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The danger in feeling so bad for too long is feeling too good at the slightest turn of good fortune
The results of the just-ended midterms inspire some hope that a shift has begun from the culture of fanhood and patronage that has defined our politics in recent history.
Particularly significant are the losses suffered by movie and television personalities, and a most notable loser is Bong Revilla, a senator seeking re-election. No one has juggled politics and entertainment more successfully than he has since Joseph Estrada, the actor and former president.
Revilla has been just about everything in the movies — actor, director, producer — and television presenter, too. A consistent election winner all these 30 years and high placer in senatorial races, he has been a natural shoo-in in the midterms. He is going out in his first defeat, and doing that well before retirement age — he is only 58.
Ben Tulfo also fails to make it, although not his brother Erwin — he is joining another brother in the Senate, a holdover. Their formula, which has proved only half-successful this time, has been to raise their profiles and cultivate influence with the authorities, at the same time vaguely intimidating them, by setting up a citizen complaints desk on radio and television and broadcasting official failings.
Ben’s loss derails somewhat the family’s ambition to join the club of political dynasties. It speaks to his rather confused conviction and shameless practicality that Erwin says he supports the constitutional ban on political dynasties, but doesn’t mind building with his brothers their own dynasty while Congress takes its time trying — and it has been trying for nearly 40 years now — to decide when to pass, or whether to pass at all, the law that shall implement the ban. Congress happens to be 80% dynasties.
The luck of the Villar dynasty is similarly mixed, but its loss is more unlikely and more dramatic. Longer and more entrenched in the patronage business by virtue of its ridiculous wealth, from realty mainly, the Villars also will keep two seats when the Senate reconvenes in July; a daughter is replacing her mother and joining a holdover brother.
One not averse to throwing her weight around and with energy that belies her 74 years, the Villar matriarch, Cynthia, could not have been intending to leave for good a perfect national platform for her. She has merely reached the limit of her Senate stay — two successive terms. If she were to keep the dynasty’s chief profile high, she could not be expected to stay long in the shadows.
Known before as merely the deferential power behind the throne, she was prompt to step up and come out when husband Manny, the former Senate president, lost his taste for politics and receded out of sight — he remains scarce — after losing a presidential election that all the surveys had assured he owned. The martyr’s son Benigno Aquino III, declaring at the last moment, spoiled it for him, in 2010. And just as well: Aquino’s is the presidency to beat by all proper accounts.
Presumably, Cynthia Villar ran for a seat in the crowded Lower House only to sit out the interval required between terms for her to become eligible for a senatorial comeback. But the midterms may have sealed her electoral fate: her own home district rejects her.
Meanwhile, two candidates given poor chances in the surveys place high in the Senate vote: Bam Aquino is second, Kiko Pangilinan fifth. Former senators both, they lost their last previous elections, Aquino for senator in 2019, Pangilinan for vice president in 2022. Those losses came at possibly the worst time to run for the likes of them — candidates who only had track records, no fans, neither clients. The time in fact belonged to Rodrigo Duterte. And given where we have ended up since his election as president, in 2016, we ought really to feel good about the midterms.
A dynastic patriarch from Davao City known for his trigger-happy, extra-legal, quick-fix ways, Duterte ruled the nation in more or less typical fashion for six years, leaving a trail of murder, corruption, and treason: Tens of thousands lay dead in his brutal and indiscriminate war on drugs; cronyism flourished in the usual cases of the “padrino system,” but particularly profitably on state deals that allowed grossly overpriced supplies during the COVID pandemic; a whole mineral-rich and strategic territorial sea was ceded to China for who knows what benefits in return.
Actually, notorious leadership had preceded Duterte, and it suited him perfectly. An ally of Gloria Arroyo, he used her influence in Congress, where she continued to sit as a deputy Speaker after her presidency. Known to be close to the Chinese herself, she is suspected as the one who put Duterte onto them. Once out of the presidency, thus no longer immune to suits, Arroyo, along with some senators from her time — including the once unbeatable and untouchable Bong Revilla — was taken to court for plunder but let off by a Supreme Court she had managed to pack with her appointees.
Duterte hasn’t been as lucky. Ferdinand Marcos Jr., his successor and initially accommodating and protective ally, broke with him, doubtless in a clash of political ambitions, and had him delivered to The Hague, in the Netherlands, to be tried by the International Criminal Court on charges of “crimes against humanity” for his drug war.
Duterte being the iconic face of dynasticism, patronage, and autocracy, and his arrest and extradition happening close to the midterms, his fate is viewed in hindsight as emblematic of the reversals of fortune observed in that election — observed not only in the senatorial vote but in many levels of contention. Indeed, the showing of the liberals and the progressivists has been far stronger now than in any election in recent years. In fact, this early it has engendered a robust sense of confidence for the presidential election in 2028.
But beware of overhope: The danger in feeling so bad for too long is feeling too good at the slightest turn of good fortune. – Rappler.com
