“The Uniteam and the survey firms have been warned.”
Anyone who is interested in or understands geophysics knows that a tsunami is usually the result of an underwater seismic movement that causes seawater to move inland in enormous volumes, leveling almost everything in its path. Protection of communities and people is the responsibility of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology; questions regarding the possible occurrence of tsunamis are necessarily directed at Phivolcs.
The last tsunami to hit the Philippines —the only one in over a century—was the tsunami that rolled through Tacloban City in November 2013 in the wake of typhoon Yolanda (international code name Haiyan). Because tsunamis usually occur with great speed and without affording citizens a chance to seek information from Phivolcs, the people of Tacloban City were not forewarned and not prepared. Over 6,000 deaths and enormous economic loss were the result.
Nine years after Yolanda, another tsunami is coming, but this tsunami has been developing since 2021, and its victims have seen—or should have been seeing —it coming. In this instance, the government institution involved is not Phivolcs but the Commission on Election.
I refer to the Pink Tsunami—the tsunami of the kakampinks, The UniTeam of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Sara Duterte and their supporters is way ahead—by over 30 points—in the surveys, that Vice President Leni Robredo is hardly moving up and that the Vice President will not be able to catch up with Marcos before election day. The survey takers and Uniteam have in effect been telling the Filipino voters that the magnetic needle has not been moving at all.
All of that is false news. The needle has been moving. And it has been moving in the direction of VP Leni. Even assuming that the results of the earlier surveys—the responses of 1,400 out of an estimated 63 million voters—are credible, so many things have happened during the last few months that render untenable the suggestion that VP Leni has made no progress whatsoever toward closing the purported opinion survey gap between her and Marcos.
At the top of the list of against-Marcos things that have happened in recent weeks is the bringing into the limelight of the P23 billion—which has grown to P203 billion—tax on the estate of Mr Marcos’ dictator father. Then there are the magnificent Robredo volunteers—the kakampinks—all over the nation. There is also the steady stream of defection of politicians away from the other presidential candidates and toward Vice President Robredo.
But by far the most important of the against-Marcos developments that have taken place during the last few months has been VP Leni’s barnstorming across the length and breadth of this country. Her visits to the provinces have given the mass of Filipino voters—the silent majority—an opportunity to see for themselves that the Vice President is not the “babae lang yan” that her rivals have painted her to be. It is very difficult to believe that she converted few or no people to her cause in the course of her visits to the provinces.
Yes, another tsunami is coming. It is the Pink Tsunami—the tsunami of the Kakampinks—and two weeks from now it will roll across the land, leaving Uniteam and the opinion-survey firms in its wake.
Tsunami usually don’t give warnings of their occurence, but Marcos and his Uniteam are hereby given fair warning of the Pink Tsunami’s coming.
