For observers of political dynasties in the Philippines, recent midterm elections seemed an all-too-familiar affair. Prominent political families again dominated their bailiwicks, entrenching decades of rule. Some term-limited relatives swapped positions with others in a sort of nepotistic game of musical chairs.
Many clans also expanded their reach. Four pairs of siblings will sit in the new Senate, making up one-third of the entire chamber. Eighteen provinces came under the charge of “obese” dynasties, with five or more relatives occupying different offices. In Ilocos Sur, 19 members of the Singson clan won seats across local government, making them, as dynasty watcher Danilo Arao put it, the “super obese” dynasty of the Philippines.
But the midterms weren’t entirely a rehearsal of familial power-brokering. They also saw a string of electoral upsets across the country, as seemingly minor candidates felled or frustrated political dynasties. According to the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ), 11 provinces – nine in Luzon, one in the Visayas, and another in Mindanao – resisted clan rule. Of those 11, four chose non-dynasty candidates for governor.
The significance of these upsets is greater than any one opposition bloc eating into the president’s support base, a topic on which Philippine and international media outlets have been directing outsized focus. Loosening the viselike grip of the country’s dynasties, which Julio Teehankee has referred to as the “building blocks” of Philippine politics, invites a fundamental reordering of power itself.
That old dynasties simply return is certainly a possibility: this has occurred many times before and has indeed happened this midterm election. But the neophyte success behind two of the biggest upsets – the defeats of Cynthia Villar in Las Piñas and Gwen Garcia in Cebu – reveals the limits of patronage and machinery, the lifeblood of political clans. They are stories about people’s protective sense of livelihood (kabuhayan) and the retaliatory force they can muster under threat. Dynastic breakdowns, in this way, show that public accountability in the Philippines still has teeth, especially when they emerge from below.
Titans Toppled
The defeats of Villar and Garcia are both historic and politically significant. Villar is a two-term senator, Garcia a two-decade governor. They are kingmakers who have been courted by no less than presidents. And they are both matriarchs of “fat” political dynasties, in which numerous family members simultaneously (sabay-sabay) occupy various elected offices. Since the 1960s, both political clans have dominated their respective bailiwicks. But for Villar, power also came by way of her family’s wealth (the largest in the Philippines), and for Garcia, from her clout as head of the country’s most vote-rich province.
Villar’s downfall was engineered by Mark Anthony Santos, a Las Piñas councilor and contender against Villar for the lone congressional district of Las Piñas City. For the first time since 1992, a Villar will not hold the seat. While Villar’s campaign had a national focus, Santos promised local reforms: he touted plans for expanding housing programs, student allowances, and the congressional presence in the city.
But Santos’ success was also buoyed by scandals over the Villar family’s management of public works projects. Since 2022, resident anger has boiled over Villar’s Las Piñas-Zapote River Drive, a thoroughfare aimed at easing chronic flooding and cleaning up the river itself. However, Santos, along with PCIJ, found the flood control project to be ineffective, dangerous, and host to conflicts of interest with Villar-owned businesses and realty nearby. Even after local demands for redress and oversight efforts from her Senate peers, Villar managed to evade them all.
Of even greater controversy has been the Villar family’s control of PrimeWater, a utility that is currently under investigation by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s government. In cities and towns neighboring Las Piñas, the water supply has been intermittent and unfit to drink since 2018, despite the company raking in billions of pesos each year. Locals shared how, in search of water, they travel to various PrimeWater reservoirs, lining up and even quarreling with others to fill their buckets and jugs. As a result, water scarcity became the foremost issue for millions of resident voters this election, with many snubbing the Villar enterprise as “Crime Water.”
Along with Cynthia Villar’s defeat in all but one Las Piñas town (barangay), her daughter, Camille, nearly lost her Senate bid: she tanked in Luzon regions where PrimeWater operates and landed tenth among the Magic 12, the number of Senate seats in contention every election cycle. It seems the Villars’ more than 1 billion pesos in campaign spending, for media ads and cash giveaways, could not bury widely shared grievances about people’s basic needs.
Machine politics also backfired for Governor Garcia, who just weeks before the elections piloted an affordable rice program, a popular yet elusive campaign promise of President Marcos. And despite Garcia commanding support from local leaders as well as the president and his senatorial slate, most Cebuanos ultimately broke away. They instead chose newcomer Pamela Baricuatro, who lacked political star power, apart from endorsements from the Dutertes. Baricuatro won 29 of Cebu’s towns and cities, while Garcia only secured 22. Garcia’s nephew also lost his own reelection bid for mayor of Cebu City.
Like Villar, Garcia seemed to have long been bleeding public support, as locals grew exhausted with her antagonistic and alienating leadership. In addition to defying orders from government watchdogs, she frequently lashed out at rights organizations and other officials for “meddling” in her affairs. In 2020, she even publicly shamed a private citizen for criticizing her administration, going so far as to mock the critic’s appearance and publish her personal details. (Why abrasiveness proved politically fatal for Garcia but has been politically fruitful for the Dutertes would make for a worthwhile study.)
