"Lessons must be learned here."
"Lessons must be learned here."
A highly regarded maxim tells us that a person who does not look back at where he has come from will probably not get to where he wants to go. A corollary maxim is one that tells a person to review his plans so that he does not make the same mistakes anew.
The corollary maxim is very appropriate at a time when the candidates for President in the coming election – Vice-President Leni Robredo, Panfilo Lacson, Manny Pacquiao, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Isko Moreno and Leody de Guzman – are gearing up for a campaign that officially begins on February 8, 2022. The maxim expects them to review the record of the 2016 election in order to be able to determine what Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte and his organization did right and what Mr. Duterte’s opponents and their organizations did wrong. For the comparatively unknown mayor of a distant city to be able to defeat well-known personages like Senators Mar Roxas, Grace Poe and Miriam Defensor-Santiago was nothing short of a feat. And for those national personalities to be beaten by an essentially provincial figure was nothing short of a colossal upset.
It has been almost six years since the 2016 election and there has been plenty of time for review, analysis and dissection of what happened and did not happen in that election. By now, conclusions should have been drawn and lessons derived.
What went right for Rodrigo Duterte and what went wrong for his opponents in 2016? Put another way, what did Davao City’s mayor do that his opponents failed to do? Stated still another way, what mistakes did Rodrigo Duterte’s opponents make that he did not?
Two mistakes made by Mr. Duterte’s opponents spelled the difference between victory and defeat for Davao City’s mayor. One mistake related to the structure of the competition that Rodrigo Duterte faced; the other related to the attitudes of the mayor’s opponents.
The bigger – and decidedly the more damaging – of the mistakes made by Sen. Mar Roxas et al. in 2016 was their failure to present a united, formidable challenge to Mr. Duterte, who steadily rose in opinion surveys as the campaign progressed. Rodrigo Duterte garnered less than 17 million votes out of a total voting population of almost 60 million. Mr. Duterte is a plurality-vote president, and not an impressive plurality at that.
Those who saw the trend of Mr. Duterte’s survey numbers perceived possible danger and were convincing Sen. Roxas and Sen. Poe with increasing intensity to join forces in order to head off the pro-Duterte trend. But each of the two senators apparently thought that his or her success chances were good and thus maintained their separate candidacies. Ascribe it to a sense of responsibility or to plain chutzpah, but the fact is that they split the anti-Duterte vote. Had they chosen to unite their forces, Davao City’s mayor would have been denied victory.
Those who believe in the avoid-repeating-mistakes maxim were greatly saddened by the failure of Vice-President Robredo and her 1Sambayan co-convenors to unite the anti-Duterte administration forces and to form a single Opposition 2022 line-up. Clearly, one of the key lessons of the 2016 election has not been learned. Hopefully, the disastrous outcome of that 2016 situation will not be repeated next year.
The other big mistake made by the anti-Duterte forces in 2016 was the near-universal underestimation of the challenge posed by Davao City’s mayor. The palpable attitude of people in the Roxas and Poe camps was that a provincial pol like Rodrigo Duterte couldn’t possibly win a presidential election. They continued to maintain a complacent attitude even as Mr. Duterte’s survey numbers were rising alarmingly.
That was a grievous mistake that the anti-Duterte forces must studiously avoid making again. The trends of the survey numbers and popularity indicators of all the Presidential candidates – be he a labor leader or a former boxing champion or a dictator’s son – need to be closely tracked and carefully analyzed. A Duterte-like slip-through must be avoided at all costs in 2022.
ERRATUM: The “Tax Code” in the second sentence, 4th paragraph of my Dec. 10 column should have been “OEC.”
