WHAT stayed with you after meeting Eduardo Campos were his eyes. Bright and penetrating, they seemed to change colour between blue, green and grey. He was a striking man in other ways, too: tall and dashing, dressed in a dark suit or blazer, his black hair flecked with grey and slicked back above a high forehead, aquiline nose and prominent cleft chin. Like many Brazilian politicians, he was tactile, putting his hand on your knee or forearm to emphasis a point. But unlike some, he always seemed cool and contained, even in the dripping heat of his home state of Pernambuco, in Brazil’s north-east.

His political message and manner stood out, too. On the one hand, he was a modern, managerial technocrat. In two terms as governor, he acted as chief executive of Pernambuco, a long finger of territory extending from Recife, the proud, decaying capital with its tradition of political liberalism and rebellion, through the coastal strip with its declining sugar industry to the dirt-poor sertão, the arid interior.

Building on the work of a predecessor in sorting out the state’s finances, Mr Campos began to turn Pernambuco and Recife around. He brought in private managers to run hospitals, and recruited an NGO to help him reform secondary schools, extending the school day. He promoted wind power and deployed modern data-mining techniques to cut crime in the capital. It was government by targets. The wonks at the World Bank loved him. But so did ordinary people in small towns. “You have to link managing with politics,” he said. He introduced schemes to help cane cutters survive the months between harvests, and gave targeted subsidies to the poor.

On the other hand, there was in Mr Campos more than a trace of the old-fashioned political boss (a coronel, as they called them in the north-east). He was ruthless at co-opting his political opponents. He had an aura of authority, of command. In the federal Congress, he stood out as a skilled negotiator. His strong political friendship with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president in 2003-10 who was born in Pernambuco, brought big federal investments to the state: a shipyard, an oil refinery and freight railways. But Mr Campos wooed private business too.

Born into Pernambucan politics, Eduardo grew up balancing left and right. His paternal grandfather was a sugar planter with ties to Pernambuco’s conservative politicians. A more important influence was his maternal grandfather, Miguel Arraes, an old-fashioned socialist, who encouraged the cane cutters to unionise and was elected as governor of the state in 1962. Two years later Arraes was arrested when the armed forces took power in Brazil; he spent 15 years in exile in Algeria.

Having studied economics in Recife, Mr Campos was set for a post-graduate course in the United States. But the family trade exercised its pull. Arraes, back from exile and twice more elected as governor, named him as his cabinet chief and then, aged just 30, as the state’s finance secretary. From his grandfather Mr Campos learned the political art of uniting different forces, of bringing people together. “It was an apprenticeship,” he said.

But he was quietly determined to be his own man. Against Arraes’s wishes, he entered the federal Congress and was quickly named as minister for science and technology in Lula’s government. In that job, he organised the approval of stem-cell research. Yet in many ways Mr Campos was socially conservative, a Catholic and a family man. He married Renata, a childhood neighbour and playmate. They had five children.

His ability, and his mix of new and old and of left and right, made Mr Campos a formidable political contender, at least on paper. He knew it. That prompted him to break with Lula, whom he first met at Arraes’s side when he was 14. Although Lula had hinted at supporting him for president in 2018, Mr Campos decided not to wait and to run against President Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s chosen successor, this year. “What’s she achieved? She’s opened up many issues but she hasn’t concluded anything,” was his withering verdict on Ms Rousseff, months before the mass protests in 2013 that dented her popularity.

Mr Campos proclaimed a “new agenda” that would break the 20-year pattern of rule first by the centre-right and then by Lula’s Workers’ Party. He seemed to have a dream ticket when Marina Silva, Lula’s former environment minister, unexpectedly agreed to become his vice-presidential candidate. Ms Silva, the darling of greens and the social-media generation, won 20m votes in the 2010 presidential election, coming third.

Yet the alliance did not altogether gel. Mr Campos’s poll ratings stayed at around 8-10%, behind both Ms Rousseff and Aécio Neves of the centre-right opposition. He insisted that as he became nationally known, support would surge. He carried on campaigning, putting in 18-hour days, an endless round of interviews with small-town radio stations, street-corner flesh-pressing and rallies. He criss-crossed Brazil’s huge territory in a rented executive jet. On August 13th, on his way to another day of rallies, the Cessna came down in thick cloud in the port city of Santos. He loved the contact with the people that campaigning brought. It wasn’t just about management. You had to combine it with politics, with bringing people together.