The Lonely Fight

ONE of the most beloved musicals both onstage and on-screen is The Sound of Music, which won five Tony Awards and five Oscars, including Best Musical and Best Picture. Its songs and storyline have since become a staple in many a school production, such that many viewers gloss over the social messages embedded in it. Set amid the harsh realities of impending war and the emergence of a fascist, repressive regime, it offers a lens onto realities of that point in history as seen through the life of a relatable family.

The protagonists chose to sacrifice status, comfort, security, and potentially their own lives, to stand up for what they believed was right, despite urging from close friends to comply, ignore, and look out for oneself - a position taken by so many from that milieu.

Recent developments in the Philippines also reveal harsh realities: the aftermath of a bloody drug war, a political landscape dominated by dynasties, natural disasters that transform communities into lakes and neighborhoods into raging rivers, public funds allegedly finding their way from infrastructure projects into suitcases if the stories are to be believed, and an infectious indifference to a bullying neighbor's encroachment upon the nation's patrimony.

Meanwhile, solo parents raise families with little institutional support. LGBTQIA+ Filipinos still have no national law shielding them from discrimination. The elderly, already deemed uninsurable, do not get much from what was supposed to be universal healthcare. Filipino pupils and students, Jose Rizal's fair hope for the Motherland, rank among the lowest in the region, if not the world, when it comes to basic competencies such as reading and comprehension.

Into this landscape steps Senator Ana Theresia Navarro Hontiveros Baraquel, Risa Hontiveros to most Filipinos, a figure whose career has been defined less by political comfort than by persistence in uncomfortable rooms. Incidentally, she performed in Repertory Philippines' '80s production of The Sound of Music alongside Leah Salonga, siblings Menchu and Raymond Lauchengco, and Monique Wilson.

Hontiveros's legislative record is not built on speeches alone. She served as a young Akbayan party-list representative in the House from 2004 to 2010, and is now in her second term in the Senate - a term that currently includes a role as Senator-Judge in the impeachment trial of the Vice President. She focused early on health and social justice - groundwork for a Senate career that would later produce the Expanded Maternity Leave Law (RA 11210) and the Expanded Solo Parents Welfare Act (RA 11861), a measure she authored after becoming a solo parent to four children herself following her husband's death in 2005. It is rare for a law to be so plainly autobiographical; rarer still for that law to pass.

The Safe Spaces Act (RA 11313), which protects Filipinos - especially women - from gender-based harassment in public spaces, the Anti-Online Sexual Abuse or Exploitation of Children Law (RA 11930), which boosts government efforts to end online abuse and exploitation of Filipino children, and the Mental Health Law (RA 11036), which provides the first legal framework for mental health care in the country, are the fruits of her advocacy on behalf of the vulnerable. Her most stubborn fight, however, remains unfinished. For years she has authored and re-filed the SOGIESC Equality Bill, seeking basic protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The measure has repeatedly stalled, blocked by those who favored a vaguer alternative and referred back to committee.

What distinguishes Hontiveros from many of her colleagues is not simply what she has proposed, but the isolation in which she has often had to propose it. During her first term as a senator, she was a vocal critic - one of very few - of the Duterte administration and its war on drugs. After the 2022 elections swept in a Senate dominated by the Uniteam, she emerged as the lone opposition candidate to win a seat — a distinction that sounds like an honor but functions, in practice, as a burden. Without a reliable bloc, her leverage comes almost entirely from committee work, procedural persistence, and public pressure rather than vote-counting.

That isolation has abated with developments after the 2025 mid-term elections and the leadership changes in the Senate. She is now a member of the majority, chairperson of three major committees, and a more audible fiscalizer both on the Senate floor and at the hearings of the powerful Commission on Appointments.

However, the fight rages on, whether over press freedom, the West Philippine Sea, or dismissive remarks about her lack of a law degree. Being the last woman standing has its costs: red-tagging, condescension, even death threats, and the simple exhaustion of relitigating the same fights year after year with little or no reinforcement.

That track record — legislative substance paired with unwavering persistence — is precisely what her supporters now cite as she weighs a 2028 presidential run. The "Risa Na" movement, launched by Akbayan and allied groups, argues that her record of advocacy and integrity makes her a natural standard-bearer for a campaign still searching for a single, winnable candidate.

The obstacles, though, are real and worth stating plainly. Early polling has been unkind: surveys through mid-2026 place her well behind frontrunner Vice President Sara Duterte, sometimes by margins as wide as 60 to 21 percent in head-to-head matchups. She has also trailed other opposition figures like Leni Robredo and Bam Aquino in multi-candidate surveys. Critics — including allies of the Dutertes — have dismissed her confrontational Senate style as calculated positioning for exactly this moment, rather than principle. And the lay of the land remains unclear, with no consensus yet on whether Hontiveros, rather than someone else, should be the opposition's unifying figure.

Whether her allies' efforts translate into a viable campaign remains to be seen. What is not in question is the labor that precedes it: that of a legislator who has spent over two decades converting personal and political conviction into law, often as the only person in the room willing to do so. Whether Philippine voters reward that exertion with the presidency, or whether the numbers simply prove too steep to overcome, remains one of the more consequential open questions of the 2028 race.