The four horsemen of the apocalypse

Apocalyptic is how one academic has described the outcome of the 2025 midterm elections. This, the 13th midterm election, which is a referendum on the incumbent administration, certainly only has political misery for company. It marks only the fourth time in our electoral history that a president has been repudiated in the midterms.

What are the four horsemen of the 2025 apocalypse? Let us propose these four: first, unpopularity; second, incompletion; third, decay; and fourth, blindness. Because a midterm is always a referendum on the sitting president, the popularity—or lack of it—of the sitting president matters, and here, the President went into the fight by becoming increasingly unpopular. And because a midterm is about competing slates, it mattered that both main contenders, the President and the Vice President, went into the fight without complete slates. The President, at first, could proclaim he was the only one able to muster a complete slate, but his elder sister and the latest offering of the Villars proved fickle in their affections and fleeting in their loyalty. So he really only had 10. The Veep, for her part, had a slate not entirely her own since her father had his own candidates, and in the end even mashing them together meant only a partial slate was proclaimed: itself so stuffed with token candidates it took the defection of Marcos and Villar to strengthen their ranks.

Put another way, going into the fight, neither side could have achieved a sweeping victory in the first place. Here, decay enters into the picture: with the weakening of mass media, including the collapse of mainstream news outfits and the ghettoization of both TV and movies into an increasingly elite industry, making giant reputations or outsize media personalities is a thing of the past, when mass audiences still existed. By sheer longevity, those who gained stature in the old era are still able to seek election, but even they are increasingly remote figures to an increasingly young population. For some, their residual claims to fame are enough; for others, their time has clearly passed. What matters more are in a sense, committed fandoms, both the political kind or those that participate in elections as cohesive voting blocs.

Then there is blindness, which is the inability to see how the world around you is changing and adapt accordingly. It can either be thinking you can dance your way to victory or joke your way to a win without bothering with a platform, or becoming such a purist about ideology you alienate potential allies. It means forcing yourself as a candidate in an arena you aren’t competitive in, without accepting your limitations and looking for another arena where you can also join the fight.

The result can be described as apocalyptic but in a different sense. First, context: measuring this 13th midterm plebiscite by all the others, we have an unusual outcome: it was both a tie and a defeat. As of press time, the rankings showed five Alyansa vs. five DuterTen candidates in the winning circle. For a midterm, this is only the second tie ever; the first was Macapagal in 1963. But the surprise victory of KiBam (Kiko Pangilinan and Bam Aquino) also means the outcome is five admin, seven non-admin: a defeat, though a slim one (40 percent), nowhere on the same level as the truly catastrophic defeats of Quirino in 1951 (he lost, 0-9 or 100 percent), Arroyo in 2007, (2-10 or 16 percent) or Marcos in 1971 (2-6 or 25 percent).

This explains why, surprisingly, joining Marcos in seeming to lick their wounds instead of crowing, was Sara Duterte who expressed disappointment over the results—results hard-pressed to have been better, however much she had going for her slate, because of the weakness of her slate to begin with. The President may be limping, but he isn’t necessarily lame, and after having everything go for her, the Veep couldn’t definitively repudiate her tormentor. Instead, what we saw was a validation of Leni Robredo’s seemingly logic-defying campaign of 2022: in a world where Marcos and Duterte destroy each other, an alternative has a fighting chance.

The rules of the game mattered, too. Time and again, the surveys tell us that voters are hard-pressed to complete a list of more than eight senators. Because those defeated prior to martial law wanted a chance to win post-Edsa, our Senate elects 12 at a time instead of the eight we used to elect before martial law. This opened the door, in the ’90s, to dagdag-bawas; today, it leaves the door open to command votes, machine votes, or simply, suggestion votes (as in, “Can I suggest these names to fill up your 12 slots?”). This dynamic, many have sensed, led to the KiBam surprise. And at the end of the day, their core voters also held together in other races and other places, such as for the party list, where the established ones did badly.

Neither the President nor the Veep could hold the halves of their former coalition together. The next battleground, which made this midterm unique, is, of course, impeachment. The Palace is shaken, but not enough opposition could be stirred to result in the kind of repudiation that leads to an incumbent becoming a total lame duck. A moderately well-prosecuted trial can still be devastating.