By the time you’re reading this, the Philippines will be edging closer to judgment day for politicians vying for positions all over the land. May 13 is Election Day for senators (who are voted nationwide) and local officials from town mayors to governors to members of Congress.
These elections are pivotal in how the nation will be governed in the next three years and beyond. It’s because the politicians the people will vote into office will either be supportive of President Benigno Aquino III or not. Aquino has said the election winners will be key to his reform program, and he has been travelling around the country to persuade people to vote for his chosen candidates. This is especially true for the candidates for the Senate.
Besides the President, senators are the only other officials who are elected by a nationwide vote (unlike in the United States where senators, like congressmen, are voted by state). For this reason, senators are held in higher regard among all government officials, except for the President of course. For this reason too, the senate is seen as a breeding ground for future presidents.
Having to court all the voters around the country is of course a grueling task. Senatorial candidates have to cover practically all the major cities and towns around the archipelago. That takes a lot of time and effort. And money, lots of money. Senatorial candidates have to spend millions of pesos and mount nightmarish logistics in order to cover the whole nation.
But the rewards are handsome. Being a senator brings prestige and clout. Senators are next only to the President in terms of political power. And any one of them, in theory at least, is a potential president.
And it also pays in money terms. While the basic pay is low (like for all positions in the bureaucracy) senators annually get P200 million each in pork barrel funds (congressmen get P70 million each) that they can allot for projects anywhere they like around the country. The pork barrel system here works essentially the same way as the one in the United States in terms of the senators being able to pinpoint what projects to finance.
But here pork barrel money also finds its way into the senators’ pockets in the form of kickbacks. Pork barrel funds are allotted to specific projects favored by a senator and the projects’ contractors (favored ones as well) “kick back” part of the money to the sponsoring senator (or congressman). Thus, senators become rich just for that. In the Philippines, there are no senators who live in shanties, even if that’s where they used to reside before they became senator. That’s a fact of life here.
No wonder senatorial candidates (and all the other candidates for office here) shell out lots of money just to get elected. Campaigning requires a lot of money. The sheer logistics alone of campaigning need massive funding. And when you have to cover a lot of ground, the financial requirements of campaigning get multiplied. That’s why the winning candidates need to recoup their “investment” later on through kickbacks and other forms of stealing.
As you read this, the candidates for the May 13 polls are right in the middle of the campaign. Having started the campaign in the middle of last February, the senatorial candidates are by now exhausted, both physically and financially (candidates for lower office started their campaign last March 29 only). Those who have money on their own, those who have fat cats as backers and large political parties to support them, obviously have a built-in edge. The less endowed make do with physical exertion by trying mightily to cover as much ground as they humanly can. They will slog through to the finish line on May 12, if indeed they have the stamina to get there.
As of this writing, the senatorial bets who are doing well in the surveys are reelectionists Loren Legarda, Chiz Escudero, Alan Peter Cayetano, Koko Pimentel, Antonio Trillanes and Gregorio Honasan. Grace Poe, Cynthia Villar, Nancy Binay, JV Ejercito, Jack Enrile, and former senators Dick Gordon, Ramon Magsaysay and Jamby Madrigal are also within the ambit of winning.
Loren Legarda, the reported front-runner in the senatorial race, is a former television newsreader who has distinguished herself as an environmental advocate. Very ambitious (she has run for vice president twice but lost). Chiz Escudero too has higher political ambitions, having once flirted with the heady thought of running for president but relented when his expected campaign money didn’t materialize from a conglomerate tycoon. Alan Cayetano is a member of a brother-and-sister act in the senate who likes to fight brinkmanship games like impeaching presidents (then President Gloria Arroyo) and verbal jousts with his nominal boss, the senate president (Juan Ponce Enrile, who himself has figured in dramatic political episodes as a henchman of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s and 80s).
Grace Poe is the daughter of the late movie icon Fernando Poe Jr. who is respected, like both her father and mother (movie star Susan Roces), in the film community. From this Observer’s eyes, a liberal in political persuasion. Cynthia Villar is a former congresswoman and the wife of former Senate President and 2010 presidential candidate Manny Villar (the richest senator). Doing well in the surveys because of early visibility by engaging in charity work and capitalizing on the family name.
Nancy Binay is the daughter of Vice President Jojo Binay, and that’s her only apparent qualification and surely the only reason why she’s doing well in the surveys. Has never held any elective position before and spent many years as either her father’s or mother’s (who had both been mayor of Makati, a wealthy suburb of Manila) personal assistant. Jojo Binay won a startling and come-from-behind victory in the 2010 election as vice president, trouncing the front-runner, former senator Mar Roxas. Binay and Roxas appear to be the main protagonists in the presidential election of 2016. A possible third candidate is current senator Bong Revilla, a full-time movie star, but this is a ludicrous prospect if ever there was one.
JV Ejercito is a son of former President Joseph Estrada who had served as town mayor (in their bailiwick of San Juan, a suburb of Manila, and as congressman). The luckiest politician in modern Philippine political history is Joseph “Erap” Estrada. He too (!) was a movie star who later became a petty politician (town mayor of, where else, San Juan) who then was voted into higher office (senator, vice president, president) by the star-struck masses. He was convicted of plunder (amassing money illegally), then pardoned by the opportunistic Gloria Arroyo, and in 2010 ran for president and came in a distant second to President Aquino (Manny Villar was an even more distant third). And now Joseph Estrada is running for mayor of Manila against the incumbent Fred Lim, himself a former senator. Estrada, who has no qualification whatsoever for high office (his supporters will dispute this of course) has remained alive in politics despite having no gray matter between his ears and his conviction as a plunderer. He also maintains several wives. Only in the Philippines!
“Bam” Aquino is a cousin of President Aquino and, for those in North America who remember Ninoy Aquino, a Ninoy dead-ringer. Bam is a youth leader who has won several awards and is touted by his party and supporters as qualified for the senate. But, to this Observer, President should not have approved Bam’s candidacy for the reason that they’re cousins, thus taking away the President’s moral ground for attacking dynastic politics, which has been a bane here for keeping politics so feudal still, with political families controlling elections and how localities are governed and administered.
The other candidates mentioned above haven’t really distinguished themselves lately in any earth-shaking importance. Except for Miguel Zubiri, in a negative way, who won in 2007 on the strength of vote-rigging manipulations allegedly ordered by then President Arroyo. Zubiri’s bogus win robbed Koko Pimentel, a son of another senator (Aquilino “Nene” Pimentel), of four years of his legitimate term in the senate. Koko, naturally, is bitter about Zubiri’s usurpation of his victory, and has been very vocal about it in the ongoing campaign. What happens if they both win this time?
In all, there are about 33 candidates for the senate. The ones unmentioned here, although they have qualifications of their own, haven’t a snowball in hell’s chance of winning. A deserving candidate is Teddy Casino, currently a party-list congressman and civil society activist. But, being an independent candidate (meaning, no big campaign chest), he is unlikely to get to the winning column.
This current crop of would-be senators isn’t exactly the crème de la crème, but what to do? The present membership of the senate (and worse, also of the House of Representatives) is so undistinguished and undeserving that the potential winners this time aren’t likely to raise the quality of either chamber of Congress. And yet people continue to vote them into office.
As the saying goes: People deserve the government they elect. Please tell your relatives here not to waste their votes and vote wisely. The Philippines will continue to be in the doldrums if the quality of our leaders
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