The formal opening of the election season commenced with the filing of certificates of candidacy, with the Commission on Elections welcoming political aspirants seeking to take elective positions in the May 2025 national and local elections.
As of last count nationwide, nearly 70 million Filipinos are eligible to cast their votes for the 2025 midterm elections.
Locally, with political stability restored and maintained, politics is now the main preoccupation of the public.
As expected, the choice of aspirants for the available positions is limited to the usual political families and familial personalities.
With this scenario, political positions provide extensive opportunities for patronage, apparent clientelism, and possible electoral fraud.
However, despite pessimism about the potential for political change, democracy maintains strong public support, and voter turnout is high.
For decades, Filipinos engage in ‘personality politics’, as seen in the long list of film stars, basketball heroes, TV personalities, and other celebrities who won.
This pattern is repeated time and again, resulting in the conclusion that “Filipinos get the government they ask for (and thus, deserve)” and suffer the consequences for the shortcomings of our political system.
This stems from the notion of a peculiarly-Filipino culture, with the values: utang na loob, pakikisama, smooth interpersonal relationships, compadrazgo, and an attraction to leaders who project a certain kind of culturally distinctive form of charisma.
In addition, ingrained in the political landscape is the practice of vote-buying, fraud, turncoatism, and violence, shaping electoral processes and outcomes, and political machines have been oiled at least as much by monetary and coercive inducements and pressures by the ‘clientelist’ linkages.
Political mobilization is largely money-driven, giving rise to the system labelled as ‘boss politics’, with particularistic interests and issues.
Under these circumstances, ‘personality’ functions as a mechanism by which individual politicians attempt to secure something of a hold on the flow of money, muscle, and machine manpower that are essential to electoral victory.
Among the grassroots, mobilization is an elaborate and highly labor-intensive operation, involving the participation of dozens of local leaders, watchers, and enforcers, the dispensing of thousands (if not millions) of pesos, and the mastering of a long, tedious, and legally complicated process that stretches from the registration of voters to the final canvassing of the results.
“Fear factor” invariably plays a part, as well as personal loyalty and personal consequences to consider, but to be successful, a politician’s ‘personality’ is crucial: to win, he must convince both backers in Manila and followers in the precincts that he is invincible, that he will win!
To this end, candidates must work to project his power and prowess as far and widely as possible, to promote the notion of his omnipresence and omnipotence through bumper stickers and posters, attendance and sponsorship of weddings, funerals, fiestas, and cockfighting matches, and TV appearances, tri-media advertisements, social media presence. Virtually all publicity is, in fact, good publicity.
For as long as the culture of “boss-ism” prevails, voters will have narrow choices composed of celebrity or individuals with personalistic interests, perpetuating a political system of personality, money, and machinery. Let us vote wisely.
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Author’s email: whelmayap@yahoo.com
