The folly of waiting for a united opposition

By Michael Henry Yusingco, LL.M

Infrastructure has been a prolific cash cow for political dynasties. And many Filipinos have endured this tribulation for many years. But of late, the greed of dynastic politicians and their business cohorts have become too confronting for the public taste.  Even their young ones are no longer ashamed to flaunt their inexplicable wealth. “Puno na ang salop!” is the cry in everyone’s heart. Indeed, the electorate seem poised to stop tolerating this perversity with millions of enraged voters coming into the fold.

But this horde of angry Gen Z and Millennial voters face a grave challenge because, alarmingly, many Filipinos see the election as merely a binary contest between the Marcos and Duterte clans. To resign ourselves to this archetype is surrendering our politics and governance to dynastic rivalries. This means the pork barrel cartel will continue to wreak havoc on the polity. And so, the goal must be to rescue voters from being constantly trapped into choosing the “lesser evil” candidate. Accordingly, the electorate must do something radical in order to free itself from this hostage scenario.

This urgent paradigm-shift directly corelates to instigating the emergence of a credible opposition. However, this task is not about just hoping that in 2028 some spontaneous “unity” among opposition figures will crystallize. That has never been how oppositions rise in this country. Gen Z and Millennial voters must channel their rage towards creating space for political leaders that can be trusted in public office. This requires discarding the tendency to edify political figures and fully comprehend what “to be in opposition” truly means.

A credible opposition is not merely a collection of loud voices denouncing the administration. Criticism of government is a democratic right that belongs to everyone: activists, journalists, academics, and ordinary citizens. But being in opposition in the truest political sense is something more demanding. It entails fiscalizing government—that is, identifying gaps in policy, exposing inconsistencies in implementation, and offering serious alternatives that could better serve the people. This is how credibility is forged.

Being in the minority bloc, whether in Congress or in public opinion surveys, does not automatically make one a credible opposition. The latter usually inhabits minority status, but not everyone in the minority possess credibility. Credibility must be earned through clarity of vision, capacity to mobilize, and the political courage to stand as an alternative government-in-waiting. More crucially, the leader of the opposition must be palpably presidentiable. To be a credible opposition leader is not a ceremonial title; it is a claim to the presidency itself.

For now, the potential of a credible opposition emerging before 2028 is still low. Today mostly contrarians dominate the public discourse with political stalwarts simply content with criticizing the administration for the sake of media visibility.  Yet this fixation on criticism without construction is a dead end. It does not inspire confidence in voters who are pragmatic and looking for governance solutions. Without a “government-in-waiting” agenda now just relegates anyone who identify as “opposition” as a bunch of noise-makers—loud but inconsequential.

If this pattern is allowed to persist, the 2028 election will likely be reduced to a dynastic clash between the Marcos and Duterte camps, with no serious “third force” to challenge their dominance. This scenario would be a tragedy, for it would suggest that our democracy has calcified into a contest of family names, rather than a genuine competition of visions. Lamentably, simply waiting passively for a “united opposition” to surface is just the same as allowing dynastic politics to continue reigning supreme.

Therefore, Gen Z and Millennial voters must flex their presence in the public sphere and give more attention to politicos investing effort not only in fault-finding but in policy work. They must engage more with public officials who devote time to cultivate robust alliances with civil society groups. At the very least, this conscious partiality for meaningful political discourse can push the undesirable and unworthy out of electoral contention. But if the right people rise to the occasion, then elections can be once again a contest of wits, instead of just being a triennial theater for the witless.