Philippines Senator Risa Hontiveros Says She Is ‘Open’ to 2028 Presidential Run at Harvard Talk

Philippines Senator Risa Hontiveros said she would consider a presidential bid in the country’s 2028 elections and criticized its current government for corruption at a Monday talk hosted by the Harvard Yenching Institute.

“Yes, I’m open,” Hontiveros said to cheers from her audience. “If the opposition sides with me, I’m open.”

Hontiveros, who has served as a leading opposition figure in the Senate of the Philippines since she was elected in 2016, said her visit to Harvard was the culmination of a week in the U.S. that featured town hall meetings with Filipino Americans in Las Vegas and Boston. Since at least this spring, Hontiveros has positioned herself as a 2028 challenger to Philippines Vice President Sara Duterte, likely to be current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s chosen successor.

When East Asian Languages and Civilizations professor James G. Robson — director of the Harvard Yenching Institute and the moderator of the discussion — asked Hontiveros about the recent double earthquake just off of Mindanao, she said a chain of earthquakes including in Cebu, Davao Oriental, and in Surigao del Sur has left local residents “nervous” and “fearful.”

But she also laid the blame at the feet of the Filipino government, saying that the construction of poor-quality infrastructure has left residents vulnerable to disasters and corruption has impeded relief efforts. In the last month, thousands across the Philippines have protested fraudulent government flood relief projects.

“It’s so imminent. There seems to be a shifting of tectonic plates physically as well as a shifting of tectonic plates politically as well,” she said. “Concretely, the ghost and sub-quality nature of some of the infrastructure projects that were built in the past few years have been exposed by these natural disasters.”

“They were built from taxpayers’ money, citizens’ money, only held by the government,” she added. “Perhaps Mother Nature is exposing human folly.”

Hontiveros also described her efforts to combat and investigate Philippines Offshore Gaming Operations — firms that offer online gaming services to international markets, especially China — and cryptocurrency scam hubs in her role as the chair of the Senate Committee on Women, Children, Family Relations and Gender Equality. She discussed investigations into the hubs’ role in facilitating human trafficking.

“We discovered several other countries in Southeast Asia trafficking Filipino women to these other hubs in the region, also trafficking women from these hubs into the Philippines, forcing them to work as scammers to their shop,” she says.

“They were recruited, usually online, on the messaging apps that should bear more accountability for these continuing crimes,” she said, saying the women faced inhumane working conditions and sexual harassment.

She said that the process of addressing POGO-related crimes was “tied up with our complicated relationship with China,” describing cases where Chinese nationals posed as Filipino public officials to protect the POGOs.

The operations employed tens of thousands of foreign nationals in the Philippines before Marcos banned them last summer. Officials have said that more than 9,000 foreign nationals involved in POGOs, mostly Chinese nationals remain in the country as of July despite being subject to a wide-scale deportation campaign.

Hontiveros also expanded on a bill she has spent years attempting to pass in Congress that would create a legal process to end marriages in the Philippines — one of two countries, besides the Vatican, that has not legalized divorce. She said she has encountered difficulties reintroducing the legislation.

Initially, she said, lawmakers discouraged her from pursuing an earlier bill to protect citizens from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity and expression of sex characteristics, saying they might support measures to legalize divorce — but would not sign the more expansive bill.

Now, she said, some of her colleagues feel the language of divorce is a political nonstarter in the Philippines, where nearly 80 percent of residents are Catholic.

“I was bringing it around to the representatives and several of the senior ones who tell me: ‘No, Risa, I cannot sign this,’” she says. “In fact, one of our senior leadership was the one who advised me. He said, ‘this is okay, provisions wise, but maybe don’t call it the divorce bill anymore. Call it the dissolution of marriage bill.’”

Regardless of what it is called, Hontiveros said, the bill represents “an expansion of the grounds for legal separation in Philippine civil code — but by any other name — providing for divorce, for those who want and deserve a second chance at life and love and family.”

When asked by Robson about the historical tensions between the Philippines and China, Hontiveros says she is looking for a wider coalition of like-minded countries to respond to China. She said China maintains too heavy a presence in the Philippines’ national energy grid and criticized former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte for his administration’s tilt toward China.

“Personally, those years for me, and I think for many Filipinos, a nightmare,” she said. She said foreign policy was the one area where she shared significant common ground with the Marcos administration, which has leaned back toward the West.

“It’s important now we try to prevent the outbreak of any hot hostilities anywhere near the West Philippine Sea,” Hontiveros said. “We’re watching with great solidarity, Taiwan.”

She concluded her talk by calling for a stop to government monitoring of political views among youth and the practice of red-tagging, or labeling left-wing activists as terrorists in order to make them targets.

“We really need to create more safe spaces for young people, including students,” she said. “Historically, in the Philippines, they were really at the front lines in terms of counterinsurgency, and then recently in terms of the so called War on Drugs, which is really a war on the poor, the extrajudicial killings.”

Youth activists on social media and in universities have become a powerful voice in Filipino politics and made up a major bloc opposing Marcos’s election in 2022.

“It’s essential that young people feel safe in our public spaces, and the government is responsible to create that,” Hontiveros said. “So let’s keep working — especially you, because you are our hope for the future.”