Thank Charter Change Naysayers for Perennial Political Turmoil in PH

I was casually scrolling through my Facebook feed recently when I kept running into posts claiming that Vice President Sara Duterte is effectively being written off for the 2028 presidential race. Right after those, my feed turned into a parade of early trial balloons. One post was floating a “Win-Ri” tandem between Senators Sherwin Gatchalian and Risa Hontiveros—billed almost like a showbiz love team to catch the eye of younger voters. Another was hawking a potential team-up between former senator Manny Pacquiao and former vice president, now Naga City Mayor, Leni Robredo. Then came posts suggesting Defense Secretary Gibo Teodoro should run, while others insisted Senator Bong Go would step up as the Duterte camp’s candidate if the VP gets disqualified. Watching this flood of political floating trial balloons made me wonder: are all these potential presidential names popping up simply because everyone is convinced the Vice President will be convicted by the impeachment court and knocked out of the running?

Whether you view these legal moves against her as necessary accountability or just calculated political targeting, the whole spectacle points to a much bigger mess. The non-stop political warfare we see every day really just highlights how flawed our 1987 Constitution is when it comes to picking and vetting who gets to lead the country.

Our current system relies entirely on a direct popular vote, which sounds great in theory, but it operates on a pretty flawed assumption that being popular automatically means you’re qualified to govern. When you don’t have real vetting systems in place, elections naturally favor candidates who already have massive name recall or giant political networks. Because the framework lacks a way to screen out candidates with serious flaws before they reach the ballot, the opposition is left using post-election legal tactics, like endless prosecutions and impeachments, as their only real gatekeeping tool.

The real tragedy in all of this is how much national energy and bandwidth get completely wasted. Think about the incredible amount of public money, legal efforts, and legislative hours being poured into trying to impeach or convict a sitting Vice President. That is time and focus being drained away from pressing issues that actually affect our daily lives, like skyrocketing power rates, high fuel prices, and sluggish economic growth.

When the framers of the 1987 Constitution brought back the popular vote after years of dictatorship, they forgot to include the institutional mechanisms needed to help people actually vote wisely.

Take political parties, for example. In healthier democracies, real political parties act as the first line of defense by thoroughly vetting prospective leaders through internal performance tracking, policy debates, and consensus building long before anyone hits a national ballot. Because our local parties are mostly temporary, personality-driven vehicles, we don’t get that filtering process, leaving the public to judge candidates based on pop-culture marketing rather than actual readiness to govern.

We see this play out in how candidates build their personal brands around single issues without offering a clear, comprehensive national strategy. A candidate might run heavily on a platform of good governance and anti-corruption, but how does that directly solve immediate economic shocks like inflation? Another candidate might bank on a tough defense posture against Chinese incursions in the West Philippine Sea, but is a military-forward stance heavily reliant on foreign treaties really our only path forward, or does it blind us to potential economic trade-offs in trade and tourism? Without strong, ideology-driven parties forcing candidates to defend complete platforms, voters are left choosing between catchy slogans and single-issue identities.

Even if a popular candidate manages to get elected on a promising idea, our current setup offers zero guarantee that they can actually deliver once in office. Because presidents run on personal clout rather than strong party lines, they rarely enter office with a loyal, policy-aligned majority in Congress. They spend their terms building temporary, transactional alliances in the legislature just to survive, leading to gridlock and diluted promises.

This is precisely why so many people have pushed for structural alternatives over the years, such as switching to a parliamentary system. In a parliamentary setup, citizens vote for their local representatives, and the parliament itself chooses the Prime Minister from among its members. That creates built-in peer vetting, because a leader has to earn the respect and confidence of fellow lawmakers over years of actual legislative work, making it much harder for an inexperienced celebrity to jump straight to the top. Plus, since the executive and legislative branches are naturally aligned, the government can pass reforms without constant gridlock, and if leadership fails, parliament can replace them without dragging the country through a months-long, paralyzing impeachment trial.

Alongside structural fixes like a parliamentary setup or stronger political parties, fixing our education system is just as crucial. A popular vote system only works as well as the analytical capacity of the voters casting those ballots. Right now, our schools focus heavily on basic literacy, but if we want an electorate that can’t be easily swayed by pop-culture gimmicks, political love teams, or populist rhetoric, we need an education system that actively teaches critical thinking, civic literacy, and basic economics.

At the end of the day, the endless political drama over who gets to run in 2028 isn’t just about the individuals involved. It’s a symptom of a constitutional design that leaves us choosing leaders based on popularity contests, leaving the rest of the country to pay the price in lost time, sidelined economic priorities, and constant instability.