Early bird in the Senate race
This early, former Finance Undersecretary Cielo Magno has served notice of her intention to run for the Senate in the 2028 national elections.
She is positioning herself as an alternative to traditional politicians who are often elected from political dynasties with deep pockets and formidable campaign machineries, or had won due to name recall from their lucrative movie career, regardless of their qualification for the position.
Recall that Magno drew public attention in 2023 when her term was ordered terminated (or was otherwise ordered dismissed) by then Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin because of a post in her social media account that indirectly criticized an earlier order of President Marcos to impose a price ceiling on rice.
Her action supposedly showed her lack of support for the administration’s programs and that she should have taken up her concerns about the rice pricing internally and not air them in public.
A professor of the School of Economics of the University of the Philippines, a government position she maintained because she enjoys security of tenure in the academe despite her unceremonious exit from the Department of Finance, Magno is active in social media, with reportedly more than 200,000 followers, that she uses as a platform to express her comments on current political and social issues.
Offhand, her announcement to run for the Senate may look like “premature campaigning,” but there is nothing illegal about it because that description attaches only if, following the rules of the Commission on Elections, she has filed her certificate of candidacy for the Senate, which can be done only in 2027.
Apparently, Magno is taking a leaf from some incumbent senators who won their seat in spite of minimal use of traditional campaign methods, such as posting of billboards, newspaper advertisements, public speaking engagements, and TV and radio spots, through the use of social media and other internet-based means of communication.
Recent past national and local elections have shown that the most effective way to touch base with and solicit votes from millennials and Generation Z, which constitute a substantial majority of the voting population, is through social media.
That mechanism requires few facilities for production and uploading of campaign materials in cyberspace and, most importantly, there are hardly any government regulations, other than the law on cyberlibel, that govern its operation.
In other words, it’s a free for all space for anyone who has the inclination or energy to create content.
It is widely believed that the votes from those two age groups played a major role in the election of then opposition candidates Bam Aquino and Kiko Pangilinan to the second and fifth slots, respectively, of the 2025 senatorial election in spite of the vast resources the administration deployed to support its candidates who lost miserably.
That political development raised hopes that the country’s youth have (finally!) decided to take matters into their own hands, rather than concede to traditional political groups, the election of senators and perhaps the next president in 2028.
As a new face in the country’s political milieu, Magno is expected to be the subject of invitations from TV talk shows, podcasts and similar public activities to talk about her views on the issues of the day and the legislative proposals she would bring to the Senate, if elected.
That arrangement would help make her be known to people outside of the academic and political circles that she is presently identified with and actively involved. The votes needed for her to be elected to the Senate are outside the periphery of those groups.
A continuous exposure in social media is, however, not without its risks in terms of public perception. She could suffer from “viewer fatigue” if her posts come out in such frequency that may bore their intended audience and make them lose interest in them.
At the flick of a finger, those posts can be quickly taken out and the viewer can look for other content that would satisfy his or her appetite for information or entertainment at that particular time.
It may also be advisable for her social media posts to only cover or discuss issues that have a clear and significant impact on the life of the majority of our people.
Not every controversy in the country that crops up deserve a comment from her, otherwise she would be no different from TV and radio commentators who have an opinion on anything so they can fill up their allotted time.
Between now and the date of the permissible start of the campaign period for the 2028 elections, Magno and her advisers may have to come up with ideas that would keep her in the public eye without costing her image fatigue.
Although her decision to be an early bird for the 2028 polls may have some advantages, it also gives her detractors a lot of opportunity to map out plans to derail her ambition to add much needed brain quality to the Senate.
That’s how the political cookie in our country crumbles.
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