"We will know soon enough."
The first election returns that the nation will receive will be those from the cities and municipalities that comprise NCR (the National Capital Region); these will have been trickling in during the hours immediately following the end of the voting period. These returns will be followed by those from the regions closest to NCR—Central Luzon and Calabarzon—and from Cebu City, Davao City and other major population centers; these will have been coming in since early this morning.
Of course, the results of the local elections—those for representatives, governors, mayors, and provincial, city and municipal councilors—will become known fairly quickly. It is the results of the contest for the only national positions at stake—12 senators—that will take considerably longer to determine. If experience is anything to go by, perhaps the identities of the 12 new members of the incoming Senate will not definitely be established until the end of this week at the earliest.
What will be the profile of the Senate of the 18th Congress, which comes into being on July 1? That will largely depend not so much on the nominal party affiliations of the remaining 16 senators as on the professional and personal tendencies of those men and women. Close to one-half of the 16 are members of what has been known, since the start of the Duterte administration, as the Duterte-supportive Senate super-majority.
The 16 remaining senators are divided into supermajority members (Lacson, Sotto, Gatchalian, Pacquiao, Honasan, Escudero, Legarda, Zubiri, Villanueva and Recto) and five opposition members (Pangilinan, Drilon, Trillanes, De Lima and Hontiveros). With Legarda, Honasan, and Trillanes bowing out of the Senate after having served two consecutive terms, the super-majority will have a two-senator edge over the opposition.
To be able to block objectionable bills filed in the Eighteenth Congress, the opposition will have to win enough seats to achieve 12-12 parity with the supermajority. That means that the voters will have elected all eight Otso Diretso candidates. That is a tall, but not unachievable order, given the vast resources that the Hugpong-PDP-Laban machine poured into the election.
If the election returns indicate victory for the administration candidates, and if therefore the supermajority continues to exist, the nation can expect more of the same from the incoming Senate—tepid opposition to and lack of criticism of the administration and eagerness to embrace Malacañang positions and proposals. By contrast, a robust opposition brought into being by a strong Otso Diretso showing will return the Senate to the role that it has always been expected to play in this country’s political system—a dispenser of independent, not lackey-type, judgment on all national issues that go up to the Senate for consideration.
If yesterday the voters cast their ballots with their minds and country-loving hearts rather than with their irrational biases and open palms, the pro-administration supermajority will disappear and its place will be taken by a group of winning candidates who will make the Senate, once again, an institution that the Filipino people can be proud of.
Will the Otso Diretso have confounded the polling organizations and sprung a surprise on the administration? Did the voters elect 12 first-rate senators? The nation will know soon enough.
