THE Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) (village and youth council) elections are set to be held on Nov. 2, 2026. The date is already fixed by Republic Act 12232, which was signed by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. himself less than a year ago. The Commission on Elections (Comelec) has already spent roughly P3 billion in preparations. Nearly 4 million new voters have registered, almost three times the original target. And yet, here comes another push to postpone the polls.
The excuse this time is the current oil crisis. Sen. Imee Marcos has led the argument that the P16 billion set aside for the elections would be better used for fuel subsidies and food assistance. Some members of the House of Representatives are nodding along.
President Marcos has said he is open to studying the proposal. The choreography is familiar because it has been performed before — several times, in fact.
Since 2016, the barangay and SK elections have been postponed no fewer than four times. Elections set for 2016 were moved to 2018. Those due in 2020 were delayed first to 2022, then pushed to October 2023. Last year, President Marcos signed yet another postponement law, moving the polls’ December 2025 schedule to November 2026. Each time, there was a reason that sounded urgent: synchronization with other polls, election fatigue, the Covid-19 pandemic, the need to focus on the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao elections. Now it is global oil prices. The common thread running through all of these is not an emergency. It is convenience — the convenience of those already in power.
The proponents make two arguments. First, fiscal responsibility: redirecting P16 billion during a national energy crisis is prudent governance. Second, continuity: village officials should stay focused on crisis response, not get distracted by campaigning. Both arguments sound reasonable in a press release; neither survives closer examination.
Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has noted that the government has P238 billion in available funds from the 2026 budget and prior-year continuing appropriations. The election budget — estimated at P9 billion in actual remaining needs — is not the margin between relief and collapse. The Philippines has held elections through natural disasters, including a pandemic and active armed conflict. An oil price spike driven by events in the Middle East, real and painful as it is, does not come close to the kind of extraordinary national emergency that would justify suspending a constitutional obligation. Economic hardship is not a democratic emergency. If anything, it is precisely in hard times that communities most need accountable leaders who answer to their constituents rather than to whoever gave them an extension.
The fiscal argument also collapses on its own terms. Postponing the elections does not eliminate the cost. It defers it — at greater expense. New ballots must be printed. Voter registration must be reopened. The Comelec chairman himself has warned that realigning the election budget is constitutionally prohibited. The Supreme Court said exactly the same thing in its landmark 2023 ruling in Macalintal v. Commission on Elections, which struck down a prior postponement law precisely because it violated the constitutional ban on the transfer of appropriations. Going down that road again is not prudence. It is a repeat of a maneuver already declared unconstitutional.
The National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections’ (Namfrel) position is clear, and it is the right one. Elected barangay and SK officials derive their authority from the people who voted for them, for a defined term, and for no longer. Any extension of that term — whether through legislation, executive pressure, or budgetary manipulation — is a subversion of the democratic mandate. Barangay officials currently holding office are already on borrowed time. Granting them another extension they did not earn at the ballot box is not governance. It is political debt management dressed up as public service.
There is something else that does not get discussed in committee hearings but that everyone in the room understands. Barangay officials are the organizational machinery of Philippine electoral politics. They mobilize voters, deliver communities on election day, and serve as the indispensable ground force of whichever national coalition controls the patronage flowing from Manila. Keeping nearly a million of them in extended, unelected tenure means keeping them grateful — not to their constituents, but to the legislators and executive officials who gave them more time. That is the real arithmetic of every barangay and SK election postponement, and it has nothing to do with oil prices.
The accumulated damage of serial postponements goes beyond politics. Millions of young Filipinos between 15 and 30 years old have been told, repeatedly and through action rather than words, that their turn to participate can always wait. The SK exists for the specific purpose of drawing the youth into governance at the most immediate level. Every deferral teaches a generation that elections happen on the schedule of those already in power, not on the schedule the law prescribes. That civic lesson, absorbed year after year, is far more corrosive than any budget shortfall.
The resolution here is not complicated. Congress should reject any bill seeking another postponement. The president should hold to the commitment his own administration made when it signed RA 12232. Comelec should continue its preparations, regardless of the political noise, and defend the institutional independence that is the foundation of its constitutional mandate. And every citizen who cares about grassroots democracy should say so, loudly, before this becomes yet another fait accompli announced on a Friday afternoon.
Namfrel has said it plainly: the Filipino people have waited long enough. That is not rhetoric; it is arithmetic. Four postponements since 2016. Barangay officials holding office years beyond what voters authorized. A generation of young Filipinos who have never experienced an SK election on schedule. There is a point at which deference to power becomes complicity in its excesses. That point has been reached.
The Nov. 2 elections must proceed. No more excuses. No more extensions. No more borrowed time.
