Extinguishing pol dynasties’ ‘breeding ground’

Elections for the country’s most basic political unit have been postponed again, and we’ve lost count of how many times the barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections (BSKE) have been canceled or postponed before.

But this column won’t address the pros and cons of the postponement because lawyer Romulo Macalintal has already filed a petition for an injunction in the Supreme Court to invalidate Republic Act No. 12326, the “Act Fixing the Term of Office of Barangay Officials and Members of the Sangguniang Kabataan to Five Years.”

The law postponed the BSKE, originally scheduled for next month, and set the next BSKE for the second Monday of November 2028, with elections every five years thereafter. The postponement gave incumbent barangay officials, elected in 2023, an additional two-year term.

The changing of the guard at the barangay level may seem mundane, as barangay executives—given their position at the lowest level of public governance and their localized jurisdiction—have considerably less power than other elected local officials, or so it seems.

To include or exclude. But amid the Macalintal petition, the Supreme Court justices will once again be asked to rule on a constituency they did not overlook in a recent ruling—barangays, which, as part of the local government units (LGUs), serve as the political base for local and national politicians.

Last Aug. 26, the high court called Congress’ 39-year refusal to fulfill its constitutional duty to enact an enabling law prohibiting political dynasties a “grave abuse of discretion.” Congress’ grave inaction in failing to comply with the mandate of Article II, Section 26 of the Constitution—”The State shall guarantee equal access to opportunities for public service and prohibit political dynasties as may be defined by law”—has allowed political dynasties to persist, along with the continued impoverishment of many constituencies and the underdevelopment (or unequal development) of large swaths of the country.

In the ruling, the Supreme Court laid out four suggested guidelines for crafting the enabling law (which I discussed in my two previous columns). For the prohibition to be meaningful, it must include four elements: covered relationships, timing, scope of covered positions, and geographical location.

The Supreme Court said the prohibition should extend to the fourth degree of consanguinity and affinity, and that this prohibition should “span across all the political units under the Local Government Code, i.e., barangays, municipalities, cities, and provinces.”

To exclude the barangay from the prohibition on political dynasties “is to miss the opportunity to weed out the problem at its base and to deprive oligarchic politicians of their ‘stepping stone’ or ‘breeding ground,’” the Supreme Court warned.

Both the House and Senate versions of the Anti-Political Dynasty Act are ominously silent on banning political dynasties down to the barangay level. But according to the Supreme Court, the Constitution identifies barangays as one of the LGUs, while the Local Government Code of 1991 “recognizes the barangay as the most basic political unit, serving as the primary implementing unit of government policies, plans, and programs, where collective views of the community are expressed, and where disputes are settled.”

Corruption and political patronage. Quoting the Center for People Empowerment in Governance (Cenpeg), the ruling said that the “politically-stagnant and economically unproductive barangay usually comes to life with every cycle of elections that are largely decided by vote buying, by how much is given to village supporters, by promises of pork barrel allocations, ‘emergency assistance,’ and other forms of largesse.”

But supposedly nonpartisan barangays have primarily served as the electoral base for political dynasties; this comes at a hefty price for the electorate—and for democracy itself.

The Supreme Court further quoted Cenpeg in pointing out that “traditional politicians … wasted away the potential of the barangay by using it primarily as an electoral base through fraudulent means, political deals, and corrupt practices to ensure their political hegemony. As a result, the barangay has served to make patronage politics resilient and people beholden to small favors and emergency assistance from local officials that are actually stolen from taxpayers’ money.”

In short, many barangays have long been co-opted not as institutions of governance but as grassroots political machinery that perpetuates dynasties from the local to the national levels. The Supreme Court ruled that “the concentration of political power within a narrow few” has not only “distorted democracy” and “weakened accountability” but, egregiously, “fostered conditions conducive to corruption and political patronage.”

To recover the barangay’s true worth in our democratic project, the proposed Anti-Dynasty Act must not only extend to the fourth civil degree but also include the barangay within its scope. Anything less is another dubious omission that the Supreme Court declared an “active reproduction of the ruling-class interests.”

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