Phenomenally Pink: Robredo’s Campaign for the Presidency Bucks Gender Terrorism in the Philippines

On May 9, the Philippines will go to the polls to choose outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte’s successor in leading the country for the next six years. While there are four frontrunners (including senator and former professional boxer Manny Pacquiao) among the 12 candidates, all eyes are on Vice President Maria Leonor “Leni” Gerona Robredo, 57, as she faces off against her old rival Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., 64 — son of dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. currently leading the polls — in a repriseof their 2016 competition for the vice presidency.

History has a way of looping in the Philippines. In a March poll, Robredo was trailing Marcos Jr. by more than 30 percentage points, but she was in a similar position in the 2016 elections and managed to defeat her opponent by a narrow 263,473-vote margin. While the race has been dynamic, the numbers have remained static, causing many to suspect that the survey results are inaccurate. While the last Pulse Asia survey showed a surge in her numbers, Robredo’s supporters prefer Google Trends, where she leads by a wide margin.

No two rivals could be more of a contrast: Marcos Jr. is the only son and namesake of the late dictator, whose 20-year reign was marked by martial law and corruption. Marcos Jr. had grown up in the Presidential Palace and lacked for nothing. Money taken from the national treasury was used to accommodate his and his siblings’ schooling, in prestigious universities like Oxford and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Marcos Jr. was given diplomatic immunity and bodyguards while in the United States. He has been groomed to be his father's successor.

On the other hand, Robredo was an accidental politician, convinced by supporters to run for Congress when her husband, former Secretary of the Interior Jesse Robredo, died in a plane crash. She has a degree in economics, finished law school, and, as a lawyer, worked for nonprofit organizations handling domestic violence and land-grabbing cases. She is soft-spoken and lives modestly in a two-bedroom condominium with her three daughters.

This contrast, between the only son of a “strongman” and a widow, resonates with the enduring friction between a woman-centered native culture and the infrastructure of patriarchal political dynasties bred by colonialism.

Gender terrorism rife in the election cycle

When Robredo won the vice presidency over Marcos Jr., the latter contested the results before the presidential electoral tribunal, claiming that Robredo had cheated. In 2021, the tribunal unanimously dismissed his protest, but Marcos maintains his accusations against her, reviving his election fraud claims in his bid for the presidency.

Since she took her oath as vice-president in 2016, Robredo has been targeted in a sustained social media zersetsung that portrays her as incompetent, ignorant or promiscuous for no other reason than her gender.

Even President Duterte, infamous for his homophobic and sexist remarks, has taken aim at his vice president: in November 2020, when the country was hit by Typhoon Vamco (Ulysses), Duterte — irked that Robredo had managed to reach a typhoon-wrecked site ahead of his men — jeered, “You go out every night, what time do you get home, and in whose house do you go?” apparently implying that she was sleeping around.

Robredo’s daughters have not been spared, either. In 2019, a fake sex tape of daughter Aika was uploaded to porn sites; and last month — right on time for the election —another sex tape, this time targeting her daughter Tricia, was released online. The women are mainstays of their mother’s campaign and projects. Both have denounced the videos as fake.

Robredo has the equally mild-mannered Sen. Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan as her teammate, while Marcos has current Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte — and President Duterte’s daughter. The latter alliance was the brainchild of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who is now running for congressional representative of her province. Arroyo brought together four presidential names — Marcos, Arroyo, Duterte, and Estrada (MADE) — to back Marcos Jr. and Duterte, ordaining it with unparalleled political clout and a near-inexhaustible campaign war chest. Arroyo’s support for the team is suspected to be to guarantee her protection after her last plunder case for alleged electoral fraud.

Neither of these vice-presidential candidates has escaped attacks either. Pangilinan has brought several cyber libel suits against YouTube channels for disseminating “libelous” content aimed, he said, at destroying his family and his relationship with them. And Duterte has been criticized for not presenting as feminine enough, as well as having her experience with sexual violence trivialized.

The color of resistance

With the qualities of competence and strength being so gendered in the Philippines, politicians have often used hypermasculine iconography to sell themselves to the electorate: Duterte’s forward-thrusting clenched fist has quickly melded to become part of his brand, for example. Sara Duterte similarly adopted her father’s posture of masculine aggression, campaigning in an armored vehicle. And, borrowing from the Marcos regime, the Marcos-Duterte team inherited the Marcos Sr.’s martial law hymn “Ang Bagong Lipunan” (“The New Society”) as its campaign song.

