How political extremes in the Philippines are losing the middle

In a nation as relationally enmeshed and emotionally saturated as the Philippines — where politics is often transacted not through policy platforms but through whispered obligations, inherited loyalties, and the long memory of familial debts — it has never been the thunderous polemic that reshapes the electoral landscape, but the steady, resonant murmur of the undecided middle.

And yet, in recent electoral cycles, the quiet center has not been drawn in with deliberate nuance but instead left behind — sidelined by a rhetorical arms race between extremes that may dazzle the digital sphere yet fails to stir the political ground beneath it.

Alienation, in its purest form, does not merely shut the door — it shifts the walls, erodes the center, and leaves one orphaned from a story they once thought theirs.

Estrangement during the 2022 presidential campaign did not declare itself in sweeping ideologies. It crept in through manner and mood; through the quiet arrogance of language dressed as moral clarity.

In a country where voting is as much an emotional as it is a political act, the progressive campaign’s insistence on moral certainty often mutated — however unintentionally — into a politics of exclusion.

Volunteers in the Robredo campaign did not merely canvas; they navigated hostility. In Marcos strongholds, they were jeered at, red-tagged, even doused with water — symbols of rejection both literal and ideological. In Davao and Butuan, young campaigners were branded as NPA sympathizers by neighbors, barangay officers, sometimes even relatives. The accusation was not argued; it was assumed. 

Harassment escalated from slurs to vandalism. In response, Robredo’s team called for state protection, as the campaign’s emotional labor gave way to literal risk. 

They came to offer platforms — and left negotiating safety. Each moment, a microfracture in the broader architecture of persuasion.

Behavioral science corroborates what the field organizers instinctively feel but often fail to name: that allegiance is less a product of principle than of proximity, fairness, and the quiet assurance of emotional safety.

When political movements fail to nurture these conditions, they provoke not apathy, but affective recoil.

Political scientist Jennifer McCoy’s work on democratic erosion reveals a recursive dynamic: as movements polarize, centrists disengage, and the extremes cannibalize the discourse.

We do not merely radicalize others — we radicalize ourselves in their absence.

This dynamic was observable in the digital echo chambers of 2022. A Rappler-Kosovo study of Twitter behavior showed that while Robredo supporters exhibited creative energy and moral fervor, they largely communicated within ideological silos. Marcos supporters, conversely, though often vitriolic, engaged across a broader spectrum.

Online, the Robredo campaign began to mirror not a coalition but a fandom — one sustained more by affirmation than conversion.

And fandom, for all its aesthetic power, is structurally averse to doubt. It rewards affirmation. It punishes uncertainty.

The language of the campaign, too, betrayed this inward turn.

Phrases like “radical love” — while earnest and visionary often landed poorly outside urban, liberal enclaves.

Political anthropologist Sensei Adorador noted how such terms, coded in middle-class idealism, failed to resonate in communities shaped less by discourse than by livelihood, trust, and ritual.

Language, in these spaces, is not only a means of communication; it is a vehicle of inclusion. When it misfires, it alienates.

Sociologically, this failure to engage the middle is not a tactical oversight. It is a structural failure to apprehend the mechanics of persuasion in a nation where politics flows through relationships, not algorithms.

Filipino electoral behavior is governed less by ideology than by memory — of favors granted, betrayals survived, kinship honored. To dismiss the unconverted, to shame the hesitant, is not simply impolite. It is politically self-defeating.

The center does not argue.

It exits.

And when it does, it leaves no display — only absence.

Anthropologically, any effort to reduce the Filipino electorate to dichotomous camps: progressive vs. regressive, informed vs. ignorant, is an erasure of the cultural complexity that has always animated Philippine political life.

Ours is not a two-party psyche. It is a woven one: marked by layered loyalties, economic anxieties, postcolonial trauma, and a centuries-long struggle to reconcile modernity with memory.

Alienating the undecided, the apolitical, or the tentative is not merely a lost opportunity. It is a betrayal of the electorate’s texture.

That betrayal is becoming cyclical.

In the prelude to 2028, we already see the repetition. Candidates like Vico Sotto and Isko Moreno are not assessed on governance, but reduced to affective archetypes.

The discourse, once again, seeks contrast — not comprehension.

Who appears more makamasa, who tweets more strategically, who looks more presidential.

The center, meanwhile, remains a silhouette — spoken about, never spoken to.

This culture of judgment, aestheticized and digitized, is what may be termed performative criticality: the posture of discernment without the rigor of analysis. It thrives on irony, brevity, and moral signaling. It privileges visibility over vulnerability. And it alienates efficiently, elegantly, consistently.

But perhaps the deepest tragedy of the 2022 campaign lies not in its failure, but in its unrealized proximity to something transcendent. It held the potential for a narrative recalibration: youthful optimism, creative dissent, moral courage. Yet these instruments of transformation were often deployed for affirmation.

The campaign became a mirror, not a bridge.

We spoke to ourselves. We mistook catharsis for consensus.

And in doing so, we forfeited the possibility of persuasion.

Political psychology reminds us that voting behavior is narratively shaped.

People do not vote for policies; they vote for stories that render them intelligible to themselves. They vote for belonging.

For safety. For hope.

Alienation does not merely silence, it redirects. Those pushed out of one movement will seek solace in another; often in the arms of strongman charisma, where coherence is substituted by control, and contradiction masked by certainty. Not because they are misinformed for they feel, at last, addressed.

What, then, becomes imperative?

To reframe bridge-building as an act of political sophistication. To replace discursive purity with narrative hospitality. To understand that those who hesitate are not obstacles, they are invitations. And to remember, above all, that the middle is not mute.

It is listening. It is watching.

It is waiting to be engaged not with pageantry, but with sincerity.

Because in Philippine politics, as in life, it is not the crescendo that shifts history. It is the quiet that follows… the room still occupied after the shouting has ceased.