Seeing Red: Will a Marcos Alliance Save or Sink Leni in 2028?

For many months, the argument has been that only Leni Robredo can mount a serious challenge to Sara Duterte in 2028. The latest Pulse Asia numbers appear to support this. Sara remains clearly ahead, but Leni is the only prospective rival within striking distance. In a hypothetical two-way race, Duterte received 52 percent against Robredo’s 34 percent, with 14 percent undecided. No administration candidate presently comes close. Pulse Asia president Ronald Holmes even believes Robredo could still win, provided she decides to run.

But Robredo’s recent closeness with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has made that possibility more likely and less likely at the same time.

More likely, because Leni may be the only politician with an existing national base whom the Marcos administration can realistically reinforce. She already has the Pink movement, a recognizable reformist brand, and the memory of a 2022 campaign that attracted nearly 15 million votes. Add the machinery of an incumbent administration, access to governors and mayors, and possibly a portion of the Ilocano vote, and she could become a much more formidable candidate.

Administration support could also bring the institutional advantages that Robredo lacked in 2022: funding, logistics, local alliances, and ballot protection. Someone close to Marcos as her running mate, perhaps someone like Gibo Teodoro, could serve as the bridge holding such an unlikely coalition together.

Yet the same alliance could also destroy the reason people believed Leni could defeat Sara in the first place.

Her greatest asset has never been machinery. It has been her story. Robredo represented clean government, political independence, and resistance to the two dominant dynasties of recent years. If she becomes the administration’s candidate, she may gain a machine, but lose the moral contrast that made her candidacy compelling.

That could weaken her purist base without necessarily winning over Marcos loyalists in equal numbers. Votes are not automatically transferable. Neither affection for the President nor loyalty to the Marcos name guarantees support for someone many loyalists spent years opposing.

Meanwhile, Sara’s support may remain largely untouched. Her base already sees the impeachment trial as part of an administration campaign against her. A Marcos-Robredo alignment would only sharpen the binary choice: Duterte against everyone else. It could even help Sara consolidate soft supporters who may dislike the administration but have never identified with the Pink movement.

Then there is the problem of decisiveness. Sara declared early. Robredo has repeatedly said she will not run nationally in 2028, a position Holmes warned could weaken her chances over time. In an atmosphere riddled with economic anxiety, the backdrop of a world at war, and a sense that criminality is back with a vengeance, voters may reward certainty more than reluctance.

A late reversal would therefore require a powerful explanation. Why run after repeatedly saying no? Why accept the support of a President she once opposed? What changed beyond the arithmetic of defeating Sara Duterte?

Robredo may be the administration’s strongest available answer to Sara. But every step that brings her closer to the Marcos machinery may also take her farther away from the story that made her its strongest answer in the first place.