Elections should not deteriorate into popularity contests

I fully agree with President Aquino’s clarion call to our electorate to be more discerning now in the choice of their candidates in all the forthcoming political exercises in our country.  Let us accept the President’s challenge to “choose candidates who can fight for the interest of the people (as) we don’t need those who are only good at reading scripts, dancing or singing.”

We need new and fresh ideas from truly qualified leaders who could lead our country and our people to their much-deserved economic and political recovery. As early as in 1992, in his separate opinion in Adiong vs Comelec, the late Supreme Court Associate Justice Isagani Cruz challenged the Commission on Elections (Comelec) “to concentrate on the education of the voters on the proper exercise of their suffrages (to) prevent them from deteriorating into popularity contests where the victors are chosen on the basis not of their platforms and competence but on their ability to sing or dance, or play a musical instrument, or shoot a basketball, or crack a toilet joke, or exhibit some such dubious talent irrelevant to their ability to discharge a public office.”

Justice Cruz’s erudition that “The public service is threatened with mediocrity and indeed sheer ignorance if not stupidity” still reverberates in our present political and electoral processes. God bless our country. — Atty. Romulo B. Macalintal, Election Lawyer, Philamlife Village, Las Piñas City