[Rear View] A ‘pink wave’ in 2028? Not so fast

The Liberal Party and Akbayan celebrate the Democratic 'blue wave' but must approach the 2028 election cautiously, as they face significant challenges including a strong front-runner in Vice President Sara Duterte. The pink movement needs to broaden its appeal beyond its base to capture grievance voters, particularly those who supported Marcos and Duterte in the past, while overcoming its elitist image. This is AI-generated. Read the article for full context. Report any errors. The day after the historic midterm elections in the United States, the Liberal Party (LP) and Akbayan, the organized core formations of the pink movement, released statements hailing the Democratic “blue wave.” Pink online pundits and the faithful boldly prophesied a “pink wave” in 2028, declaring that if it can happen in Donald Trump’s America, it can happen here. The liberal progressive bloc’s affinity with the Democrats, the democratic socialist wing in particular, runs deep. They share the vocabulary and cultural anchors. They are evangelistic in their campaigns to fire up the youth vote. But the “blue wave” rode a national grievance over prices and an unpopular war. The pinks would do well to proceed with caution. The 2028 election is not a midterm; it’s an open race for the presidency. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., thankfully, cannot run again, but he is very much a player in 2028 despite his absence from the ballot. The abysmal state of the economy, the high cost of living, soaring prices, inefficient public services, and corruption are his legacy, and that legacy gives voters the permission structure to support anybody but a Marcos clone. Who gets the grievance voters in 2028? The question, and the challenge, for the pinks is who collects the grievance vote. The surveys all say it’s Vice President Sara Duterte. She remains the front-runner despite unexplained wealth allegations now at the center of her impeachment trial and persistent questions about her grasp of policy. Pulse Asia’s September survey had her at 50% nationally, nearly double Leni Robredo’s 26. In Mindanao, where identity politics comes into play, she is at 92%. Other surveys show support for her thinning, but she remains, for now, the candidate of the aggrieved. Unless the Senate impeachment court convicts her and declares her unfit for public office, the Vice President is the competition for the anti-incumbent vote, and the pinks will have to capture those voters from her. Unlike the two-party system, our multi-party system extends to voters a wide range of choices. In a crowded field, a fractured opposition in 2028 is a gift to the Vice President. Brazil and Serbia offer better models of coalition building than the US: progressive presidential candidates won by working with people and parties outside their own base, a concept that the pink movement has always found hard to embrace. The pinks did have their “pink wave” moment in the 2025 midterms, with real and hard earned victories. But the presidency is a winner-take-all contest, and the same movement that can elect senators and party-lists can lose the presidency. We saw it in 2022: the pink movement mustered the largest rallies and the most star-studded endorsements in recent memory, and Robredo still finished with roughly 15 million votes to Marcos’s nearly 32 million. With presidential voter turnout at above 80%, the pinks cannot win by just mobilizing their own. They have to persuade voters who voted for Marcos and Duterte in 2022, the same voters they continue to regard with disdain and talk down to. ‘Disente’ The LP also carries a burden the US Democrats, for all their troubles, do not. For many voters, the LP has come to embody elitist politics. It is a damaged brand, and the damage is partly self-inflicted. The Democrats did not win on decency. They won on affordability, and on high gas prices as a result of the Iran war, with strong candidates perfectly fitted for the states they ran in. The Liberals and their pink allies proudly declared itself “disente” in 2016 and 2019, and the DDS caricatured them as preachy, elitist, and out of touch. Unfortunately, that caricature has taken hold, and it is an uncomfortable weakness they must confront. If they want to be relevant in 2028, talk less about character and more about gut issues, about bigas, kuryente, at trabaho. 2010 rewind The party’s old guards still wish for another 2010. The late Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino was an accidental candidate. His mother’s death in August 2009 put him front and center, Mar Roxas stepped aside, and a grieving nation found its standard-bearer in a matter of weeks, one who was the opposite of outgoing president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. It happened at a time when mainstream media still had the power to make or unmake candidates. That country no longer exists. Voters today live in partisan chambers that are both political and identity-based. Partisans are willing to overlook the character flaws of politicians they regard as their own, and to disbelieve anything that comes from the other side. A sympathy wave needs a shared audience, and there is no shared audience anymore. The pinks cannot wait for history to repeat itself, and they should not plan for it. Self-reflection Before the pink movement plunges into the murky, gritty battles of 2028, it needs to look inward, to accept that the ground shifted in 2016, a shift affirmed in 2019 and 2022. The liberal opposition failed, or refused, to recalibrate, bemoaning disinformation without confronting it head on, dismissing unfavorable surveys while extolling favorable ones, no matter how questionable the science. And it bears repeating: it must stop blaming the voters for their own shortcomings. Finally, it must accept one inconvenient fact: Robredo, hailed as the movement’s face and hope, has said she will not run in 2028. Liberal stalwarts and ardent supporters, however, refuse to give up. So go ahead and admire the Democrats, but use their victory as an opportunity for self-reflection. With neither a machinery nor, as of today, a candidate, the pinks are not yet primed to secure the votes of aggrieved Filipinos. The hard work began yesterday. – Rappler.com Joey Salgado is a former journalist, and a government and political communications practitioner. He served as spokesperson for former vice president Jejomar Binay.