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Democracy For Whom

We have watched the world surge with resistance from the masses throughout 2025, and the Philippines is no exception. We watched our government tossed into one scandal after another, revealing to the people that private interests and capital gains are the main priority for so many within our government, both at the local and national level. This was most visible with numerous flood control projects, painting a picture not just of bureaucratic white collar crimes of graft and corruption, but of violence. Theft and unanswered promises become the destruction of lives, homes, and jobs for the Filipino people—violence at a scale made to look like it’s the fault of nature or the fault of a few individuals with bad planning. But, the Filipino people have woken up—and continue to wake up. We learn that this is a system that runs deep at the core of Philippine politics that normalizes corruption, violence, and theft, dulling our senses with platitudes on “resilience.” We now defy that perception of resilience, despite the society that molds us to become the wage workers and middle managers of tomorrow, labor and heart becomes our reason, and education becomes our weapon. We came to realize that we didn’t have to flood, go homeless, or suffer. Our nascent democracy struggles toward the understanding that we deserve better. But, we can change—there is hope. This is the realization that power is not something to merely hold from the masses, but the method toward change. 

Now, we see multi-pronged efforts all over the Philippines investigating the flood control corruption at the heart of the movement. Commissions, committees, offices, and departments, pursue justice from the legal front. Meanwhile, the grassroots organizations, the church, and the people of our barangays, municipalities, and cities went to the streets not as individuals, but as a collective. And for every moment we remain unconscious or are tossed back to ignorance, we suffer and are praised for resilience. In this way, we can say hope is a practical thing, a material process that can change things toward improvement. At its very core is the power of the people, and the status quo rattles whenever the masses collectively exert that power, amounting to the Trillion Peso March. They render us idle because they fear that potential; in the words of Peter Kropotkin, “Idlers do not make history: they suffer it!” No longer idle, we move toward consciousness—that is democracy growing.

A people-oriented politics—true democracy—should be one where the government serves the needs of the people. From the eyes of the masses, we must see politics as power from the people, for the people. It’s the people fending for themselves against an enemy defined not by individual morality, but by the violence of their class—a condition we can change by building toward equality. “Build the new within the shell of the old,” the principle we find throughout Paul Raekstad and Sofia Saio Granid’s Prefigurative Politics, which educates us on building democratic progress within our current conditions, building from the masses. After all, every movement from the individual to the masses is politics. In this form, we are filled with hope, which we feel growing from the anti-corruption movement, from September 21 to November 30, from Pampanga to Manila, grows a movement we call the Trillion Peso March. But that cannot be the end of it, just as we live to witness that the People Power Revolution was not enough to uproot authoritarian power over us. This spring of resistance waved across the movements that rock the world. The moment that places like Indonesia, Nepal, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Madagascar, Kenya, and more guided themselves to a politics of uniting the people against the oppressors which openly violated them and stood above them, it sparked change. Consciousness burns into our collective psyche, what we are capable of—that anger can become passion, that dissent comes from love and patriotism, and that we can be guided by hope, a step to the prefiguration of a better tomorrow. That is democracy.

Democracy For Them

But we have fallen into a trap—we have allowed them to resolve a problem they caused, not unlike Rodrigo Duterte’s death squads saying, “Upon further investigation, we have found that we are not guilty.” They protect each other. Or they use it as an opportunity to destroy political opponents. All at our expense. President Bongbong Marcos openly condemns corruption, but it was his executive power which permitted the corruption to happen. Departments point fingers, politicians offload their involvement to individuals like Zaldy Co for his blatant corruption and Sarah Discaya for her blatant corruption to scapegoat their own corrupt affairs. This is how those in power have defined politics, as a matter of their policies, their games, and their powers. In so doing, it waters us down as protests become pleas, rallies require permission, and demands become requests. Our attention is diverted to distractions as our so-called representatives continue to take from us at every moment they are not being held accountable.

This is the relationship of an abuser to the abused, ”Only what I say matters; you only matter when I say you matter.” From this, it comes naturally that we would see politics as a dirty affair, when we can only see it from their eyes. But we can’t be fooled, they do this because they can see the potential of the masses, they fear transparency, and the only mechanism a state ought to do is violence to return to its definition of order, that hierarchy, that injustice, that abuse. 

People become hesitant from the sluggishness. Is it from rigorous legal pursuit of due process that they are slow? Or is it that bureaucrats and crocodiles have bent the system enough that they have the wiggle room to move amid the slowness? To this date, only 11 police officers were convicted of killing innocent people during the drug war in Duterte’s administration. Only after 8 years that the police that were guilty of killing Kian delos Santos were arrested and convicted.

