pulitika – Katrina Stuart Santiago

I applauded when I heard over radio yesterday, through a Naga news report, that Naga Mayor Leni Robredo had categorically stated that she is not running for national office in 2028, and instead is keen on winning another term as mayor.

This politically made sense to me. Three years is not enough to do anything substantial on the local level, especially if one is undoing the kind of politics that was instituted by nine years (if not longer) of a predecessor.

This also just socio-culturally-politically made sense to me as voter, spectator, and citizen: Mayor Leni has disappeared from national discourse, and understandably so, since she lost the 2022 elections and especially since she won the 2025 local elections. There is absolutely no reason to imagine that she can win another presidential run, especially given the epic loss of the last one. Not only will there be enough material against her that will easily be revived and refurbished for an anti-Leni campaign; there will also be absolutely nothing to talk about in terms of her contributions on the national level since 2022.

I think VP Leni knows this. And I trust that she and her closest (female) circle know how unkind another presidential run will be for her and her daughters. It will be as painful for the rest of us, who campaigned for her in 2022, and who will know, deep down, that she is a non-starter at this point. We will be faced with a whole library of anti-Leni content that we failed to battle with in 2022. In 2028, we won’t even have enough weapons and ammunition to counter these attacks given her lack of national political work and engagement.

Which is why I cannot understand statements such as that of Senator Kiko Pangilinan’s, that insist that she can, might, should still change her mind, for reasons that are so deliberately naive, and also obviously conveniently silent on the other (more obvious) contenders.

Pangilinan says:

Today, given her rising poll numbers, I believe that Leni is in the best position to build the broadest and strongest unity not just amongst the ranks of the Liberal Party and our allies but to include all other groups and personalities outside our allied forces who are also looking to participating in the 2028 Presidential elections.

The Senator is being silly. The reason Leni is being polled at all is because she has refused to say she is not running for president. The moment polling companies remove Leni’s name from the list of choices, that is the only time we will see who can rise against Sara Duterte. And the sooner we have a sense of our choices, the better for all of us on the democracy side who are in this to ensure that we do not go through another Duterte presidency.

Leni polling higher than anyone else on our side is also no surprise given the nature of surveys; among short-term memory, name-recall, and pandemic visibility, she will be top of mind second to a Duterte. Those were, after all, the names of a former president and vice president.

The only reason polling companies will include Leni’s name now is if those who commission a survey insist that her name be put in. And if that is a strategy that even the Liberals etal will use for their commissioned surveys, then that just proves how unkind and manipulative they can be against someone who is, purportedly, their own.

More Pangilinan:

As her poll numbers grow, so will the number of politicians and groups of various political colors and civil society/private sector groups throwing their support behind her. A snowballing of support behind her bid is quite possible. With her at the helm going into 2028 and given her current poll numbers that are much higher now than in the run up to the 2022 Presidential elections, a formidable coalition, far broader and more inclusive than the one we forged in 2022, can be cobbled together and lead us to victory in 2028.

This is of course exactly what we thought in October 2021, when Leni announced (too late) that she was running for President, for exactly the same reasons that Pangilinan now invokes: “para sa bayan.”

Tigilan na ‘yang ganyang linyahan. Especially because this is also what Duterte propaganda has used as slogan since 2024, when Sara Duterte left the Marcos Cabinet, and even more so since 2025, when the former president was jailed. And because they have been saying this, at scale, across all platforms, more consistently than any of us on this side, this now has lost all meaning. Propaganda-wise, “para sa bayan” now invariably means another Duterte presidency.

Here’s more of Pangilinan sounding exactly like the dilawan-pinklawan that lost us the 2022 elections.

Now more than ever, having witnessed the largest corruption scandal in Philippine history, our people are crying out for good governance, and public accountability. Now more than ever, all those who believe in meaningful change and honesty and integrity in our public institutions must come together, sacrifice our time and effort for the sake of a better future for our children.

Big words ano. Good governance. Public accountability. Meaningful change. Honesty and integrity. I am not sure that any of these are the reasons why Leni is polling high at all. Political consciousness will tell us that more than anything, what people are remembering about Leni as VP is the work she did during the pandemic. At best, that was crisis management. And that is not at all what wins elections — because if that were true, she would’ve won 2022.

