(Part Two)
“Your minds, please. Do not vote according to your heart.”
One of my admired former senators, Franklin Drilon, who has made Iloilo City such a pretty destination for foreign as well as domestic tourists alike, has called the Alyansa senatorial slate a “hodgepodge”.
In Bisaya, “saksak sinagol”. In Tagalog, with apologies to our national dessert – “halo-halong pilit”.
Drilon blames it on “our present political system”. In this space and in other papers where I have written columns in the past two decades, I have always maintained that we have a crazy political set-up. Political parties are non-existent; what we have are mere flags of personal or dynastic convenience.
Lulubog-lilitaw.
LDP, then Lakas, then LAMMP, then Lakas once again, then Liberal, then PDP, and now, Lakas +++.
Lakas, currently owned by Speaker Martin, is the leading party in the HoR, but can only put up one candidate for senator, Napoles client Bong Revilla. So it has to create an “alyansa” with the oligarch-owned parties, NPC, NP and NUP, the last having no senatorial material. Not to forget Partido Federal, resurrected after being used in 2022, then placed in cold storage.
What everybody and his mother swore to in Duterte’s era, PDP, can only field three senatorial candidates: Bong Go, Bato and Philip Salvador. What everybody and his father proudly joined in PNoy’s time, the LP, has also only Kiko Pangilinan, solamente. Bam Aquino has ditched his cousin’s party for another, though the LP will support him still, so that Kiko will have a partner in the hustings.
Chel Diokno, who would have been one out of five names I would vote for next May has pragmatically opted to go with the Akbayan party list.
The Makabayan bloc is fielding a complete slate for the first time. All of them, I am sorry to predict, will not make it, even if some of them are better qualified than many in the Alyansa. But it seems their motto is “try and try till you succeed”.
So now we go to the decimated PDP, abandoned even by Francis Tolentino, who won in 2019 because of FPRRD’s support.
Who else will join Bong and Bato in the PDP? From the Davao grapevine, I hear they will be joined by Gringo Honasan and Dante Marcoleta, perhaps Mayor Baste Duterte.
Meanwhile, Doc Willie Ong who is battling for his life in a foreign hospital, has sent Doc Liza, his very amiable wife to Manila with a special power of attorney to file his COC. May he win the battle of his life along with a seat in the Senate so that after decades since Juan Flavier, we will have a doctor who will fight for the health of poor Filipinos.
Now that Imee Marcos has declared herself independent of the Alyansa, Ping Lacson has as well declared so.
That’s what happens when, as Drilon says, you forge a hodgepodge.
We also have the celebrities who keep going back to the Senate, making it a retirement haven, “laos na sa takilya” but still armed with a single qualification to win – name recall and nothing more.
FPRRD who along with Inday Sara, maintains political clout in Mindanao and Central Visayas, not to mention wide swaths of Region 8 and Negros Island Region, would best just choose some names to endorse, and gift them with strength coming from their spheres of influence. But please, don’t waste your time on sure losers who would still lose even if a thousand angels come down to help them.
The former president told this writer that he will likely endorse just seven names, whom he describes as the “Magnificent 7”, one short of the Otso Diretso which lost wholesale in 2019.
I am reading four surveys, done at about the same time frame, and they have widely different results, which is surprising to this political technician, but which hopefully means people have yet to really make up their minds.
Your minds, please. Do not vote according to your heart. It will only result in heartbreaks again and again.
I can only pray that the electorate will be a tad wiser this time, vote for the independent-minded, and save the Senate from forever becoming the theater of the absurd.
