutional advertising in the first half of 2026, a value that would exceed the ceiling allowed in R$ 167.6 million (excess of 27%).
The Secretariat of Social Communication (Secom) was contacted by email, but did not respond until the publication of this article by the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, late on Tuesday night (23).
Marinho also targets a specific campaign: the advertising piece “Time with the Family”launched to defend the end of the 6×1 work schedule. According to the senator, the initiative consumed around R$80 million and “can be interpreted as an example of the use of the public sector to delegitimize divergent political positions”.
The senator states that the campaign has “clear potential for electoral impact” and that Planalto seeks to dispute the “political paternity of the proposal in an election year, in a context of low presidential popularity”.
Furthermore, Marinho recalled a precedent from TCU. According to the senator, in 2019 the court suspended an advertising campaign by the Bolsonaro government about the Anti-Crime Packageset of public security measures sent to Congress. The argument was the same: that it is not legitimate to use official advertising to promote a legislative proposal still in progress.
“Institutional coherence requires that legal parameters of the same nature lead to the same results, regardless of the government at hand”, says the senator.
Marinho asks TCU for an emergency audit at Secomprecautionary measure to immediately suspend the 6×1 scale campaign and impose fines on those responsible. The PGR requests the opening of an investigative procedure.
