Pet Sematary Pinoy Democracy: Why the System that Returned After 1986 Came Back Wrong

Among the writers here at Get Real Philippines, I am perhaps the most unsophisticated or instinctive. So please forgive the way I present this idea of how I think democracy ought to work.

It hit me recently while going through a cardboard box tucked away in the back of my closet—a collection of keepsakes from every political campaign I’ve ever been a part of. The moment I opened the lid, the musty scent of old, aging paper and stale adhesive filled the air. Inside lay an archive of lost battles: yellowing plastic badges with my name and campaign designations, stiff folded posters, faded vinyl tarpaulins, rusted tin buttons, and rolls of promotional stickers whose backing paper had long dried up.

I picked up one of those laminated IDs, holding it up to the light. After a thoughtful pause, a quiet, uncomfortable realization forced its way out: I didn’t know diddly-squat about what I was actually writing back then.

In every campaign, my job was to persuade people to vote for our candidate. I crafted copy detailing their visionary platforms, their flawless track records, and their technocratic backgrounds. I meticulously explained why their proposed policy solutions made them uniquely qualified to solve the nation’s most pressing problems. But looking at that box of forgotten souvenirs, I realized the truth: I was handing the public elaborate answers to questions they had never asked. I believed elections were about finding leaders who could solve problems. In reality, everyone else was watching a high-stakes contest where the only thing that mattered was winnability.

To understand why this mismatch bothers me so much, allow me to tell you about how decisions are made in a corporate boardroom—a setting many reading GRP will recognize.

A while back, a friend and former client invited me to his company’s office in Bonifacio Global City (BGC) to sit as an observer during a regular board meeting. Normally, these proceedings are strictly private, but he had secured approval for me to watch them deliberate over critical operational issues and vote on courses of action.

I’ll admit: twenty minutes in, my eyes were watering over what I would normally consider dry, tedious minutiae. But I endured. With my friend quietly filling in the blanks, I began to grasp what was at stake. Most of the background had been laid out in prior sessions; today was about evaluating concrete options and forecasting probable outcomes for each.

At the end of each presentation, the board members voted. Some explained their reasoning, some proposed tactical tweaks, and others rejected the options entirely. But even after a single course of action secured the majority, the process didn’t end. Points raised by dissenters were accommodated where possible, warnings were cataloged, and contingency plans were attached to address potential risks.

That BGC boardroom is precisely how I imagine an election should function:

• Informed Participants: Everyone at the table thoroughly understands the problem, appreciates the long-term implications, and objectively weighs competing solutions.
• Shared Purpose: The sole focus is identifying a strategy that actually works and benefits the collective whole.
• Accountability: Every proposal includes performance metrics, clear contingencies if things go sideways, and room for constructive input.

I wish this was how we deliberated over who to vote for during national elections. I wish we treated choosing a president the way a board selects a strategic direction or an executive team. But the deeper I look at our voters, our culture, and our political mechanics, the more I realize why our current setup makes that level of collective thinking almost impossible.

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If we want an election to work like a boardroom, we have to look closely at three major breakdowns in our current setup: our candidates, our scope of leadership, and our voters.

First, consider the candidates themselves. There is a frustrating paradox in public life: the most competent people are rarely widely popular, and the most widely popular people are rarely competent.

This isn’t just a political hunch; it’s a documented human bias. Organizational research on leadership selection shows that when people choose who they want to lead or work with, they consistently prefer someone of average competence who possesses strong interpersonal skills over an exceptionally competent expert who lacks charm or warmth. We naturally prioritize emotional comfort over operational excellence.

In a political campaign, this instinct becomes fatal to good governance. Managing a country requires deep technical knowledge, structural discipline, and the courage to make necessary but unpopular trade-offs. It is quiet, complex, unglamorous work. But our political system doesn’t test for administrative competence; it tests for performative appeal. A candidate who explains a six-year infrastructure overhaul with fiscal constraints will lose a debate to a charismatic performer who promises simple, magical fixes in sixty days. The traits that make someone a brilliant operational leader—nuance, caution, and quiet efficiency—are terrible for building a viral political campaign.

Second, we suffer from a massive failure in how we view leadership itself.

When a corporate board evaluates a strategic shift, they don’t just look at the person presenting the pitch. They evaluate the operational team, the execution strategy, and the resource allocation. In national politics, however, we treat the presidency like a solo hero’s journey.

We forget that a president does not govern alone. True competence lies in the entire governing apparatus:

• The Cabinet: The actual domain experts running agriculture, finance, public works, and health.
• The Legislative Coalition: The lawmakers required to pass actual budgets and reforms rather than blocking them for political sport.
• The Bureaucracy: The institutional network capable of executing policy down to the barangay level.

When we vote based on raw charisma and likability, we elect a friendly figurehead who often lacks the team, the network, or the baseline understanding to execute anything meaningful. We buy the front-man, completely ignoring the fact that there is no orchestra behind him.

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Finally, we have to talk honestly about the third breakdown: our voters and the rules of the game itself.

In that BGC boardroom, every person at the table had a solid grasp of the company’s business model, its balance sheet, and the interplay between different departments. They understood the consequences of their vote.

To expect our electorate to function like a board of directors requires assuming a level of civic literacy that our current reality simply does not support. A significant portion of our voting population is young, impressionable, and trapped in a struggling education system that rarely teaches how government actually functions. How can we expect citizens to weigh complex economic platforms when many haven’t been taught the basic interplay between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches?

Without a firm grounding in how governance works, people naturally default to emotional instincts, name recognition, or personality cults. A voter who doesn’t understand fiscal policy won’t evaluate a tax reform plan; they will vote for the candidate who made them feel seen, handed out immediate relief, or produced the most entertaining campaign jingle.

To make matters worse, the electoral system itself has been thoroughly gamed. Mechanics designed to protect the integrity of democratic choice have been bypassed by clever workarounds, media manipulation, and deep-pocketed political machinery. When campaigns are optimized entirely for emotional reach and tactical dominance, substance becomes a liability. A candidate who insists on presenting a detailed, realistic policy roadmap is playing chess on a board where everyone else is playing a high-stakes popularity contest.

This brings me back to that box of old campaign keepsakes.

For years, I wrote campaign materials believing that if we just laid out the best vision, the strongest track record, and the most logical solutions, people would see the wisdom in our candidate and vote accordingly. I was trying to run a boardroom presentation in the middle of a carnival.

Do I still wish our elections worked like that BGC board meeting? Absolutely. I still believe that a nation’s collective intelligence should be pooled to choose leaders based on strategic competence and real solutions.

But let’s not kid ourselves: this isn’t going to happen anytime soon if we’re just waiting for a magical era when voters become fully civically equipped, capable of seeing through campaign circus acts, and ready to value real governance over performative winnability.

We have to finally come to terms with the uncomfortable truth. The brand of democracy we reintroduced in 1986 has gone completely off the rails and lost the plot. It was built on the romantic notion that the sheer act of voting would naturally yield good leadership, while ignoring the hard structural mechanics required to foster an informed, deliberative electorate. Until we stop treating elections as a national spectacle and start confronting those structural failures, the candidates offering actual solutions will keep losing—and we will keep living with the consequences.