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Philippines
Friday, March 29, 2024

Listen to your mama

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The Inday Sara show has packed up,” announced Davao City Mayor and presidential daughter Sara Duterte last week.

She was referring to her public tiff with the political opposition, which had taken issue with her pronouncement, among others, that a candidate’s honesty need not be a requirement in running for public office. Duterte called Vice President Leni Robredo a fake vice president, with fake courage.

Ms. Duterte’s mother, the President’s former wife Elizabeth Zimmerman, called the mayor, told her to stop picking fights with political adversaries and to be kind before anything else.

Listen to your mama

“She sort of scolded me,” the mayor revealed, even as she added: “Let’s see how long I will last.”

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In these last few weeks before elections, Filipino voters are seeing, as always, just how far politicians will go to win their votes. There are different takes on which qualifications reign supreme – executive or legislative experience, for example, educational attainment, leadership potential, public appeal, a moral lifestyle.

Out of all these, however, good character is a baseline that must be met by all candidates. This is not to say that any good, upright person would immediately be deserving of a particular office – far from it. Nonetheless, not even sterling expertise, mass appeal or overwhelming name recall would amount to anything if candidates did not posses some basic traits.

And contrary to what they may believe, these values are often taught them by their parents, in the nurturing environment of the home – except, of course, if their parents are themselves evil to begin with. The virtues of honesty, kindness and hard work stand out. We will try to imagine our public officials as impressionable children being taught, for instance, not to take their classmate’s lunch, or not to fight with their siblings, or to always do their homework. We imagine them following these basic rules until these become ingrained in their systems and shape the way they conduct themselves later on in life.

Many external factors come into play as they get older. There are conflicts of interest, moral ambiguities, the evil-and-lesser-evil dilemmas to contend with. In many cases we are sure they do not anymore recognize themselves from the young, idealistic youngsters they used to be.

Amid these real-world, grown-up complexities, candidates would get by if once in a while they would stop and think what their mothers, for instance, would have said to them. Sometimes the simplest and most basic tenets would hold. In the end, Filipino voters would still wish to have leaders with character – not ones who are characters, or worse, caricatures.

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