As nations across the globe cast their ballots in 2024, a common trend emerged: Voters demand change. Many incumbent leaders and parties were booted from their positions.
Though this pattern has yet to solidify in the Philippines, it is certainly brewing, as public satisfaction for the Ferdinand Marcos Jr. administration’s management of crucial national concerns tanks, while Vice President Sara Duterte’s allies, now touting themselves as “opposition,” quickly rise in senatorial survey rankings. Though polls project that most administration bets may still secure a Senate seat, the Marcos alliance could be unseated by the Dutertes next election if current trends hold.
As the divide between the once united camps widens further, a path for the true alternative can be paved. And even as the progressive opposition lags in the Senate pre-election polls, the course may yet be cleared in the remaining days of the campaign and even until the 2028 elections.
It is in the trenches, then, of a Marcos-Duterte rift where the Left can best bolster its mass-based campaign of a genuine opposition-led Philippines that will improve upon the failures of the incumbency.
Marcos’s approval ratings have been dropping not just due to retaliation from the Duterte bloc but also his economic mismanagement. In top national concerns like controlling inflation, satisfaction ratings for the president have plunged into the red. But even when Duterte flaunts how she will succeed Marcos as the next head of state, she makes no mention of these ills or her solutions.
Unlike Rodrigo Duterte, who used strongman populism to cement his name, Sara is running only on the coattails of her father’s legacy. Her rickety voter base may yet falter, evidenced by her tanking ratings that only bounced back after the International Criminal Court’s detention of her father. The gaps in her political strategy can then be leveraged by the Left to expose how she is only “opposition” insofar as she is adversarial to Marcos.
While the opposition has already been implementing this, a large receptive audience is still missing. Awareness of opposition bets in opinion polls barely breaches 30%, save for past elected senators.
To change this, the opposition must bolster a mass-based campaign at the margins.
Progressives must escalate on-the-ground work that engages with local government units and other formations. While the Makabayan bloc and Akbayan have already begun employing this strategy by fielding local candidates, such efforts must further expand, unafraid to infiltrate dynastic strongholds and fracture voting blocs in the North and South.
Once embedded in the community, the opposition can turn the identity and bailiwick politics strategy that afforded Rodrigo Duterte and his allies their 2016 and 2022 victories on its head. Where the former president harnessed the marginalized’s frustrations to pit the community against one another—”good citizens” from “bad citizens”—the opposition can draw a clear line between the progressives who truly represent the people and the politicians, like Marcos and Duterte, who exploit them.
The opposition can then rival the incumbent’s empty platforms by laying down its own sustainable and people-centered ones. These plans must not only offer solutions but echo the people’s growing unrest with Marcos’s ineffective programs that liberalized the economy further while failing to create livable conditions.
By tethering itself to citizens on the ground, the opposition can create close relationships that may counter accusations pinned against progressives by disinformation drives and red-tagging online. Such were the cases of progressive-backed candidates in Siquijor and former Rep. Arlene Bag-ao in Dinagat Island, who upended entrenched political dynasties starting 2013 through grassroots movements.
Through all this, the opposition and its representatives can begin ingraining themselves in public consciousness, with a solid, grassroots base that can weather the remainder of this campaign and better support them come 2028.
The 2025 elections are nearing a close. But whatever the results may be, the path toward an incumbent replacement in 2028 and long-term change is forward-looking. What remains now is for the progressive opposition to convince the nation before then that it is not only a viable alternative to the failed incumbency, but a formidable one. ●
First published in the May 7, 2025, print edition of the Collegian.