By contrast, the Robredo-Pangilinan team chose to morph the feminine into a call-to-arms, stressing the role of women as “the light” of both the family and national home. And to counter the emphasis on violence of the outgoing administration — particularly in its “drug war,” whose death toll could be in the tens of thousands — Robredo chose to speak about love as an active verb.

“I firmly believe: Love is not measured by forbearance alone but by a readiness to do battle,” Robredo said in her declaration of her presidential bid. “Whoever loves must do battle for the beloved.”

And to underscore the difference between herself and the hyper-masculinism of the Duterte and Marcos regimes, her campaign color would be pink, and she would rely on volunteers. “Nothing would take precedence over the initiative of volunteers” was the directive for and from her campaign staff.

Her volunteers responded with incredible energy, emerging from one of the world’s longest pandemic lockdowns to capitalize on freedom of expression: First, small supporter groups sprouted all over the archipelago, devising all manner of pinkness — from pink food color-dyed “lugaw” (rice porridge), pink ribbons and streamers, and, when the country moved into its Christmas season, pink lanterns. Houses and walls were also painted pink — all at the volunteers’ expense. Volunteer artists painted a giant Robredo-Pangilinan mural at the team’s first headquarters and started a trend. Writers and artists released an anthology titled 100 Pink Poems as a Valentine’s Day present for Robredo. And a virtual group art exhibition, featuring more than 100 artists, was organized to show the creative community’s support for the presidential candidate.

Her campaign’s sorties also included the country’s legendary singers and bands, all performing for free. When Filipino rock band Rivermaya showed up at one of Robredo’s rallies, performing their song “Liwanag Sa Dilim” (“Light in the Dark”), it became the campaign’s defacto anthem. And images of Robredo holding a blazing pink light aloft over the darkness became a campaign icon.

By luck, the common word for pink in the local languages is “rosas” – which also means the flower rose. Campaign rallies became music, light, dance, and flowers, as cities vied in a friendly competition, called “OlymPinks,” for the most innovative stage design and program and the largest crowd.

A culture-bearing campaign

Robredo’s campaign also featured an unlikely staple that came to symbolize her commitment to the marginalized (“laylayan,” the hemline, is the word she uses): lugaw.

Lugaw, a rice porridge has been a staple of the Philippines since before first contact with Spanish conquistadores. It is instant, cheap nourishment for the ill and the poor, though all classes eat lugaw in the Philippines. Because Robredo featured it at her inaugural dinner in 2016, she earned the moniker “Leni Lugaw” from online detractors, intended as a pejorative — albeit a contradictory one: using such an essential food as an insult was to strike at the heart of a culture that loves food and eating.

During the pandemic, President Duterte sank the country into so much foreign debt — 12 trillion pesos at last count — that the Philippines became the World Bank’s top pandemic borrower in fiscal year 2021⁷. His cronies and carpetbaggers became overnight millionaires from the procurement of vaccines and medical supplies — as the loved ones ordinary folks’ died and the not-rich could barely find a hospital. In this ambiance of profound contempt for the people’s wellbeing, the phenomenon of the lugaw rose to validate poor folk’s self-respect.

Even before the campaign, Robredo’s supporters were serving free lugaw at roadsides, feeding the pandemic-stricken poor, so it came as no surprise that the dish made a special appearance at the announcement of Robredo’s presidential run, a reclamation of “Leni Lugaw.”

Her Message

Robredo has received historic endorsements from both Catholic clergy and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, along with its political party, the United Bangsamoro Justice Party.

Should Robredo win, it would be historic, wrote retired journalist Roman Cortes Jorge on Facebook. “It will be the first time in a century that the Philippines will have a president who does not come from a political dynasty, who is not a product of privileged nepotism, who did not exploit celebrity stardom or a famous last name, and who will not have any conflicts of interest by having relatives in government or have family businesses favored by government contracts.”

In 2016, as the Duterte social media blitzkrieg ultimately decimated Liberal Party candidates — and only Robredo won from her party — the message was “the last man standing is a woman.” This year, her campaign released a stream of records — “resibo,”

or proof — of what she had done before and after becoming a public official to back her final message during one of the first presidential debates: “the best man for the job is a woman.”