But Pangilinan’s biggest problem is that he even believes Leni to be the leader of the democratic movement that has a chance of winning 2028 for us.

I hope I am wrong but Leni’s refusal to run, may create a leadership vacuum that I am afraid cannot be adequately filled by other contenders, this in turn could lead to disunity amongst our ranks and the splintering of not just our forces but of all potential allies outside our ranks. The net effect will be the fielding of various political parties and groups of their respective Presidential bets, further weakening our chances and delivering victory to our adversaries.

This is echoed by Senator Leila De Lima:

umaasa talaga tayo na magbabago pa sya ng isip because for us, she’s still the most winnable among the possible opposition candidates.

Some things need to be said here. One, Leni has not been a leader of this movement for democracy since last year, when she won the Naga mayoralty race. In fact, we have not felt or heard Leni since she lost in 2022 — and that is good for her (kudos to her sense of distance and boundaries and self-care).

Two, when Leni ran in 2022, that did not stop other groups from fielding their own candidates. Ka Leody, Manny Pacquiao, Ping Lacson, Isko Moreno all ran, too, despite VP Leni. Pangilinan should stop kidding himself that they were able to gather a strong coalition around the Robredo-Pangilinan tandem.

Three, winnability was what we campaigned on, was the fuel that pushed us, in 2022. And we proved then that “winnability” to us will not mean winning with the larger majority of voters.

Lastly, whatever “vacuum” Pangilinan is worried about is a falsity. It’s only a vacuum because people like him insist that Leni is the the only person who has a fighting chance. This is absolutely false.

Which brings me to this question: why doesn’t Pangilinan — and many like him on the Liberal side — why doesn’t he consider someone like Risa Hontiveros a viable leader and contender for the 2028 presidential elections? Hontiveros has been at the forefront of urgent and critical investigations in the Senate, from the illegal POGO hubs to the West Philippine Sea; has been fighting with all of us for the divorce and SOGIE bills; has been an important voice on national issues since 2016, and even more so since 2022.

It is beyond me why there is such a silence on Hontiveros as, in fact, a level-up to Leni. The kind that will not dial back on her pro-divorce stance (as Leni did) when faced with the Catholic Church. The kind that will not suddenly compromise on her stance for equal rights and protection for LGBTQIA+ in the face of conservative criticism. The kind that can and will and has proven able to speak about democratic rights and systemic change in a language that we all understand, and in ways that are doable and imaginable and possible.

Pangilnan says:

We must forge the broadest unity possible for the cause of good governance and win this for our people and work together for a better future for our children.

Maybe the broadest unity is only possible when the Liberals like Pangilinan realize that when a woman says NO, she means it. And when another woman is willing and absolutely able to take on that spot vacated by the woman who said no, then we should also respect her enough to see her, name her, and work with her.

The burden at this point is not on Leni to change her mind. The burden is on the Liberals to tell us why they cannot imagine a 2028 battle for the presidency without her. ***

There are many reasons to be entertained by the news that Rodrigo Duterte’s legal defense has decided to request that the International Criminal Court (ICC) “adjourn hearing indefinitely” because he is “not fit to stand trial.”

It is especially entertaining if one considers that for the past six months since his arrest, and since the family has been able to visit Duterte at the ICC Detention Center in the Hague, visiting family members have consistently stepped out to talk to the crowd, big and small, on what they call Duterte Street. And each and every time, they reassure this people: Duterte is okay.

If you’re on the Tiktok algorithm of the Dutertes, this is in fact what props it up. With the Vice President away from the Philippines most of the time, and her brothers not really worth any media coverage, what is here is massive content on Duterte based on updates from these family visits. And at no time did it seem like he has “cognitive impairment in multiple domains” that would make him unfit for anything at all.

During the June 2025 visits of Congressman Paolo Duterte, the image painted of the old man Duterte was of someone who has all his mental faculties together. According to Pulong, on June 16, Duterte had this message for his followers who were waiting outside the detention center: “Alagaan ang Pilipinas, alagaan ang mga Pilipino. Kaming mga pulitiko dadaan lang, ang importante bumuti ang Pilipinas during their time.” (Take care of the Philippines, take care of Filipinos. We politicians will be passing through, the important thing is to make sure the country become better during our time.)

And while both Pulong and his sister Vice President Sara Duterte would talk about how thin their father had become, the narrative was also consistent: thin, but okay.

