Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.
THANK you very much for the positive reaction to last week's column ("Restoration politics," TMT, Nov. 5, 2021). It received close to 600 percent more likes than any of my prior columns and am very deeply grateful that many of you found it worth reading. As this is being submitted on Thursday morning, I am not aware of what may have happened since then on who is running and for what.
Like Christmas season, which in the Philippines begins in August or September and sometimes ends in mid-January (I have been serenaded with Christmas carols by singers in Santa outfits at the airport in Manila as I returned at that time, then hearing them inexplicably segueing into singing my most hated song "Never Been to Me" in 2019), Philippine elections start early and never really end. They just kick into overdrive for about six months. Why never ends? There is all the pre-campaign drama and positioning. Then post-election, the interminable counting, the elections protests ("Always cheated, never defeated" should be our election motto) and then the courts taking close to six years to decide or not even bother to decide a protest in the hope that the losing candidate runs for another post in three years to render making a decision "moot" as the protest is deemed abandoned.
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