When Voting Right Is Not Enough

On a recent late afternoon road trip back to Lianga, I made a quick food stop at a 7-Eleven store still quite a distance from my hometown.  Near the cashier’s counter was a prominent display containing the franchise’s now very popular coffee tumblers displaying the faces of the prominent candidates vying for the presidency of the Philippines in the May national and local elections. 

I watched curiously as a young and sveltely attractive millennial still in office uniform confidently stride up to the counter drop her purchases on the counter then go the tumbler display, pick one with the picture of Vice-President Leni Robredo and quickly add it to her items for check out.  Since I was next in line to her, I caught her eye then asked her, “Why Leni?”  She smiled then gamely replied, “I like her style, her honesty, her integrity, her advocacies and personal charisma.”  

I just smiled back and nodded and later as she confidently sauntered out of the swinging doors into the fading sunlight, I wondered to myself if I should have told her to her face that she might be voting for the right person but not for not all of the right reasons.  I wondered also if she had followed through in her thoughts and reflections the real ramifications and consequences of the consequential choice she apparently had already made.

If the recently published Pulse Asia survey results covering the March 17 to 21 period are to be believed (and there are many Filipinos who rightly or wrongly, fervently do not), Bongbong Marcos and Sara Duterte retain their commanding lead among voter preferences for the presidency and vice-presidency for the coming May 2022 polls.  Despite the fact that Vice-President Leni Robredo has made an almost two-digit leap in her popularity rating since their last survey, she remains a rather distant second choice to Marcos.  Sara Duterte, on the other hand among the vice-Presidential bets, continues to enjoy a seemingly insurmountable lead over Senate President Tito Sotto and Kiko Pangilinan who is Robredo’s vice-presidential candidate. 

Other published surveys like the one conducted by Publicus Asia for the March 30 to April 6 period has come up with different numbers but project a largely similar trend for voter choices.  If indeed, we take all of these projections as snapshots in time and useful at the very least as tools for quantifying what can be extremely subjective and volatile indicators that are so difficult to accurately capture and analyze, then we can tentatively project possible scenarios. 

If indeed, the past few weeks have witnessed an unprecedented “pink surge” all over the country (proven arguably by the massively attended campaign rallies even in supposedly Marcos or Duterte bailiwicks followed by surprising political endorsements from local political leaders some who are even supposedly affiliated with the Duterte or Marcos grand alliance) that has seen Leni Robredo’s presidential campaign powered by exceptional grassroots voluntarism generating new enthusiasm, energy and a reawakened sense of purpose, then it is still theoretically possible for the Vice-President to repeat her come-from-behind win in the 2016 national polls and win again over Marcos who narrowly lost to her in the vice-presidential contest then.  However, even a surprising and unprecedented Robredo presidential upset win would necessarily be fraught with dire and even existential problems. 

A victorious President Leni Robredo will be pitted alone against a government bureaucracy controlled by the remnants of six years of Rodrigo Duterte’s populist strongman politics.  The new legislature will probably be dominated by pro-Duterte representatives and senators who would then present an enormous stumbling black to a Robredo administration eager to push through priority reformist legislative programs and initiate institutional reforms.  A Supreme Court packed with Duterte appointees will be another intimidating obstacle the new president will have to outmaneuver in the quest for an overhaul of the judicial system. 

A Duterte vice-presidency under a Robredo administration will not only create complications and coordination problems for Leni but it will by its very existence threaten the legitimacy and survivability of her fledging government.  A new locus of power with an uncooperative Sara Duterte in the center would not bode well for a President Robredo who has billed herself as a reformist candidate and one dedicated to setting right what is wrong with the current government setup.  She will have to be watching her back all the time while pursuing a policy of progressive reformist reform. 

This brings us to the millions of people like the millennial I met at 7 Eleven recently.  I should have told the young millennial to her face the abject truth.  For her vote in May 2022 elections to be truly impactful, it must transcend the so called Pink Revolution.  It must necessarily transcend even Leni Robredo herself and her slate of candidates.  It is not enough to vote for her and power her on to the highest office in the land. 

The vote for Leni Robredo must be a commitment for change, for a rededication to the ideals that almost forty years ago powered a revolution that crushed a dictatorship yet failed to live up to its underlying dream, a reformist revolution whose aftermath was quickly corrupted by the very same demons that it sought to destroy and banish.  EDSA I was that revolution and yet today even the yellow color that was its enthusiastic battle cry then has instead become tainted and soiled, discredited and rejected. 

If this revolution has to be pink or rose or whatever color of the spectrum, in the end it does not matter.  It must evolve to become a social movement that will be the engine of social and political change.  Leni Robredo will need it if indeed she will indeed, by a miracle, become our next president.  If she loses the race, then the clamor for change and the relentless energy that has powered her campaign and advocacies will still be there and by God, if the drone shots of her mammoth rallies can be believed, there is an untapped force there waiting to be properly harnessed that can be an irresistible engine that will sure rise to the occasion to challenge any attempted return to dictatorship and authoritarianism.

The May 2022 polls, despite opinions to the contrary that it is just another ordinary and inconsequential electoral exercise, one we as a nation will have to go through every couple of years or so, is actually one that will determine to a large degree the survival of our struggling democracy or the harbinger of its impeding demise.  The ideals of liberal representative democracy, freedom of speech and the press, public accountability, and justice and equality for all are being challenged all over the world.  Authoritarianism and the divisive and incendiary rhetoric of populist extremists dominate the political discourse. 

The results and, more importantly, the aftermath of the May elections will tell the world where we stand in this existential debate.  So this is why a vote for Leni Robredo is not and will never be, by itself,  enough.