(more…)

I do not doubt that there is a whole lot of reasons to continue discussing the impeachment of VP Sara Duterte, specifically whether it is right or wrong that Senate President Chiz Escudero is doings things at his own pace, and whether that puts the whole impeachment at risk and / or risking the possibility of getting an acquittal for VP Sara. I tend to think that SP Escudero is far smarter than all of this. He’s not new to this circus, and certainly has engaged long enough with politics in this country to know not to put even his own political career at risk by a failure to thoughtfully and carefully flesh things out, anticipate outcomes, adjust as things unfold.

And if your biases against Escudero don’t cloud your judgment, he actually made a lot of sense at that February 20 press con, talking about how the Senate, in fact, is taking the necessary steps it can take at this point in time, owing to the fact that the Senate is not in session, and many Senators are busy campaigning either for another term in office, or for other elective positions. He is firm in the refusal to rush the proceedings, or to call a session, and denies either side of the political spectrum to pressure him into doing or saying anything: “I will not dignify nor listen to partisan legal opinions or positions for or against the impeachment of VP Sara.”

At this point in our political discourse, that pretty much gives Escudero the license to ignore everyone. For good or bad, partisanship is the rule these days, not the exception. (more…)

The thing with six years of a fascist leadership like Duterte’s, built on fragile masculinity and misogyny and violent rhetoric and male chauvinism is that it changes us culturally. Women and the LGBTQIA+ community are more sensitive, and therefore angrier, and rightfully so. We are also exhausted.

But the men. Oh the men.

It’s one thing to have had to deal with the likes of Banat By and Jeffrey Celis during Duterte years and the first years or so of Marcos governance when SMNI continued to give them a platform. It’s another thing altogether to find that even men who should know better, ones who claim they are better, media personalities even, can use exactly the same tone and tenor, the arrogance, the same machismo, as that which the six years of Duterte had enabled and encouraged.

And of course this could only surface at scale when they are talking about a woman like Sara Duterte. Because there is nothing like a woman in rage to get men frothing at the mouth.

I will admit that the impulse to label SaraD for her year-end political performances was strong. After all, we had come from six years of old man Duterte doing those midnight madness press cons, and her Blairwitch Project version just brought it all back. Consider too that those press conferences about imagining beheadings and wanting to exhume the dead and talking to assassins to take down the Pres-FirstLady-SpeakerOfTheHouse trio were happening alongside Congressional Inquiries where she refused to take the oath and Senate Inquiries where she shiminetted her way through all the questions about accountability and public funds.

Which is all to say that it was easy, too too easy, to simply fall back on calling her every kind of crazy after the two presscons. After all, we called her father that, too. But what is unique to SaraD is that macho commentary reduced her to only that. And given the digital and media platforms that have the same male opinions on repeat, then it is normalized as discourse for a certain algorithm: the woman in rage is an unhinged woman.

Ronald Llamas is at the forefront of this male chauvinism, but it is because he is being given the platform across mainstream media’s Storycon (also hosted by men, with a woman on live video) and guestings on shows like Karen Davila’s Headstart, as he always is on digital platforms from Christian Esguerra to Richard Heydarian, and is co-host of Bilyonaryo’s four-male panel called Kwatro Kantos. These hosts practically give Llamas free rein over conversations, and in relation to the SaraD press cons already frame the conversations so that it justifies the sexism.

Read the rest on Vera Files.

Still breathing a sigh of relief. At least that’s me, half the time, three years in.

Having shifted quite easily from campaigning heavily against a Marcos return in 2022, to watching BBM perform his Presidential becoming, it was only a matter of time before I realized I had eased into this new status quo with a voice in the back of my head: thank heavens it’s not another version of Duterte. At least not a fascist of the same scale, at least not going off the rails at midnight press cons, at least not falling back on threats and fear mongering to justify violent anti-people government policies, at least not shameless and disgusting in all the worst ways populists across the world are.

Yes, BBM is still a Marcos, yes. And yes, he is still not taking responsibility for the murder of citizens and the plunder of national coffers during his father’s time, yes.

But.

This Marcos is not a Duterte. Not so far. (more…)

Katrina Stuart Santiago

Katrina Stuart Santiago

Category Archive for: pulitika

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