With the issuance of the calendar of activities for the 2025 Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan Elections this December 1, barangay officials and those who seek to replace them should now start the groundwork in the next six months.
Aside from ensuring completion of whatever projects or programs in place or for implementation, the incumbents must be certain that such projects, programs or activities are free of any taint of irregularity that would otherwise be taken advantage of by their prospective opponents.
Those elected in the 2023 BSKE who still expect that their terms would be extended until 2027 could be in for disappointment.
True, Senate Bill No. 2816 seeking to postpone the December 2025 village polls, lengthen the term of barangay officials to four years, and extend their current term by two more years, is now at Malacanang for the president’s signature.
But Pres. Bongbong Marcos is likely to avoid more controversies in the light of his administration’s low ratings among the public, especially with the expectedly strident opposition to the Senate bill from lawyer Romulo Macalintal.
It was Macalintal and other groups who sought the High Court’s ruling on Republic Act 1135 which postponed the 2022 BSKE to October 2023.
In deciding that the law was unconstitutional, the SC further ruled that the succeeding BSKE shall be held on the first Monday of December 2025 and every three years thereafter, pursuant to RA 11462.
However, it added that Congress is not precluded from further amending RA 9164 (as amended), the law which provides for synchronized BSKE.
Assuming PBBM does not veto SB 2816, fails to act on it and it lapses into law, Macalintal and the same groups would question its constitutionality before the SC.
It is fortunate that in its last ruling, the Court set guidelines and principles regarding any government action that seeks to postpone any elections.
It said that postponement of the election must be justified by reasons sufficiently important, substantial, or compelling under the circumstances: it must be intended to guarantee the conduct of free, honest, orderly, and safe elections; it must be intended to safeguard the electorate’s right of suffrage; it must be intended to safeguard other fundamental rights of the electorate; or, such other important, substantial, or compelling reasons that necessitate the postponement of the election, i.e., necessitated by public emergency, but only if and to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation.
“Reasons such as election fatigue, purported resulting divisiveness, shortness of existing term, and/or other superficial or farcical reasons, alone, may not serve as important, substantial, or compelling reasons to justify the postponement of the elections,” the Supreme Court stated.
The postponement, it added, must be based on genuine reasons and only on objective and reasonable criteria.
It must still guarantee that the elections will be held at regular periodic intervals that are not unduly long and that the intervals must still ensure that the authority of the government continues to be based on the free expression of the will of the electorate.
“Holding the postponed elections at a date so far remote from the original election date may serve as badge of the unreasonableness of the interval that may render questionable the genuineness of the reasons for the postponement,” the SC emphasized as it pointed out that any postponement must not violate the Constitution or existing laws.
By now, nearly two years after the current crop of barangay and youth council officials assumed their posts, the public that they serve have a firm grasp of what their public servants have accomplished for their constituents.
They should be given the chance to pass judgment on what they have done for the public good.