If there is a lesson to be learned from the outcome of the 2019 elections, it is this: the Duterte machine — guns, goons, gold, plus propaganda — is a success, by ALL counts, and it doesn’t even matter that chief propagandist Mocha didn’t get a seat in Congress.
It has succeeded because we were all oblivious to, decidedly ignoring, all the signs that this leadership would move hell and high water to get the Senate and Congress it needs to continue, Presidential ill-health and worsening poverty and discontent notwithstanding. To be clear: the election results are not a referendum on Duterte — there was enough irregularity, questions of fraud, massive vote buying to disabuse us of that (— it’s so bad Duterte himself has pretty much admitted to fraud.)
But the fact that they were able to get those Senators proclaimed despite all those irregularities, with nary-a-difficult-to-ignore public outcry, that is the referendum we should be looking at. It is also the “referendum” of the past three years. The truth is, beyond the count, we had let Duterte and his people get away with “rigging” this election, so to speak, ensuring a win, no matter how well the opposition(s) campaigned and how much money they put out (think Bam Aquino and Mar Roxas).
Talo na tayo sa eleksyong ito bago pa man tayo bumoto, bago pa man magsimulang magbilang ang COMELEC. We were losing long before campaign season, long before people even declared their intention to run. In fact, by the time we realized there was a slate we could all get behind, we had already lost. How? Let us count the ways.
(1) Letting them get away with very early campaigning. Bong Go — along with many other of Duterte’s people — were campaigning long long before they even announced they were running. But Go is extraordinary because not only did he have visibility as Duterte’s Special Assistant, he was also consistently equated with the Malasakit Centers that government has been opening AND funding since early 2018. These centers came with campaign tarpaulins and IDs that had Go’s face on it; billions of taxpayers’ money was being used to establish these centers. None of us cared; mainstream media barely made a fuss, even when UP-PGH students did. In the beginning he was only seen as “representative” of the President; by January early 2019 when he was already running for the Senate, it was declared that this was his brainchild. When COMELEC asked that his tarps be taken down from the Malasakit centers in March, it was too late. His campaign was complete. The win made believable.
(2) Different parties, same Duterte. While it didn’t escape us that two of the Senatorial slates — one of Partido Demokratiko ng Pilipinas’s (PDP) the other of Hugpon Ng Pagbabago’s (HNP) — were both actually pro-Duterte slates, it did escape us that in local elections, while many were PDP (as many Liberal Party members in Congress shifted allegiance when Duterte won), many were also from PFP, i.e., Partido Federal ng Pilipinas. As the name suggests, is also a pro-Duterte party. This means that while we were being given the illusion of choice in the local elections, in reality any choice was a Duterte win. And if you control the local, in many ways you control the national. Something to think about: if the LGUs are pro-Duterte, how easy was it for non-Duterte Senatorial candidates to campaign in their areas? The answer: NOT easy.
(3) Hundreds of millions in campaign funds. A look at the pre-campaign and campaign spending of Duterte’s winning Senators reveal that ultimately what we engaged in was a losing battle. Go’s pre-campaign ad spending was at over P400 million pesos, while his SALN declares wealth at a mere P12 million; Marcos declared (ill-gotten?) wealth is at P24 million and her pre-campaign ad spending was at P413 million. While this was something PCIJ informed us about as early as February 2019, there was no changing both survey results and actual election results: the numbers do not matter, not anymore. Neither did it matter that we all saw those Marcos and Go billboards very very early in the game, and we all knew it was early campaigning, but COMELEC didn’t care. Between officials turning a blind eye, a critical public that’s ignored, and hundreds of millions in cash from who-knows-what-sources: the election was won before we even voted.
(4) Media is not on our side. While mainstream media tried very very hard to be relevant throughout the 2019 pre- and official campaign periods, ultimately it was bogged down by many things: fear of Duterte, mostly (if you’re ABS-CBN you were worried about your franchise as well — another Duterte success). Those pre-campaign forums and later on Senatorial debates, the interviews with candidates, while helpful for the non-administration candidates, barely made a dent in results. It’s telling too that a majority of those who did win refused to be part of media-initiated fora (with the exception of Bato Dela Rosa who was just out to do a show, turned the CNN Debate to his advantage given his base). We raised a fuss about candidates who refuse to do debates as bad choices, but as with many of the things we did online, it didn’t matter.
(5) We got stuck on social media. Social media is an echo chamber, and nothing proves that truer than the fact that we had the best choices for Senators in this election, but none of them made it. We were noisy sure, we were campaigning online, we were (over-)sharing, we were rabid even — but did it make a dent? Beyond our (very) small circles, it didn’t. It was clear we needed to go to the ground, our competition was doing it long before campaign season started after all, but I think at some point we didn’t even really know how.
In this sense, we did, without a doubt, serve the election to Duterte’s people on a silver platter. Sad, but true.
On the upside, we proved during the 2019 campaign that there are more of us who are on this side of issues: we are listening to each other, agreeing on some very basic things like human and basic rights, corruption, China, the state of the environment, the fight of our farmers — already a major feat given three years of Duterte propaganda deliberately sowing seeds of division and polarization. We proved that we can go beyond these historical and manufactured divides, and even not care for these at all, as we built our own Senatorial slate, one that we all agreed is what we need at this point in time. We all agree that the lack of unity is what does us in, is what the other side has over us.
While we lick our wounds, I’m pretty sure we have the same questions, and we’re all searching for answers. But maybe the next lesson to be learned is this: we do not start with: “How do we educate the masses?” That just feeds the anti-elitist propaganda that Duterte has won on the past three years.
For now, the only question I have an answer to is “When should we start?” And the answer is now. Lest we lose 2022. ***