Countdown

This early, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. says he is already counting the remaining days in his presidency.

For the sake of building a strong republic, the political opposition should be doing the same.

Seeing how impressively organized the Marcos campaign was for the 2022 race, there’s no reason to doubt his pronouncement. He said he wanted to make every day of his presidency count: so many “urgent” things to do, so little time!

Some thought it was just the latest effort to rehabilitate the Marcos name, to show that Junior does not intend to perpetuate himself in power – unlike Ferdinand Senior and Imeldific, who acted as if they wanted to be maharlika rulers forever.

The most cynical interpretation of BBM’s statement is that it was a subliminal message of support for Charter change – something that is supposedly not his priority – to show that the latest Cha-cha initiative pushed by his House allies is not about term extensions for officials led by the president. Once Cha-cha gets rolling, of course, nothing can stop its proponents from introducing such a proposal.

Whatever BBM meant by that statement, the political opposition must also be counting down to 2028, and before that, to the 2025 midterm elections.

In just two months, the Marcos 2.0 administration will be marking its first year. Criticism during BBM’s Year One has been largely muted, not necessarily because he has done a spectacular job, but more because he has avoided making mistakes.

Also, like post-pandemic economic performance figures, BBM has benefited from being gauged from a low base, with Rodrigo Duterte as his predecessor.

After six years of Duterte’s obsession with killing and his late-night stream-of-consciousness harangues peppered with expletives, insults and sexist jokes, Bongbong Marcos has been a vast improvement.

A significant drop in the number of drug killings has improved the Marcos image in liberal democratic capitals. And the reopening of the economy after the crippling pandemic lockdowns has revived businesses and restored jobs.

Members of the political opposition have their work cut out for them in 2025.

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The first order of business is to stop moping about the 2022 election debacle and to instead look on the bright side: 20 million voters DID NOT pick the BBM-Duterte tandem. That’s an enormous number of people whose support can be harnessed.

After 10 months, the losers should be tired of wallowing in self-pity. A brutally honest post-mortem of the election results must be conducted by the opposition or non-administration forces. It’s simplistic to pin the blame for the Marcos-Duterte landslide victory mainly on disinformation and historical revisionism through the clever use of social media particularly TikTok.

Even before the official start of the campaign period, BBM was already rating high in surveys on the possible presidential candidates. This was despite the fact that there was no lack of information on the human rights abuses, kleptocracy and disastrous crony capitalism during the martial law regime.

Yet BBM still won the presidency, by the largest margin ever. And so did Daughterte, whose father – when he was campaigning for the presidency – did not even bother to gloss over his reputed penchant for killing, but in fact promised to do more of the same. Voters embraced the “kill, kill, kill” spiel and gave Rodrigo Duterte a resounding win. Why?

Duterte’s landslide victory in 2016 should have already prompted what became the political opposition to shift to emergency mode and assess all the possible reasons for the loss, beyond blaming a supposedly uninformed electorate.

There should be a serious effort to understand voter preferences in the past three elections – an openness to the possibility that people had become cynical and were genuinely disenchanted or unimpressed with the issues that have long been the focus of the electoral campaigns of groups associated with the so-called yellows and reds.

Messaging, image building, the information platforms to be used for selling opposition ideas, alliance-building – these matters are as critical to an election campaign as fund-raising.

We see campaign teams brainstorming on these matters in movie / TV shows, many of them based on real election races in other countries.

There are currently gut issues that the non-administration groups can latch onto, starting with food-driven inflation.

In the year leading up to the 2022 race, the message of voters to candidates amid the desolation of COVID-ruined lives and livelihoods was, “SOS: how can you help us ASAP?”

The opposition and non-administration forces focused on the need for good governance. The Marcos-Duterte team gave away ayuda, entertained on TikTok, promised rice at P20 a kilo and yet another one-year extension of the terms of barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan officials. We all know the election outcome.

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The second order of business for the opposition and non-administration forces is to pick a leader.

It’s a reflection of the state of this segment of our society that we have to ask who is the current leader of the political opposition.

The opposition personality who occupies the highest post in government is traditionally deemed as the leader of the opposition.

But the Senate has only two opposition members – Risa Hontiveros and Koko Pimentel – and neither has taken on the mantle of leadership.

We asked Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman this week who is the leader of the opposition. He replied that the Liberal Party is still alive, and he is its president.

He told “The Chiefs” on Cignal TV’s One News that the party is in fact reassessing its approaches to campaigning, in preparation for the 2025 midterm race and the bigger battle in 2028.

There are talks that opposition forces are scouting for a leader with no clearly defined political color, which will make the individual more of a non-administration personality.

Whatever the tack may be, the forces must see that the period of preparation for the next elections began as soon as the 2022 results became known.