IN EVERY election,or I should say in every competition, there are, to use a cliche, winners and losers. Winners rejoice after a win while losers either accept the loss or refuse to accept the result. That determines a loser’s response to a loss. Either he or she is merely saddened or gets irate. In Philippine elections, most losers never accept a loss. That has given rise to the claim that in our elections, there are the winners on one side and the cheated on the other side, no losers.
That, I say, is what has made the recent elections for councilor in Cebu City interesting.Both sides--Bando Osmena-Pundok Kauswagan (BOPK) and Barug-PDP Laban--failed to come up with a sweep, meaning that each won some seats and lost other seats. And some of the losers just couldn’t accept their defeat.
One notable twist there are party mates blaming other party mates for their loss. The usual reaction is for a loser to blame the other side for his or her predicament.
Cheating, which ranges from vote buying to, in the current setup, manipulating the digital vote count, is the usual claim. Cheating can’t be claimed against party mates for obvious reason: one can’t cheat against oneself.
Conflict between party mates usually arise during the conduct of the campaign and not in the count. In any group, teamwork is key to winning the game or achieving a goal. It is when party mates do things on their own without regard for the greater good of the group that suspicions arise and conflicts erupt.
The question losers ask is always, what went wrong? Answering that involves a good dose of criticism and self-criticism. The conduct of the campaign is one of the aspects that would be looked into.
Losers may self-criticize, but more often than not, their eyes roam outside of their own backyards. They get more critical of people outside of their campaign organization than of insiders.
This apparently is what is happening in the aftermath of the elections for councilor in Cebu City. A Barug candidate who lost in the elections has a description for his party mate who won: a snake.
To be fair, the losing bet said he would still look deeper into the allegation that his own party mate could be among those responsible for his loss. We have to wait for the proof that he has promised to divulge soon.
There are those who would rather want losers to move on instead of tarrying long in the vicinity of a loss. I say that is wrong. I think participants in an electoral exercise, whether they won or lost, should gather the main players in their campaign and sum up their effort and the manner they conducted the said campaign.
Lessons need to be learned for the next elections, whether they want to run again or not. Case in point: the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism has come up with a book that essentially summed up the lessons of the elections in selected localities.
Conflicts can be good if they are handled well.