🇵🇭 One month countdown begins

Hello friends!

If you’ve checked the Philippine press this morning you will have seen the headers have changed over and the countdown clocks are here: it’s 30 days, baby! 

So, how does the presidential race look exactly a month out? Still very scattered with one horse out ahead of the pack, but there’s a whole of April to get through and if I’ve learnt much about the Philippines it is that things can turn absolutely bananas in no time. Or it might not! 

I’m deeply obsessed so expect a busy month,

Erin Cook

Dictator’s son Bongbong Marcos continues to lead the pack in recent pulling, but that gap has narrowed ever so slightly. Pulse Asia numbers show him dropping from 60 percent in January and February to 56 percent in March. VP Leni Robredo, meanwhile, gained nine points on Jan-Feb reaching 24 percent for the same period. Manila Mayor Isko Moreno, who I truly expected to have been profiled and fanboyed far more by the foreign media, drags at 8 percent and Manny Pacquaio on 6 percent. 

I’m interested in two things here. Firstly, Robredo is gaining dramatically. Almost 10 points inside a month aren’t so bad at all — but is it good enough? Today is the one-month countdown point and at this stage, we’re looking at a romp for the Marcos clan. Even if the Philippines didn’t operate a first past the post system a lead like this, assuming of course that polling holds, is near insurmountable by any candidate in any race anywhere. 

Secondly, the Pacman and Moreno are not doing great at all. These are two ultra-famous personalities who have not cracked the 10 percent. For Pacquaio, particularly, I’m intrigued. When I first started writing this newsletter six years ago, he moved from the House of Representatives to the Senate setting off a fresh flurry of ‘will he be president someday?’ from sports pundits the world over, a development I would quickly learn to be routine. 

The poor showing has confounded backers so deeply there’s doubt that the polling could even possibly be correct.  PDP-Laban party chief and powerful senator Koko Pimentel told ABS-CBN, as per the Inquirer, that he had lost his trust in surveys following the pandemic and unequal access to technologies required to accurately poll the stratum of society. “I call it a narrow path to victory but still it is there,” he said. Very narrow indeed.

Isko Moreno, on the other hand, was absolutely primed to cop the Joko Widodo in 2014 or Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit in 2019 treatment with a lot of foreign eggs in his very, or at least comparatively, palatable basket. The Moreno camp is responding, in my personal view, quite intriguingly to the numbers which have always shown him trailing Robredo.

Polling not commissioned by the campaign team but orchestrated by Tangere — via an app in which users fill in surveys for cash — showed a ‘three-way race’ in which Moreno fared much better, particularly as the ‘second-choice’ candidate, which Pulse also found. “If Leni is the one going to withdraw, 51 percent of her supporters are going to Mayor Isko. If it’s Mayor Isko who withdraws, only 17 percent will go to Leni. In fact, it will strengthen more the Marcos candidacy as gleaned from this survey,” Aksyon Demokratiko president Ernest Ramel said during a press conference yesterday, as reported by Rappler. 

He doesn’t seem ready or willing to throw his weight behind Robredo and offer a united front and neither does Pacquiao, who sees his campaign as more of a mission from God. 

But then there’s the 2 percent polling Ping Lacson. 

Senator Ping Lacson has left Partido Reporma, the centre-right party in which he served as chairman. He’s said he has no ill-will towards his former fellow party leaders but fully intends to continue in the race as an independent. The party, however, lined up quickly behind Leni Robredo, endorsing her for the top spot in late March. 

“We need a leader. And for the 2022 Presidential elections, given all these considerations and the crisis we have to overcome, that leader is a woman. Her name is Leni Robredo,” Partido Reporma President Pantaleon Alvarez said in a statement March 24.

It’s the kind of unsteady alliance-building that only occurs during a toughly fought election. There’s previously been no love lost between Robredo and Alvarez, a longtime Rodrigo Duterte ally, who have clashed in the past over the war on drugs. Still, Alvarez was the largest head to be chopped by the then-emerging Duterte-Marcos faction when he was ousted as Speaker of the House back in 2018 and replaced by former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. God, remember 2018? It was just go, go, go for the Philippines. 

So what’s to gain here? Rappler’s Maria Ressa had a chat with Leni Robredo this week and she pressed her on what the alliance means. It’s widely reported that Robredo desperately needs a boost in Davao, the home region of Alvarez, but what does he get from it? Robredo said she was not asked for anything and was indeed shocked by the endorsement. Separately, Alvarez also told Rappler he had not asked anything of the campaign. He might need a hand in fending off Sara Duterte, pundits suggest, but he’s not indulging that. 

“It’s not about protection, okay? Because in the first place, I don’t need it, this protection, because we were able to survive for several years now even if her father is the president, right?” he told Rappler.

I’m curious about what we’ll see in the coming weeks. Will there be a gentle tapping of shoulders for lower polling candidates with the plan to build an ‘anyone but Bongbong’ ticket?