Especially offensive to Cebuanos was Garcia’s disastrous management of government health services, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic (another potential point of comparison to President Duterte). In an effort to save Cebu money, Garcia in 2019 used an outsourcing scheme, hiring contractual personnel for its city and provincial hospitals. According to former hospital staff, the removal of “excess” workers led to shuttered intensive care units and dialysis rooms, anger that Baricuatro centered in her campaign and to which she promised renewed access. After so long in power, it seems that Garcia, like Villar, failed to see the political potential of her neglect.
Livelihoods Over Dynasties
Despite their unthinkable victories, Santos and Baricuatro are not necessarily anti-dynasts, let alone stewards of any such movement. Their successes, in fact, were made possible by rival dynasts. Santos largely benefited from inter-clan warfare in Las Piñas, drawing on support from the Villars’ rivals, the Aguilars. Baricuatro’s campaign similarly gained traction only after the backing of a larger force: the Dutertes.
At the same time, it seems unlikely that rival machinery and patronage were suddenly sufficient to unseat Villar and Garcia, themselves architects and leaders of those systems. If votes could simply be “commanded” by the wealthiest and most well-connected, then Villar and Garcia should have claimed another win, and comfortably so, despite new challenges. Why were they defeated now and so decisively? Disaffection with the dynasts cannot be ruled out as a factor. Scandal after scandal over basic needs proved they could no longer be trusted, offering energy and sheen to fresh contenders.
In other regions where dynasties held power, livelihood campaigns also resonated and won. In Catanduanes, on the northeastern edge of the archipelago, educator Patrick Azanza dislodged the Cuas clan by running on plans for disaster resilience, while in Laguna, south of the capital Manila, journalist Sol Aragones held off the Hernandezes through a campaign for accessible healthcare. Notably, residents of Batangas, in Luzon, stopped the formation of another local dynasty. While they re-elected former governor Vilma Santos-Recto, they also rejected the bid of her son, Luis Manzano, for vice governor. The overwhelming victor was another past governor, Dodo Mandanas, beloved by locals for his infrastructure projects, investments in local government units, and massive scholarship programs.
However, it was also the case that campaigns for reliable livelihoods sustained political dynasties. A prominent example can be found in Pampanga, north of Manila, where the Pineda clan has long been kept alive by economically dependent voters. This past election, the Pinedas maintained near total control of local government, downing an opposition slate calling for good governance and political fairness. This moral campaign criticized the province’s culture of gambling, which they saw as backed by the Pinedas and even breeding international crime. Recently, Pampanga has figured in headlines as a hotbed for trafficking and prostitution, after raids of alleged scam farms by the Philippine National Police in 2023 and 2024.
But even as crime weighed heavily on the electorate, including allegations that the Pineda patriarch is a storied jueteng lord, locals did not punish the dynasty en masse. As Rappler’s Chey Hofileña observed of Pampangeños in 2016, the gambling industry has long provided an answer to poverty. Local residents “think there’s nothing wrong with jueteng,” Hofileña wrote. “An illegal numbers game of chance, it has become a form of recreation, if not a cottage industry that has employed a considerable number of people and offered scholarships to countless youth. […] For residents who have no steady sources of income, jueteng offers them a precious commodity that their one peso bet could buy: hope.”
(It is important to note that the only locality which eluded the Pinedas was San Fernando, where the sitting mayor and her entire slate won handily on a record of improved health care and social services.)
That many voters still supported the Pinedas out of a belief that the family would support their livelihoods means that voting for political dynasties is still seen as a rational, practical choice for many. The same could be said in Bicol, Rizal, and Marawi City, where ruling clans enjoy public favor because they command local industries. For Rona Ann Caritos of the Legal Network for Truthful Elections, voters feel they owe political families: “It is this Filipino virtue of utang na loob (debt of gratitude) that has always worked to the advantage of political dynasties, who attach their names to government services.” Little wonder then that, according to 2024 survey data from WR Numero, half of Filipinos find political dynasties acceptable, even if they also view them as corrupt. Such sentiment, moreover, is strongest in the most vote-rich areas of the Philippines.
So while this election’s dynastic upsets force open political competition, they do not represent a new direction for Philippine politics. The victories are too few, and also too shallow. What is to stop these dynasty slayers from seeding their own political lines? Facing down dynasties, such that they cannot grow back (or do so as easily), requires a more rigorous and persistent rooting-out of their appeal.
It is therefore not enough to expose dynasties for their “bandit-like” underdevelopment, as numerous scholars have, or to claim that voting against them “can lead you to heaven,” as one archbishop advised. It is also not enough to petition the Philippine Supreme Court to direct Congress to outlaw political families, as the country’s 1987 Constitution recommends, although all such efforts are certainly required.
What resonates most is what dynasties mean to people on the ground. The falls of Cynthia Villar and Gwen Garcia, as well as the continuing mandate of more capable dynasts, similarly reflect Filipinos’ struggle for dignity and the precarity many face. Future dynasty slayers would do well to insist that transformative visions can be passed on without bloodlines.
The author thanks Allen Hicken and Arjan Aguirre for their sharp and helpful insights during the writing of this article.