Philippine Elections 2022: The Sentimental Masks of Marcos and Robredo

Contemporary scholarship on the Marcos family's return to power emphasizes the resurrection of the late dictator's image as an instrument to stir nostalgia for the supposed "golden age" of the Philippine economy and society. The 2022 presidential election, a re-staging of the 2016 vice-presidential rivalry between Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Leni Robredo, not only demonstrated the candidates' command for conjuring images of the melodramatic contest for grassroots support between Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and Corazon Aquino--but also their ability to shed these images at will when these images did not serve that purpose. Here, Espiritu and Cristobal view the elections in terms of affective masks, in which Marcos and Robredo deployed melodrama and emotional messaging to appeal to voters by both tapping into earlier narratives and moving beyond them. Leni Robredo, they argue, was defeated by a Marcosian counter-revolution that successfully overturned the orthodoxies of the 1986 People Power movement as the finest hour of Philippine politics. That is why her 15 million votes were just not enough.