The 2019 election season will be a “no-holds-barred occasion” for political dynasties in the country, Senator Leila de Lima said Thursday.
In a dispatch from Camp Crame, the detained lawmaker lamented how political families mock the country’s election system by fielding family members to almost all elective positions in every city or province.
“The 2019 election season proves to be a no-holds-barred occasion for Philippine political dynasties,” De Lima said.
“Since there is no enabling law, but only a non-self-executing constitutional provision, that deals with political dynasties and the scourge that they represent in our democratic system of elections, political families have once again fielded candidates for multiple positions,” she added.
This in effect, according to De Lima, “makes our elections to be a joke, if only it were not so tragic for our democracy.”
The opposition senator also noted that “dynastic succession to political office or dominance of political families in both national and local offices” has never “been more pronounced” than under the Duterte administration.
Moreover, she said the “prevalence of impunity and lack of accountability” enabled by President Rodrigo Duterte “has further engendered the culture on which political dynasties thrive.”
“With the model being the Duterte family fielding all three children as candidates for elective offices in Davao, it is therefore no wonder why other political families would follow suit in this showcase of avarice for political power,” De Lima said.
“Indeed, it takes a special kind of lack of delicadeza for a family to surmise that public office is a birthright and a personal entitlement,” she added.
“Political Goliaths”, according to De Lima, have quashed “whatever little democratic space is left for other struggling aspirants to public office.”
“This is the sorry state of Philippine democracy that made Filipinos believe that electing Duterte would finally put an end to the corruption of entrenched dynasties,” De Lima said.
“What they got instead was just another political family no different from the rest in their shameless sense of entitlement to political power,” she added. /kga