Aiming for the Magic 12

Call him Pilo, short for Florin.

Pilo’s mother Lydia dropped out of school in sixth grade in Ilocos to find work in Manila, and became a kasambahay in Tondo.

There she met Rodrigo – not the man who would become president, but a guy who cleaned shoes, worked part-time as a messenger for telegram company RCPI and sold clothing in Divisoria.

They got married and have three sons; all were named after chess grandmasters. Pilo was named after Florin Gheorghiu, who gained fame as Romania’s first grandmaster in the 1960s.

The young Pilo excelled in school. After obtaining a degree in economics from the University of Santo Tomas, he was accepted as iskolar ng bayan at the University of the Philippines College of Law. He remembers taking four rides from Tondo to Diliman.

In 1990, he topped what is considered the toughest Bar exam ever because of the lowest number of passers (660 out of 3,978), with a score of 88.5 percent. He later earned his Master of Laws from Yale Law School.

After nearly two decades of teaching advanced constitutional litigation in UP Diliman, Pilo now hopes to serve the country as senator.

This is Florin Hilbay, and that’s a slightly longer version of his campaign spiel, delivered in Filipino.

He was the third and last solicitor general under Noynoy Aquino after Francis Jardeleza was named to the Supreme Court. Appointed at 40 years old, Hilbay became the youngest ever solicitor general (Frank Chavez was six months older when appointed).

Hilbay was part of the Philippine team, which included Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio and then foreign affairs secretary Albert del Rosario, that in 2016 won the arbitration case over the South China Sea brought by the Philippines against China before a UN-backed court in The Hague.

How did a guy who considered working as a bank teller become interested in the rough and tumble of Philippine politics?

A precocious child, Hilbay remembers his “political awakening” when he was just nine years old. It was the night of Aug. 21, 1983; he recalls that there was a blackout in Manila when one of his cousins dropped by to report that Ninoy Aquino had been shot dead.

Hilbay says the second phase of the awakening was in February 1986, during the people power revolution. As a young lawyer, he looked up to former Senate president Jovito Salonga, whose civic group Bantay Katarungan he later joined.

It’s a compelling life story. Will voters take notice in May?

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If surveys are any indication, voters aren’t trying too hard to know candidates better. So far, those who have been topping the surveys for the Senate are already established in politics, with strong name recall.

The pollsters have come under criticism for their methodologies, notably in allowing those who commission the surveys to provide the names of the candidates to be included.

This was seen as the reason for the higher rating of a candidate who commissioned a poll last year. He was still outside the so-called Magic 12, but within what cynics describe as “cheating distance” of the winning circle.

The pollsters have a spotty track record in predicting the outcome of the Senate race, especially for the last four or five slots. Also, the campaign period has not officially started. So there’s still a chance that candidates like Florin Hilbay, who are far from the Magic 12 in the surveys, and who can’t afford to carpet-bomb the country with their campaign billboards or buy TV airtime this early, might yet see their ratings rise.

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When he started out as solicitor general, Hilbay drew some public attention with his interest in surfing (the reason he shaves his head). But overall he was pretty low-key.

And he knows low-key doesn’t win elections in this country. So Hilbay is working on his messaging and sees the value of injecting a bit of entertainment in his campaign.

Visiting us at The STAR on Thursday night last week, we asked Hilbay what his campaign peg would be. His reply: the budget, which if mismanaged, he stressed, is a root of corruption and bad governance.

Hmm… OK, we know that. Now what about something sexier to draw the attention of the masses? Yes, he said, he could present his message in a way that would make the budget process and the utilization of tax money gut issues people could care about.

A group of artists will also be helping out and could provide back-up music in case he decides to play the guitar and sing while on the stump.

His team of course will be utilizing social media. But when all the other candidates are also on social media, how do you woo voters?

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Hilbay’s campaign shows the uphill battle faced by candidates with limited resources, especially after the Supreme Court – always with a soft spot for wealthy and influential parties – effectively ruled that there is no such thing as premature campaigning.

Now some kapalmuks are even presenting themselves as endorsers of products presumably sold or manufactured by their campaign supporters, so these candidates can pollute our landscape with more of their billboards.

And the Commission on Elections is powerless to go after them. The Comelec has been emasculated by politicians and the judiciary, reduced to supervising and counting the vote. Since Comelec actions and decisions can be reversed by the Supreme Court anyway, we should just eliminate that lower layer and bring everything before the SC pronto.

The SC ruling further placed candidates with limited resources like Florin Hilbay at a disadvantage. He has his supporters, who used the hash tag #pilopinotayo to persuade him to seek a Senate seat. If the surveys are accurate, however, Pilo Hilbay still has a lot of catching up to do.

At this point, it looks like what we will be getting in May will be the same old faces, with the same privileged family names.