Missing the time when PH politics was boring
I would choose falling asleep to long speeches from a livestream of a Senate plenary session over the brawls, shouting and tantrums of the “Senateflix.” Or the bland city government school suspension announcements, than being called an “abanger” and divided into “team atabs” and “team nanay.”
I long for the time when a Palace press officer didn’t have to throw clever puns at political opponents; when it was not normal for a public works official to curse in front of a camera; back when Philippine politics was not a joke you could put in a meme.
“Bayot; p—– ina; anak ka ng p—; you son of a b*tch; you’re all bullshit; gago; duwag; go to hell; bobo; sampalin kita; tuliin kita uli; buang ka; who is this stupid God?; Pope, p—– ina ka; p—– kang UN.”
These were a few of the slurs, insults, and phrases I heard on TV when former President Rodrigo Duterte was campaigning and in power.
I was in fifth grade during the 2016 presidential elections. If I remember anything during that time, it was that a number of my classmates, trusted adults, and celebrities on social media were amused by this kind of language.
Hearing these, they had one consensus in mind: change was coming.
To them, change was 1.70 meters tall, with an iron fist, and a loose cannon for a mouth. Change was Duterte—who almost three years after his term, was arrested by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity for his war on drugs.
Multiple fingers point to his rise in national power and use of political rhetoric for its influence on the state of political communication in the country today.
“Dutertismo” was a term coined by Philippine sociologist, journalist, academic, and Inquirer columnist Randy David months before Duterte was elected president.
Filipino researcher Ian Parcon explains that David used the term to describe Duterte’s reliance on emotional appeals and stories about government failures, rather than a clearly defined political program. According to him, Dutertismo is characterized as a personalistic view of politics centered on the belief in a “strongman” leader.
Duterte’s campaign paired that rhetoric with attacks on Manila’s political elite, promises of swift action on drugs and crime, and an effective “use” of social media. But what was once deemed as a rejection of the old political playbook has rewritten the norm we know today.
Duterte’s words became part of the political machinery itself, his crude and threatening rhetoric, as anthropologist Nicole Curato argued, brought public frustration to the surface and communicated urgency.
His politics was personal. Through Duterte’s example, the public saw that a sharp insult could travel farther than a policy statement and a punchline could generate more engagement than a press briefing. Today, engagement is the political currency, and social media has fueled this transformation.
Through it, political communication could pass without the usual formalities of a press conference, a written statement or a news report; whatever politicians had to say, they could now transmit directly to their audience using their social media platforms.
Ten years later, we live to see the commercialization of political content. In 2026, political affairs are now packaged for consumption: a school suspension is a punchline; a Senate hearing is a reality show and the podium is used to vent personal and work-related grievances; a political feud between two national government officials involving a death threat is a “lovers’ quarrel.”
We are given teams to choose, personalities to root for, villains to ridicule and scandals to follow. The more outrageous the content, the more valuable it becomes, not because it informs the public, but because it keeps them watching.
Politicians now have podcasts, YouTube channels, and hands-on marketing teams that manage their various social media platforms on Facebook, Instagram, X, and even TikTok; they have the apps and they know how to use the language.
The problem does not rest solely in the hands of our politicians, because they give us a show but we give them an audience.
Today, people have become too fanatical to the point where there is a loveteam in the Senate, city mayors are treated as local celebrities and compared to Korean boyband members. There are fan edits of former senators on TikTok, our country is divided by political colors, while we turn almost every political affair into memes and content to be shared and profited from online.
Politicians have learned what gets our attention, while we have grown to expect politics to give us something worth watching.
Somewhere between the meme, the TikTok edit and the next political feud, we risk forgetting that these politicians are not characters in a show to binge, but public officials who make decisions that affect our daily lives.
We have to take a closer look at ourselves rather than our screens to see how much we have contributed in building the circus we condemn.
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Mikaela Villacorta, 20, is a journalism student from the University of Santo Tomas.