Meanwhile, when the masses stochastically express their frustration primarily through property damage, as many netizens and locals witnessed on the evening of the 21st of September as Mendiola in Manila. It became a site of police brutality, as violent dispersal shot civilians and on-the-ground footage showed armored police officers slamming rallyists against concrete. The government refused to acknowledge the 2 deaths that caused, and disparaged the 216 arrested as mere malefactors, creating a period of confusion where students in Pampanga heard about events on the ground through students in Manila. Instead of citing this as a moment that crystallized the anger of the masses against their abuser, rhetoric instead arose about how those rallyists should have been more peaceful, diverting the anger toward the government to go against those who are likewise oppressed. It benefits them to be slow. Instead of citing this as a moment that displays the violence of the status quo, we are dulled to fear. It benefits them to keep us divided and distracted, destroying our consciousness as we fight each other instead of the actual culprit. In so doing, very few of those tangled in the deep web of violence against the masses are seeing justice and accountability. That is not democracy.

So, who benefits from keeping people convinced that institutions and laws know what’s best for them? Is it democracy for the people, or power for those in charge? We are told to rely on authorities, the same ones who draw from our taxes for their own gain. This is not to say that we must condemn all politicians and government institutions. But power must be accounted for by the people before it is trusted.  

Progressives might be able to put weight behind names like Chel Diokno, Leila de Lima, Risa Hontiveros, Bam Aquino, or Kiko Pangilinan. But can the people trust a system where these situations are effectively guaranteed to happen again, making those individuals exceptions that can only offer reform after reform a system that repeatedly, playing whack-a-mole with corruption as interests from both local and foreign have vested interest in finding every way to take from the Filipino people.They cannot be our only hope. We are our hope.

Democracy For The People

When those in power leave us to drown, who answers if not the masses? Once conscious, they manifest into the civic struggle, whether it’s in the legal institutions from local to national, the church, the human rights watches, the environmentalists, the labor unions and cooperatives, the grassroots progressive coalitions, the feminists, the IPs, the LGBTQIA+ community, and everyone encapsulated under Filipino—that is hope.  But when the heart of a movement is in the masses, we feel that aching potential that makes the world as pliable as clay, that anything could happen, the sensation where days make decades’ worth of change. When the base is founded on the material concerns of the people, from affording food and rent, from affording education to healthcare, from functioning flood control and disaster response to public transportation, from addressing the needs of our marginalized sectors, we are sure to find a better country—democracy renewed. Only the people know the people’s concerns best.

Remember that we will always have each other, for it is the farmer that feeds us, it is the jeepney driver, tricycle driver, Grab, and Maxim driver that carries us, it is the doctor, nurse, and social worker that takes care of us, it is the artist that inspires us, it is the IT worker that keeps our digital ecosystem running, it is the engineer and the carpenter that builds, it is the architect that designs, it is the small business owner and sari-sari store that catalyzes our local economy, it is all the specialized skilled workers—from hotel management to accountants—that keep our higher organs running, it is the people that allow the people to live. Somehow, the true resilience is realizing how much is stolen from us and we still survive. So, we choose democracy for us.

Look for whenever the people guide themselves toward liberation.

That’s where you find hope.

The March Toward Hope

Today, we find ourselves in many moments that will be remembered in history, but it’s our choice to contribute to it, it is our choice to turn hope into change. As people mobilize all over the globe, look out for those who build hope. Raekstad and Gradin’s Prefigurative Politics defines it in the power, drive, and consciousness of a people that sparks change.

We speak not in idealism, but in the realism of understanding what it takes to build change. It is in our labor, it is in our identities, it is in our blood from ousting the colonizers of the past to the dictators of today. We carry the recognition of the true power of the Filipino—people power.

It is with this power that we recognize that those in power, whether it’s the seats in government or the private interests whose wealth corrupts the former, are not the actual sources of power in this nation. In this world, it is not the president, the mayor, the governor, or the dynasties that hold power. It is the people, and once we recognize that power, we see the theft, we seek change—the drive.

As journalists, we understand that standing with democracy is the requirement for journalism with honesty and integrity. From this, can the one side that this publication endorses and advocates for truly prevail, and that is truth. The people deserve the truth because truth is the foundation of democracy—the consciousness.

This process, of achieving a better Philippines, will take months, years, and perhaps decades of ceaseless pursuit. It doesn’t end at the Trillion Peso March, it will only end when the youth stop chanting the word kurakot. If not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then every single day after. That is the march toward progress, toward freedom, toward equality, toward justice, toward peace.

Toward hope.

Be with the people, stay tapped in.

Power to the people, all power to all the people.

Illustration by Therese Yalung