Tag Archives: Liberals

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Leave Leni Alone #Halalan2028

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. ***

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Leni and the Liberals

Duterte has made unity easy. He, along with the Marcoses, make the enemies of 2022 clear.

The vision for 2022 elections is also easy to unite on: unseat Duterte, block Marcos, stop the attacks on the people, recover from the incompetence and corruption, and take back democracy. The first step was always to build the broadest, widest coalition of anti-Duterte block-Marcos actors, that could in turn unite a majority of citizens, who are then empowered and emboldened to work on pushing for the candidate we all can believe will work on the vision for a better 2022.

VP Leni is certainly one of those candidates. Were Ka Leody not running, she would be alone in the uncompromising stand against the Marcoses getting back in power, and against the violence and incompetence of Duterte. Isko remains a distinct possibility if we are going to go beyond his budget-Duterte rhetoric and discuss instead what he is capable of doing, given the platform he is running on. But VP Leni, especially given everything she mapped out in a talk with The Rotary Club on October 14 is far far ahead of this pack, if we are thinking saying the right things for middle class support, and if we are thinking of who is on our side.

BUT the promise of unity is not one she can make, the notion of “independence” that she carries nothing more but an act. A symbolic act she admits, but now being revealed to be an act and not much else. Yet.

This has little to do with who she included in her slate—I can accept as strategic the need to build a slate that can beat the Cayetanos and Tulfos of this world, and therefore the need to have Binay, Escudero, Legarda on that list.

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Grace #Halalan2022

Talking 2022 means talking about the elephant in the room that is Grace Poe.

It is clear to anyone who has a sense of how elections are won and lost, who has as starting point Duterte-Marcos’s massive propaganda machinery, who looks at surveys critically vis a vis one’s own political biases, that the only way to win this is to bring together the business sector, the middle classes, and the mass vote behind one candidate.

It was clear, since the 2019 Senatorial election results, that this would be Grace.

And no, you’re not talking to a Grace Poe fan. Search through this site and my social media accounts and you’ll see that I have had the worst opinions of her in terms of where she stands on oligarchs, at the same time that I have been impressed by how she takes the side of the transport sector and commuters in the Senate inquiries she’s led. This doesn’t make me two-faced. It makes HER a Senator, and it makes me a citizen who agrees as much as I might disagree with the people in power.

But that IS the thing isn’t it? The right to vote is tied to a sense of our responsibility to nation, not to the people we vote into positions of power. We are not their fans, or their followers; positions of power aren’t Facebook Pages or Twitter accounts. This is about citizenship and about having a sense of what nation needs at any given point, relative to the decisions that our leaders make for us, in our names, using our funds, regardless of whether we voted for them or not.

No one seems to see this anymore, and this is no surprise. Duterte propaganda has pushed even the most sane, most rational among us to turn to fanaticism and troll discourse, which is easy to fall prey to on social media, where people across Left to Liberal leanings have enjoyed deeper echo chambers. Yes, you will get leaders, from VP Leni to Makabayan talking about uniting the opposition, but none of that matters when their actors are first to engage in divisive, DDS-like behavior on public platforms.

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State of OUR nation #SONA2021 #Halalan2022

It seems apt that the last State of the Nation Address of the worst, most violent, most incompetent president of our lifetime happened right smack in the middle of a vicious Delta variant that State propaganda denies is spreading, 17 months into the Covid-19 pandemic and government’s failed, unscientific, anti-people response.

It also happened after almost a week of endless rains that have sunk the poorest of our communities in flood waters. Which followed a Taal Volcano eruption that meant whole communities being forced to evacuate. Two days before the SONA, there was a level six earthquake in the wee hours of the morning.

None of these warranted an appearance from this president. Then again, that might have been a good thing: after all he thinks cracking jokes in the middle of a crisis is okay, and he believes that every problem can be solved by police presence—just like he finds comfort in IATF briefings filled with retired military generals who know nothing about science or medicine, pandemic response or public health.

Propaganda lang malakas
In the five years of Duterte the only thing it has maintained, has done well, and has succeeded in is its propaganda machinery. It’s so so good that those of us on the side of democracy like to deny it exists, if not like to deny the kind of power it has. Our denial of course is part of why Duterte has stayed in power despite our anger and disgust, the movements we have fashioned. There is no winning a war we are in denial about. (more…)