by Luz Rimban

FORGET the People Power Coalition and the Puwersa ng Masa. If there's one party that emerged victorious from the May 14 polls, it is Partido ABS-CBN.

The ABS-CBN bloc in the Senate is now formidable, with the election to the Upper House of former news anchor Noli de Castro, lawyer-radio commentator Francis Pangilinan and reelectionist Sergio Osmeña III (who is known to be close to the Lopezes, network's owners). The three senators join the network's public affairs host Loren Legarda and erstwhile ABS-CBN talent Rene Cayetano. At the Lower House, ABS is amply represented by its former news personalities: Teddy Boy Locsin, until recently the host of "Assignment" and now Makati congressman; DZMM news anchor Ted Failon, now Leyte representative; and reporter Gilbert Remulla who now represents the second district of Cavite in the House.

So what else is new? According to ABS-CBN insiders, what many don't see is the huge investment the network poured into the elections, an investment that will surely pay off handsomely in the years to come.

For example, the network gifted de Castro, Osmeña and their fellow ABS-CBN candidates with free commercial spots on primetime television. These cost P88,000 for every 30-second ad. The candidates were also given radio spots gratis. In addition, the network helped their campaigns by providing manpower, vehicles and various other logistical needs. As if these were not enough, there were cash contributions from the Lopez Foundation.

Returns on these electoral investments are expected from the new lawmakers when legislation affecting the Lopez enterprise comes up for deliberation in Congress. One of these is the power reform bill. It is no secret that the Lopez family has huge investments in the generation and distribution of electricity and its near-monopoly control of the power sector has been criticized by citizens' groups. Unless President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo pushes for an early approval of the bill—which means it is still the old Congress that will decide the measure—the ABS-CBN bloc is bound to make itself heard on this matter.

The talk, however, is that this early, the network is already aiming higher and looking to 2004, when its star anchor de Castro is expected to make a go for the presidency. ABS-CBN has been investing for years in the Senate topnotcher who started out in the network as an off-cam announcer for gossip queen Inday Badiday's program. Since 1986, ABS-CBN has made de Castro over and packaged him as a man of the masses. For 15 years, he was an omnipresent figure on television, where he hosted the top-rating evening news program "TV Patrol" from Monday to Friday and the prime-time public affairs program "Magandang Gabi Bayan" on Sunday. De Castro was a dominant presence on radio as well, as he had a daily morning program on DZMM, which is part of the Lopez stable. The buzz in the network is that while ABS-CBN is grooming de Castro for Malacañang, it is also hoping that Legarda, the network talent who topped the senatorial race in 1995, would be his running mate.

That team would likely be the one to beat in 2004. The last two elections have shown that popularity and media exposure are important for candidates running for national positions. That was true for Joseph Estrada. Voters did not see him face-to-face and it was largely his movie persona that they were familiar with and voted for. Observes Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist Conrado de Quiros, "With the media, particularly television, invading the lives of Filipinos everywhere, guns, goons and gold had become a cost-ineffective way of winning votes on a national scale."

The same, however, cannot be said for local politics, where well-oiled electoral machines can defeat television or showbiz appeal. In the Quezon City mayoralty race, for example, action star Rudy Fernandez took a beating from rival Sonny Belmonte, a former congressman and Estrada impeachment prosecutor who has painstaking built a grassroots-based campaign organization in one of the country's biggest cities. Other first-time showbiz candidates suffered Fernandez's fate: Superstar Nora Aunor who ran for governor in Camarines Sur, action star Philip Salvador who wanted to become vice mayor of Mandaluyong and one-time matinee idol Tirso Cruz III who sought a city council seat in Las Piñas.

All three were political neophytes, but even those movie stars with political experience got trounced. In Cavite, Bong Revilla—who won the governorship by a landslide in 1998—claimed to have been cheated by rival Ireneo Malicsi in his reelection bid, although Revilla later conceded defeat with tears welling in his eyes. Movie star Edu Manzano, who was the Makati vice mayor, took his beating from comebacking mayor Jejomar Binay grim-faced.

Then again, there was Kalookan City, where Rey Malonzo, another action star, was reelected mayor despite facing the well-entrenched mass base of rival Macario Assistio, a veteran politician. But then Malonzo had latched on to the administration coalition. Lito Lapid, yet another one of those bang-bang actors, won a second term as Pampanga governor, but that was also because he had no a strong rival—and had the President's son for a running mate. And if comedian Joey Marquez laughed all the way to the polls in Parañaque, where he is now set to serve his third term as mayor, it was in no small part to his being a Lakas-NUCD loyalist.

What it boils down to at the local level is that popularity is still no match for money and machinery. This the likes of Alfredo Lim, Fernandez and Salvador, who tried to earn extra vote-earning fame through top-rating TV docudramas, now realize.

"You run for mayor, governor or congressman, you deal with an infinitely smaller geographical space," de Quiros says. And it's a space that can be controlled and won through an entrenched network - not the broadcast kind, but one of ward leaders and barangay captains who, at the local level, still determine the fate of a local candidate.