Unipink Isn’t Unity—It’s Exhaustion in Disguise

I read something strange today.

They’re calling it Unipink—a loose, unspoken alliance between some Kakampinks and Marcos supporters, supposedly to block Sara Duterte’s rise in 2025 and beyond.

At first, it felt absurd. Like a meme. Marcos and Robredo voters, side by side? It went against everything that defined the 2022 divide.

But the more I looked into it, the more I saw what people were really reacting to—not some shared vision, but a shared fear. And I get it. For the sake of keeping the deranged out of national politics, the idea of Unipink—while it makes me squirm—starts to feel disturbingly real.

It’s unprincipled. It’s messy. It reeks of compromise.
And yet... it’s starting to make sense.

Not because it’s right.
But because people are tired, and politics in this country rarely leaves us with good options.

It’s Not Unity—It’s a Political Tradeoff

This isn’t about healing. It’s not about growth, or maturity, or people “finally coming together.” Let’s not pretend.

What’s fueling this so-called Unipink isn’t shared values. It’s shared fear.

Sara Duterte isn’t just another presidential hopeful. She’s the most obvious continuation of everything that broke us between 2016 and 2022. The killings. The bluster. The impunity. The arrogant refusal to answer for anything, including the dead. Her ICC defiance, her alignment with China, her loud silence every time she’s questioned—it all reeks of a presidency we’ve barely recovered from.

So now, some people who swore off the Marcoses are turning toward them. Not out of loyalty. Not out of forgiveness. But because Bongbong, for all his revisionism and privilege, doesn’t bark. He smiles. He plays safe. He speaks in diplomatic language. And when the bar is that low, even Marcos starts to look manageable.

It’s a miserable kind of logic. But it’s the kind of logic that comes after too many years of watching elections break things instead of fix them.

What makes this moment unusual is that realpolitik—normally the game of seasoned politicians—is now being played by voters. By Kakampinks. By people who once wore pink with fire in their chest, who marched, volunteered, gave their time and voice and heart for Leni Robredo. These aren’t people chasing power. They’re not after positions or favors.

They’re doing what they never thought they’d do—not because they’ve changed sides, but because they still care.
Because they still believe the country’s at stake.

That’s what makes this harder to dismiss.

Unipink, if it even exists, is not unity. It’s not a coalition. It’s not an alliance built on shared dreams. It’s a survival mechanism. A holding pattern. A political tradeoff that says: I’ll vote with you this time—not because I trust you, but because I’m terrified of what happens if we don’t block what’s coming.

Most of them know it. They’re not pretending this is the future. They’re not building bridges. They’re buying time.

And if you look too closely at these kinds of compromises, they start to look like betrayal.
But if you zoom out just enough, they start to feel like the only move left on the board

The Price of Tactical Voting: What Are We Giving Up?

Let’s be honest. Every time we say “lesser evil”, we know we’re giving something up.

It’s never just a vote. It’s a signal. A soft approval. A compromise we hope no one remembers.

For Kakampinks who once stood firmly on principle, this shift—this quiet acceptance of Marcos-aligned names on the ballot—isn't just political. It’s personal. These are the same people who fought for truth in 2022. Who stood against historical distortion, disinformation, and dynastic politics. Now some of them are voting for the very same forces they once marched against.

Maybe just for this cycle.
Maybe just to keep Duterte out.
But it still leaves a mark.

Because when you start voting based on who’s less dangerous, instead of who’s aligned with your values, the ground beneath you shifts. What used to be a movement becomes a mood. What used to be a stand becomes a shrug.

And the risk is bigger than one Senate race.

The more we normalize these compromises, the easier it becomes for the Marcos camp to claim validation. They don’t need full loyalty. They just need our silence. They need us to stop resisting long enough for them to rebrand themselves as reasonable. As reformists. As the new middle ground.

And maybe we think it’s harmless. Just one race. Just this once.

But someone’s watching.

The younger voters. The students who campaigned for Leni in 2022. The first-time volunteers who believed in something clean. The kids who painted murals, organized house-to-house campaigns, handed out leaflets on their own time—because they thought we were done with this kind of politics.

Now they’re watching adults quietly cast votes for dynasties again.
What are we teaching them?

That idealism is only good until the numbers stop working?
That strategy matters more than integrity?
That compromise isn’t just part of politics—it is politics?

We told them we were different. That this movement stood for something. And now we’re asking them to understand that it’s complicated.

But maybe the harder question is:
What exactly do we still stand for?

Unipink Is a Meme. Memes Don’t Build Movements.

Let’s be real: Unipink lives on the internet. Not in town halls, not in volunteer centers, not in community forums—just in Reddit threads, Threads posts, and TikTok stitches where people are trying to make sense of something that doesn't exist in the real world.

There are no Unipink campaign teams. No Unipink senatoriables. No grassroots organizing happening under that banner. It’s not a movement. It’s a mood. A meme. Something people say when they’re trying to explain why they’re voting for someone they once considered untouchable.

Social media makes it look bigger than it is.
You see a couple of viral posts and suddenly it feels like a wave. Like consensus. But that's the illusion. That same illusion made people believe we were going to win in 2022. It made us think digital noise would drown out actual machinery.

It didn’t.

And now, we’re falling for the same trick—this time on the other side.

Meanwhile, disinformation networks are already twisting the story. You’ll find identical posts claiming that even the Kakampinks now “support BBM,” as if that vote came from acceptance, not desperation. Some accounts plant fake quotes or misleading screenshots to stir conflict within the opposition. It’s the same troll playbook, just with new packaging.

