Stop making excuses: Hold the BSKE on schedule

Here we go again. Less than a year after President Marcos signed Republic Act 12232 pushing the barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections (BSKE) from December 2025 to November 2026, a fresh campaign is underway to delay them once more. The excuse this time: the Middle East crisis and its fallout on fuel prices. The proposed fix: raid the Comelec’s PHP 19-billion election budget and redirect it to crisis response.

Deputy Speaker Albee Benitez wants a six-month postponement. Senator Imee Marcos supports it, calling it “prudent.” Malacañang says the President is “open” to the idea. About 95 percent of House members reportedly back the move. And just like that, the country’s most local democratic exercise — the one that decides who runs your barangay, who sits on your youth council — is being treated as expendable.

The fiscal argument does not hold up. Senate finance committee chair Sherwin Gatchalian has pointed out that the government has PHP 238 billion in available funds from the 2026 national budget and unspent continuing appropriations. The actual cost of holding the BSKE runs between PHP 8 billion and PHP 9 billion. The money is there. Pretending otherwise is dishonest.

Comelec Chairman George Garcia himself has said the election budget, once appropriated under the General Appropriations Act to a constitutional body, cannot simply be diverted elsewhere. He has cited the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down RA 11935 — the law that tried to postpone the 2022 BSKE and redirect funds for pandemic recovery. The court rejected that justification then, even during an actual public health emergency. An oil price spike, however painful, is a weaker case by any measure.

And yet Senator Lacson has floated a workaround: Comelec could “declare” unspent election funds as savings and return them to the National Treasury. It is a clever bit of budget gymnastics — technically not a fund transfer, but functionally identical. It treats the Comelec’s institutional independence as a convenience to be managed, not a constitutional safeguard to be respected.

The deeper problem is the pattern. The BSKE has been postponed in 2016, 2017, 2018, from December 2022 to October 2023, and from December 2025 to November 2026. Each deferral came with its own justification — restructuring, pandemic, BARMM elections, and now fuel prices. But the result has always been the same: holdover officials staying in power past their mandates, voters denied the right to choose, and the barangay’s democratic character eroding one postponement at a time.

The National Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) put it bluntly in a statement, calling the pattern “a recurring ruse for political entrenchment.” That is hard to argue with. The cumulative effect of years of deferrals is that millions of Filipinos — particularly the youth who participate through the SK — have been locked out of grassroots governance for stretches far longer than any elected term was meant to last.

Consider the numbers. More than 3.9 million Filipinos have already registered to vote in the November BSKE, nearly three times the Comelec’s original target of 1.4 million. Sixty-five percent of registrants during the August 2025 drive were young voters. Ninety million ballots have been printed. PHP 3 billion has been spent on preparations. This is not an election on paper. It is an election already in motion.

To cancel or delay it now would not be fiscal responsibility. It would be waste — of money already spent, of institutional effort already invested, and of the trust of nearly four million voters who registered in good faith.

The Philippines has held elections through Martial Law, the Asian financial crisis, Typhoon Yolanda, and a global pandemic. The idea that diesel prices — now trending downward, with the Palace itself announcing big rollbacks — constitute a democratic emergency severe enough to cancel the country’s grassroots elections is not a serious argument. It is a pretext.

Gatchalian was very plain: the Supreme Court warned during the last postponement that it should be the final one, and that manufacturing reasons to delay elections amounts to undermining democracy itself. That warning should not be ignored.

The Comelec, to its credit, says it will continue preparations unless Congress legislates otherwise. But that is not enough. Chairman Garcia must do more than prepare quietly. He must go on record — publicly, unambiguously — defending the commission’s constitutional mandate and its budget. Institutional silence at this stage is its own kind of surrender.

Congress, for its part, should reject any postponement bill. If lawmakers want to address the fuel crisis, there are mechanisms for that — excise tax suspensions, targeted subsidies, fuel discount programs. Raiding the election budget is the laziest option dressed up as the most urgent.

The barangay is the smallest, closest unit of government to the Filipino people. Its officials manage disaster response, settle disputes, distribute aid, and run community programs. These are not minor posts. They are the front line of governance. And the people who hold them should be there because voters put them there — not because Congress keeps extending their stay.

Hold the BSKE on Nov. 2. No more excuses.