Kiko on win: We’re tired of losing

MANILA, Philippines — Hit by successive electoral defeats, Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan felt the 2025 midterm election was his final shot at reentering public service.

“We’re tired of losing,” the former senator told The STAR’s online show “Truth on the Line” yesterday.

“If we won’t win, let’s just let the younger generation run,” he said.

Pangilinan was midway through his third Senate term when he served as campaign manager in 2019 for the opposition slate “Otso Diretso.”

Running during the height of former president Rodrigo Duterte’s popularity, the slate faced a wipeout, with none of its eight candidates entering the winning circle. Pangilinan eventually resigned as president of the Liberal Party.

Two years later, when then-vice president Leni Robredo was looking for a running mate for the 2022 race, she set her sights on Pangilinan, abandoning his reelection bid to take a shot at the vice presidency. He got trounced by then-Davao City mayor Sara Duterte by a whopping 22 million votes.

As Pangilinan staged a comeback Senate bid with his ally, Bam Aquino, he had to “stay on message” and avoid being “hard-headed” to be more palatable to the electorate.

The result? He ranks No. 5, according to partial and unofficial results.

It was a “miracle” win for the former senator, who is outside the winning circle in most pre-election surveys. The final poll of Social Weather Stations, for instance, placed him at rank 15-16.

When the initial results trickled in, “some told me they were finding my name in the top six to 12 and even below it,” Pangilinan said. Anticipating a defeat, he already discussed with his wife, Sharon Cuneta, on how to “strengthen farm advocacy and eco-tourism in the private sector.”

The church-based Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting attributed Pangilinan and Aquino’s surprise showing to a combination of effective ground campaigning, tactical alliances and massive support from millennials and Generation Z voters, who now make up over a third of the entire electorate.

Fighting the trolls

Pangilinan, who was first elected to the Senate in 2001, made use of meager resources by campaigning separately with Aquino to visit different parts of the country.

“We don’t have a huge machinery. We just made sure to tap into our base, foster volunteerism and avoid quarreling with people of different political views,” the former senator said.

He stuck with his message on championing food security, drawing from his experience as Presidential Assistant for Food Security and Agricultural Modernization from May 2014 to September 2015.

But the campaign hit a stumbling block after internet trolls mocked him for supposedly eating rice with vinegar placed on a pot lid and banana leaves. He later clarified that he ate rice with carabao’s milk atop mustard leaves – a usual practice in Pampanga, the home province of his father.

“From January to May, we were subjected to endless bashing, with some materials amassing almost 100 million views,” Pangilinan, who branded himself as the “summa cum laude” among disinformation targets, said. “But we fought back. We didn’t allow them to seize our narrative.”

In a Philstar L!fe article, journalist Deo Dominic Bugauisan said Pangilinan’s team, headed by veteran campaign strategist Renan Dalisay, “launched a counter-campaign that reclaimed the kaldero (pot) as a badge of resilience” to fend off massive disinformation over the video.

After “leaning into the storm,” according to Bugauisan’s story, the team forged last-minute alliances from major political parties in Bangsamoro to administration figures crossing political lines (including a surprise endorsement from Cebu Gov. Gwen Garcia).

Once seated, Pangilinan plans to introduce legislation to fight disinformation tactics, which heavily targeted the opposition bloc in previous elections.

Before he stepped down in 2022, he drafted a report, in his capacity as chairperson of the Senate constitutional amendments committee, pushing for social media companies to be held accountable for the proliferation of fake news.