‘Hopefully, voters will have more good options to choose from when it comes to casting their ballot.’
AND so it comes to this: the filing of certificates of candidacy is now upon us, with all and sundry curiously casting a watchful eye on who will file for what, until the eighth of October. It used to be that the close of the period of filing more or less brought some closure on the participants in the electoral arena, but with most people now wise to the Duterte playbook, we all know that the watch does not end here. Until November 15, 2021, the Comelec allows candidate substitutions belonging to the same party, for the same position. Given the nth-hour tactic pulled by then-Davao Mayor Rody Duterte in 2015, it’s very likely that the same situation may be resurrected for this season.
That announcement about President Duterte retiring from politics at the sidelines of his aide Bong Go’s filing of his certificate of candidacy fell flat, considering that he also made the same announcement back in September 2015 when he claimed that he will not gun for the presidency. The only surprising thing was that it was Mr. Go who filed his candidacy for the vice-presidential race, and not President Duterte as previously advertised.
It seems that father and daughter (incumbent Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte) have not come to an agreement yet about their final plans for 2022. Word has it that the daughter is not very warm to her father’s wish that she takes in Mr. Go as her running mate, for many reasons. While Mayor Sara has filed her COC to run in Davao City, we know that there is still more than a month to go for these discussions to continue to percolate, and for warring factions to come to a compromise that satisfies most everyone’s interests. But most in the know are not very optimistic, and one even expressed that getting oil and water to mix might be more likely than getting Mayor Sara and Mr. Go to run together.
There are, on another hand, skeptics who staunchly believe that the ongoing “disagreement” between father and daughter is just part of the script carefully written to keep them relevant and in the news. While this cannot be discounted, many things have happened outside of the public eye that lend some credence to the theory that Mayor Duterte is indeed vehemently independent from her father, a streak that is quite worrisome to her father’s lieutenants. This is not to say that they do not share the same politics, of course; when it comes to choosing friends and allies, it seems she is more inclined to make her own and not necessarily take people in because they are loyal to her father. This explicably causes discomfort among the elder Duterte’s allies and factotums, especially those who might have earned the daughter’s ire in the past years.
In any case, it’s just a little over a month before the smoke clears and the public can see more clearly what the field looks like for 2022. Hopefully, voters will have more good options to choose from when it comes to casting their ballot.