That’s the problem with memes: anyone can hijack them.
You can’t build anything solid on a punchline. Not when it can be rewritten, reposted, and weaponized by the same people you were trying to fight.

The Pink Movement in 2022 had power because it came from the ground up. It started with people, not platforms. It didn’t need trend-jacking or branding gimmicks. It had faces, hands, and voices behind it.

Unipink is the opposite. All pixels, no pavement.

And that’s the risk—when you mistake momentum for substance. When you confuse virality with direction. That’s how we end up thinking we’ve built something… when we’ve only gone viral.

The Real Work Is Still Outside the Spotlight

The thing with all this noise about Unipink is that it makes us forget where real political change happens.

It doesn’t happen on Reddit. Or Threads. Or TikTok. It doesn’t start with memes or trend cycles. It starts on the ground—with conversations that don’t get likes, with people who still care even when the hashtags stop working.

The Pink Movement wasn’t born because someone came up with a good name. It was built by people who knocked on doors, printed their own flyers, and walked barangay to barangay talking to strangers who’d already made up their minds. That didn’t trend. That didn’t go viral. But it mattered.

It still matters.

The truth is, real opposition in this country doesn’t get the spotlight. People like Luke Espiritu, Neri Colmenares, and Heidi Mendoza don’t have the budget or machinery. But they’ve been consistent. Honest. Steady. And that’s what makes them easy to ignore—especially in a system where being “idealistic” is treated like a weakness.

But maybe the weakness isn’t in them.
Maybe it’s in us—for forgetting what we said we believed in.

Tactical voting might block someone for a cycle, but it doesn’t build anything that lasts. You don’t grow a movement by jumping from crisis to crisis. You grow it by staying in the work even when it’s quiet, even when it feels like no one’s watching.

That kind of work isn’t glamorous. It’s not loud.
But it’s the only thing that ever really changes anything.

The values behind 2022 still matter.
Truth. Accountability. Good governance. Servant leadership. Those weren’t just campaign slogans. They were the reason people marched, volunteered, gave money they didn’t have, and stayed up late building something they hoped could be different.

Just because the country is tired doesn’t mean we stop.

The goal was never just to win an election. The goal was to change how politics works—one voter at a time, one conversation at a time.

You don’t need to go viral to matter.
You just need to last longer than the noise.

Let’s Call It What It Is: Hypocrisy in the Name of the Country

This isn’t clean. And it’s not supposed to be.

Voting for someone you once called dangerous, dishonest, or complicit is a contradiction. It doesn’t matter if you do it quietly. It doesn’t matter if it’s “just this once.” It doesn’t matter if your heart is in the right place. A compromise is still a compromise. And no matter how noble the intention, it leaves a bitter taste.

So let’s not sugarcoat it.
Let’s stop dancing around the discomfort.

Yes—this is hypocrisy.

If a diehard Duterte supporter suddenly backed Robredo, we’d raise eyebrows. We’d question their sincerity. So when Kakampinks quietly vote for Marcos-aligned candidates, why pretend it’s different?

It’s not.

We’re doing what we swore we’d never do—not because we’ve changed sides, but because we’re scared of what the other side might do if we don’t. And that fear, that desperation, has led us here: choosing contradiction over catastrophe.

It’s not righteousness. It’s not growth.
It’s just the reality of people trying to protect what’s left.

But maybe the kind of hypocrisy that comes from love of country… is still hypocrisy. Just a quieter kind. The kind you carry with a heavy heart, not a loud voice.

So let’s admit it.

Let’s call it what it is—because pretending otherwise makes it worse.
Because the moment we start justifying instead of acknowledging, we risk losing whatever is left of the values we said we believed in.

So yes, maybe it’s hypocrisy.
But it’s ours. And it’s the kind we’ll have to carry—if it means protecting something bigger than our pride.

Closing Sip: Unity Built on Fear Isn’t Unity at All

Let’s just call it what it is.

Unipink isn’t a movement. It’s not unity. It’s not a turning point in Philippine politics. It’s damage control. A short-term fix for a long-term rot. A reaction to a threat, dressed up to look like strategy.

That doesn’t make it evil. But it does make it fragile.

Fear can win elections. We’ve seen that. We’ve also seen what happens when that fear becomes the only thing holding a decision together—it crumbles the moment things calm down. And then we forget. We start adjusting. We say things like “At least he’s not like her,” and “We can deal with this later.”

But when survival becomes your only goal, you stop aiming for anything better.

Every time we vote for the less terrible option, we move the line.
Every time we let dynasties rebrand themselves as tolerable, we lose a piece of what we fought for.
And every time we bend our values just to avoid someone worse, we get further away from the country we say we want.

This isn’t about being pure. It’s about direction.

If the only way to win is to stop being who we are—then maybe we’ve already lost.
Because unity built on fear won’t hold. It never does.

We don’t need another label.
We need a long memory. We need people who can hold the line even when it’s not trending. We need voters who don’t forget just because the opponent got louder.

And maybe for some, this isn’t surrender.
Maybe it’s love for country—just expressed differently. A kind that hurts. The kind where you choose what’s tolerable not because it’s right, but because the alternative is too dangerous to ignore.

That choice—while imperfect—isn’t made lightly.
It’s not about forgetting 2022. It’s about trying to protect 2028.

But one day, our children might call us out.
They’ll say we let Marcos use the movement. That we chose him—not because we believed in him, but because he wasn’t Duterte.
And who knows what kind of karma we’ve invited by making that choice.

So I’ll ask you this:

Are you willing to favor Marcos for now, so long as it stops the more dangerous Duterte from taking over?