There was a deluge of pink almost immediately after Vice President Leni Robredo finally announced her 2022 presidential bid.

#LetLeniLead was trending on Twitter. People were posting pictures of themselves wearing Pink accessories, clothes on social media. Local celebrities jumped ship. Netizens were at awe of how focused, clear, and on-time her speech was, a clear contrast to the rambling mess that is Duterte’s weekly addresses.

People were calling Leni a movement. It was a pink revolution, they say. Leni to the tyrannical reign of Duterte as Cory was to Marcos’ bloody Martial rule. It revitalized the people’s (mostly middle class) faith in democratic institutions after years of a dictator making a mockery of them. Difference is, Leni had a track record to show for. With the limited resources her office worked with, she took the reins in a successful campaign against Covid-19.

The son of the late dictator Bongbong Marcos will go head-to-head again with Leni, this time for the highest post in the Philippine government. The wheels of the Marcos propaganda machinery started whirring, not that it ever stopped. But this is the thing the Leni campaign has to reckon with, among other things: the years of whitewashing of the Marcosian legacy, enabled by Duterte himself.

Both Marcos and Duterte should be the narrowest target of a united opposition, but the opposition is hardly united as of the moment under Leni. Despite her running as an independent candidate to distance herself from her Liberal Party past, which for all its “disente” posturing has failed the people and grew largely unpopular among the basic masses. Her campaign manager, her running mate, and her preliminary senatorial slate all seemed to point still to yellow.

The people’s dissatisfaction with all things yellow should not be dismissed as merely administration propaganda. It is a valid outcry of the basic masses against the elitist and exclusionary brand of liberal democracy touted from Cory to Pnoy. The Leni camp should listen to these criticisms and assess themselves accordingly.

But her line-up is still tentative, some reasoned. And we have yet to see if any of the Makabayan bloc senatoriables have been engaged with. Leni’s camp also has yet to reach out to the progressive labor leader Leody de Guzman who is running a presidential bid, and who arguably has the most progressive platform among other presidential candidates. Even the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) showed openness to engage with Leni for the resumption of peace talks. There is still a lot to do for building a strong united opposition, one that could defeat Marcos-Duterte.

Talks of marketing, branding, going out of social media circles for Leni could only do so much when the administration is currently making a mockery out of our electoral system: from the unexpected bids of Bong Go and ex-PNP chief Bato dela Rosa, allegedly placeholders for Sara Duterte as she buys more time, and the surfacing of NTF-ELCAC-led partylist groups.

As Duterte grows more desperate to stay in power as he tries to evade an imminent International Criminal Court (ICC) ruling, the upcoming elections may be rife with fraud. Lest we forget, Duterte’s trusted ally and campaign donor Dennis Uy won the Comelec bidding to handle system-related equipment and forms on election day come 2022. As erratic as Duterte is, we also can’t cross-out the possibility of him doing away with the elections altogether.

Point is, our tactics for the both the broader anti-fascist movement (ending the comeback of Duterte and Marcos) and the electoral struggle should go beyond rallying behind a singular figure. More than just amassing a huge pink army, the election season should be an opportunity to be frank to the people we organize about the electoral struggle’s very limitations. To not clarify this to the masses would be to lie to them. Throughout our history, even the seemingly most progressive candidate eventually betrayed the interest of the masses.

We should not just “educate” Marcos apologists by sending them the academic profiles of our bets and compiling a list of credible readings. Instead, it is only ethical to enlighten them of the very mechanisms that continue to perpetuate our poverty which lead to the neverending discontent of the people over electoral results. We should bare to them, in no uncertain terms, that elections under a reactionary government (as we have now) are a limited playing field for it is still bound by moneyed interests. We engage with it to maximize our participation, but it is never what sets us free.

It is not just about gaining back supporters from Marcos-Duterte toward Leni, but amassing supporters for the longer haul, the mass movement toward national democracy. Elections are a heated time of heightened political engagement of even the middle and backward forces. We should take advantage of that to further raise their political consciousness.

What we should organize for, more than volunteers for temporal campaigns for progressive candidates, is to surface activists who would devote their lives to serving the people, even after the pink tide does indeed wash over us.

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