Unexamined

By every measure, last year’s presidential election should be a watershed for Filipino politics. Yet it remains almost completely unexamined – especially by political scientists whose job it is to examine major turning points in our historical emergence.

Last year’s presidential elections saw the largest number of votes cast for the winning candidate. It was a lopsided count, with the winning margin greater than all the votes cast for the runner-up. It produced a supermajority for the winner in both chambers of the legislative branch and a political coalition that embraces nearly all political parties.

Furthermore, the winning presidential and vice-presidential contenders posted the strongest approval ratings in the months following their landslide win. That supplies them with awesome political capital that may be used to pursue bold reforms – or be squandered. The incredible margin of victory represents the great weight of public expectation for the new leadership.

The electoral results obliterated the political opposition as we have understood it. There is little indication this could be repaired. Since the votes were counted last year, opposition figures have regaled us with photographs of themselves having fun vacationing around the world. That is hardly the method for rebuilding a rallying point.

In the year since the votes were counted, the shattered opposition showed no sign of reconsolidating. They have not produced an alternative legislative agenda. They offer no new foreign policy strategy. In fact, they have said very little about anything and seem content nursing what is left of their name-recall by constantly posting inane images in social media.

We have a fairly clear idea about how the Marcos-Duterte tandem won by a landslide. They combined their bailiwicks: the Solid North and the Solid South. Throughout the campaign, they exercised message discipline. Every tracking poll conducted during the pre-campaign showed our people wanted unity most of all. They never strayed too far from that message.

In the pre-campaign, the winning tandem tirelessly wove together as many of the political parties and networks as possible. This enabled their campaign to mount a full-scale ground war, using the synergy of the allied networks to produce the votes.

By contrast, the Robredo-Pangilinan campaign never seemed to have evolved a strategy. They discarded the only political party they had. Small as it might have been, the Liberal Party could have provided some sort of platform to draw local powerbrokers into what turned out to be a losing campaign effort.

There are only three clusters supporting the Robredo-Pangilinan campaign: the regionalistic Bicol vote, the command vote of the Left and the Catholic clergy. These clusters did not function as a coalition, however.

The Bicol vote is, unfortunately, a small regional bloc. The leftist groups, for their part, loved to advertise their command voting base at three million. They seemed unable to deliver the voting base they claimed to support leftist candidates further down the ticket.

The electoral engagement of the Catholic clergy last year was unprecedented. Hundreds of priests signed declarations of support for the Robredo-Pangilinan tandem. It is true, we know from the results, there is no Catholic vote.

We could read the electoral outcome as a public rejection of both the leftists and the Catholic clergy as electoral brokers. It is hard to imagine they could easily rise from this crushing repudiation.

In a broader sense, last year’s vote seems a rejection of the alliance of forces that claimed the mantle of the Edsa Revolution. This is an alliance that presumed monopoly of political virtue. It is certainly an alliance that once won political power by being adept in demonizing all other challengers. Our voters are no longer seduced by their overbearing self-righteousness.

Earlier this week, on the first anniversary of her crushing defeat, Leni Robredo celebrated their doomed effort by launching an expensive book titled “Tayo ang Liwanag” (We are the Light). She loves collecting scraps and mementos. This book of photographs from a badly conceived campaign adds to the little museum of mementos from the campaign she maintains.

From the title of the book, it is obvious this political camp had done very little assessment of their debacle. The title is adamantly self-righteous – precisely the perilous attitude our voters rejected.

It is a spin on the “bobotante” thesis: the argument that our voters did not support the Robredo-Pangilinan tandem because they have been misled and misinformed. This is no way to win the people’s hearts.

Robredo, in her remarks, belabors this spin. She explains her humiliating loss on her rivals having campaigned for years ahead. That is a trite explanation. And a vacuous one. It does not account for the profound changes in the composition and disposition of our electorate.

This spin is a way to shield from examination the failures of her own campaign. Her campaign was poorly conceptualized, unscientific and badly executed.

Presuming some sort of moral ascendancy, they put no effort at reaching out to other political forces. They were content holding rallies driven by the drawing power of movie stars rather than actually listening to what our voters wanted to say.

In modern electoral politics, leaders listen to the people by consulting well-constructed public opinion surveys – not by chatting with random partisans on the sidelines. The Robredo-Pangilinan tandem not only shunned systematic opinion polls, they tried to discredit them. That was at their own expense, of course.

Democracies, it has been said, are governed by words. The Robredo-Pangilinan tandem had little to say that might recover voters.