IT LOOKS like candidates’ campaigning for the May 12, 2025 midterm elections is getting less cumbersome and tiresome. Thanks to the availability of mobile phones, the many applications installed in it and smart television sets. Candidates can now reach every household and all residents thereat, including non-voting minors, most of whom now have their own gadget.
In other words, candidates can just post their campaign propaganda and become household items without being physically present. So it is not surprising anymore that when one opens his or her mobile phone, take a look at Facebook, scroll through it, and almost fifty percent of what one sees are audio-video recordings of campaign activities of this and that candidate.
With this scheme of campaigning, the candidates are saved from strenuous holding of rallies and meetings, as well as knocking at every residence’s door to meet occupants and do hand shakings. They are also spared from walking up and down just to reach houses in highland communities.
With this available expense-saving opportunity, candidates may now use whatever savings they can have from non-holding of mini-rallies in barangays to possibly buy votes.
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Talking of enticing voters we remember a candidate some two elections back who we could say was ingenuous enough. We learned that he had a huge stock of the local wine called “bahalina” in the dialect at his house. Every time his party’s team goes to rural barangays to hold small rallies he rides in his closed van and requests that he be the last to speak.
Inside his van are gallons of “bahalina” and several “lapad” wine bottles of the so-called “dayok” or salt-preserved fish intestines. After his speech he calls his local leader and ask him or her to gather the males who bothered to wait for his speech. Then he doles out the appropriate number of bahalina-filled gallons and let them drink to inebriation.
As for the women listeners the then candidate orders his assistants to distribute the bottles of “dayok,” each bottle good enough for at least a day or two meal appetizer.
After the last vote was counted in that election for local position, the wily candidate ended up among the winners.
We wonder if one or two of this election’s council aspirants have adopted the scheme. For certain he may be among the winners whether or not he/she is truly qualified and deserving.
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We agree with this common observation. That is, those truly deserving candidates – honest, educationally qualified, tested as possessing sincerity, work experience, among others – are usually the ones denied the people’s support. Say, at the national level, we have candidates – present and in the past elections – who possess the earlier mentioned qualifications. Among them are Sil Diokno, Heide Mendoza, Luke Espiritu, and several others. But sadly they are not given even a Chinaman’s chance to get elected.
At the local level, we have candidate Magz Maglana for the city’s First Congressional district. We are very well aware that she has all the qualifications herein mentioned. But like the 2022 elections ,Magz’s candidacy is again certain to be in the tail end.
We know that Magz is running with hardly the kind of resources needed to conduct a massive campaign. The possibility in fact is that her campaigners are all doing their job for nothing. They simply want to push a candidate that is not there for whatever personal benefits she could get from the position, if she wins, but for her desire to serve the people in the first district like introducing legislations that are for local application.
But again, Magz Maglana is one among those kind of candidates that the people of the district really need but apparently not what they want.
When can we ever learn?
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