Hate against Marcoses got Bam, Kiko to win

IT was the wave of loathing for Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and even for his wife, in large part due to his treasonous surrender of former president Rodrigo Duterte to a foreign court, that carried the nearly retired Paolo Benigno “Bam” Aquino and Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan to the winning circle in Monday’s senatorial election.

It was history repeating itself in a way. In the 1971 Senate elections, after the Aug. 21 Plaza Miranda bombing which most Filipinos saw as President Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s handiwork, the opposition Liberal Party won five seats — four in the top slots — while the administration party, despite its massive use of government funds, won only three seats.

This time, Filipinos have concluded that even as Bongbong Marcos Jr. has failed miserably as president, he is so despicably power-greedy that he wants his clan to continue ruling the country indefinitely by politically assassinating Sara Duterte through impeachment and removing her father from the political landscape by imprisoning him in some faraway land. “He can’t do that to their beloved ‘Tatay Digong.'”

Marcos doesn’t understand at all that the Dutertes have moved to the realm of political legend, and it would take decades, as happened in the case of similar leaders elsewhere — Peron, Nehru, Lee Kuan Yew, Sukarno and even Thaksin — for their charisma to fade.

The head of a US-funded think tank had a surprisingly good insight: “For many Filipinos, their votes for Aquino and Pangilinan served as a ‘revenge vote’ against political toxicity, corruption and empty promises.” But that is such a rarefied abstraction.

Yes, it was a “revenge vote,” but against a real individual: Marcos Jr., who represented political toxicity, corruption and empty promises.

By any political calculus, Bam and Kiko were certified losers. Bam lost his bid for reelection for a Senate seat in 2019, beaten even by the colorless JV Ejercito, a son of President Joseph Estrada with a second wife. He backed out from his initial plans — reportedly because he couldn’t raise enough funds — to run for senator again in 2022 and instead became campaign manager for Leni Robredo’s presidential bid.

Bam

Robredo lost by a landslide to Marcos because of the charismatic Duterte’s support — which turned out to be the biggest mistake of his life. Another loser was Kiko Pangilinan, also losing by a landslide to Sara in the vice presidential race. Although the Robredo-Pangilinan team met overwhelming odds because of Duterte’s popularity, Bam was widely blamed for the sheer amateurishness of the campaign, and his very wrong assessment that people had not forgotten that Marcos’ father was a dictator who led the country to ruin.

Smarting under the accusation, Bam left the Liberal Party which would have made his assassinated uncle, Benigno Aquino Jr., turn in his grave. Instead, Bam formed some forgettable party with a handful of friends and obscure politicians. Politically, he was retired.

Kiko was similarly in retirement mode after the embarrassment of losing in the 2022 elections by 23 million votes, the biggest-ever margin in modern Philippine elections. He started to become more known as househusband of megastar Sharon Cuneta (alleged net worth P1 billion) and a gentleman-farmer, or lord of the manor.

Both led lackluster campaigns in the 2022 elections, reportedly because the usual tycoons who fund politicians’ bids thought they were certain losers to Marcos and the Duterte forces. Marcos had the government machinery and the funds, while Duterte had the charisma and popularity to ask his followers to vote for his own candidates.

The truth of the recent elections is that Filipinos became so wrathful of the Marcoses that they voted for candidates whom they thought will against this awful President. At the top of their list, of course, was Duterte’s personal assistant for most of his political career, Christopher Bong Go, and Ronald Dela Rosa, his police chief in Davao City during his two terms there. He appointed him Philippine National Police chief when he became president in 2016, the prime implementer of his campaign against illegal drugs.

Marcoleta

Party-list congressman Rodante Marcoleta, an erstwhile little-known legislator, won fifth place on the list of senatorial winners. He has been one of the few politicians to have defended the former president and condemned the government for turning him over to the International Criminal Court. I myself admire Marcoleta for defending Duterte’s foreign policy stance, for neutrality in the China-US rivalry and his challenging of the US-created dogmas on the South China Sea disputes — an unpopular though authentic stand.

That made him a prime target of the powerful US propaganda machine. Indeed, one day before the elections, The Manila Times cartoonist came up with a cartoon that is practically fake news, which showed a Marcoleta lookalike handing over the West Philippine Sea to China, depicted as a panda. As if that wasn’t enough, the cartoon even had Juan de la Cruz with a speech bubble: “I will never vote for candidates who will deliver our sovereignty to foreigners.” Voters didn’t buy that “fake cartoon”: Marcoleta got 15 million votes in what is his very first attempt at an elective position, getting more votes than veteran politicians Ping Lacson, Vicente Sotto III and Pia Cayetano.

The big mistake of Duterte’s other senatorial candidates was that, even as most of them were unknown and the elections the first time they sought a public office, they had not come out publicly in an intense, even furious way against Marcos — which was the winning campaign tack. Voters therefore weren’t so sure that they would represent their disgust toward this President. I’m sure the ardent anti-Marcos blogger, the US-based “Maharlika” (Claire Contreras) would have won if she had run for senator.

Rodriguez

Duterte candidate Vic Rodriguez would have been an excellent senator, but he seems not to have pulled his punches in terms of disclosing the dark secrets of the Marcoses.

He would have known such things as he was one of the closest of Marcos confidantes, his spokesman and chief of staff in the 2022 presidential campaign. He was Marcos’ executive secretary but was booted out after only two-and-a-half months.

He had told me it was the first lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, who prevailed over her husband to kick him out. Rodriguez even told me that among others, Liza was responsible for the appointment of the head of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office, a rich agency from which a corrupt official can very easily siphon funds from, and several other critical posts. He disclosed that the first lady was so powerful she got her husband to withdraw, just after a night during an overseas trip, his appointment as presidential chief of staff.

I’m sure people would have admired and voted him as senator if he had told the nation just a tenth of what he knew. But he didn’t.

To express their hate of the Marcoses, voters chose two candidates who were in their entire political career enemies of the Marcoses, whose names were synonymous with “anti-Marcos,” as it were: Bam and Kiko.

Bam even carried the name of his uncle that everyone in the clan believed Marcos had ordered killed — Benigno. Kiko, on the other hand, had been with the Liberal Party all his political life, the chairman for more than a decade. There is no other party in the country seen to be forever anti-Marcos than the Liberal Party.

Imee

Imee Marcos and Camille Villar were clever enough to bolt out of Marcos’ Alyansa at the eleventh hour. Imee even heroically led a Senate investigation that showed beyond any doubt the President’s kidnapping of Rodrigo Duterte was illegal, even under the so-called Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court. That convinced Filipinos that her loyalty to the Constitution would prevail over a blood relation.

Panfilo Lacson, Vicente Sotto III — both 76 years old — as well as Erwin Tulfo and Pia Cayetano would have become senators even if they ran under the weird Bunyog Party although they were clever enough to choose Alyansa, obviously for its machinery and funds. They are the embodiment of the deep flaw in elections: household names, achieved by any means, are more important than character or qualifications.

Camille’s father, Manny, has been in politics nearly as long as in business. When he asked his daughter to leave Alyansa, he knew Marcos was a goner, a politically dead man walking. If we had braver generals and colonels as we did in the mid-1980s, Marcos would be crawling out of Malacañang next week.

---

Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao

Twitter: @bobitiglao

Archives: www.rigobertotiglao.com

Book orders: www.rigobertotiglao.com/shop

The post Hate against Marcoses got Bam, Kiko to win first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.

Hate against Marcoses got Bam, Kiko to win
Source: Breaking News PH