Top 2 presidentiables
party-list poster boys

Our latest report inquires into the curious case of the top two candidates for president acting as poster boys in the rising volume of television ads supposedly “paid for” and “paid by” seven party-list groups.

Indeed, the horribly costly air war for the presidency is no longer the exclusive domain of moneyed politicians and political parties. The new players and big ad-buyers are these seven apparently cash-rich party-list groups accredited by the Commission on Elections as supposed representatives of the “marginalized” and presumably poor sectors of Philippine society.

Three of the seven groups are neophytes in the electoral arena. How they managed to raise funds to purchase TV ads is just the first mystery.

A second matter is the bigger mystery: Why do their ads invariably say nothing about their respective advocacies but focus only on extolling the image, message, and virtues of the top two candidates for president – the Liberal Party’s Benigno C. Aquino III and the Nacionalista Party’s Manuel B. Villar Jr.

By all indications, this curious arrangement between these party-list groups and candidates is also a “creative” way of circumventing the airtime and spending limits prescribed in the Fair Election Practices Act or Republic Act No. 9006.

Who is using who, that is not clear for now, however. These “marginalized” party-list groups have apparently fallen into the trap of big-money politics where, in order to win, a party or candidate must command name recall by burning loads of cash on air. Meanwhile, the top two candidates who have maxed out their airtime limits in the top networks have been afforded a chance to ride piggyback on the unused airtime limits of these party-list groups.

The PCIJ produced this report as part of our commitments to the Pera’t Pulitika (PaP) 2010 Consortium that is monitoring campaign finance issues and reforms. Our esteemed partners in the PaP 2010 are the Consortium for Electoral Reforms (CER), the Association of Schools of Public Administration in the Philippines (ASPAP), and the Lawyers’ League for Liberty (Libertas).