Do we like Leni Robredo?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Steady on LGBTQ+ and women's equality, years of hands-on relief work, and no pattern of harm turned up in the sources checked.
Leni Robredo is the former vice president of the Philippines who is now mayor of Naga City. She is also Ferdinand Marcos Jr.'s two-time election rival, which is why a simple flood inspection with him in February 2026 turned into a national guessing game. She won the 2016 vice presidency against him and led the opposition in the years after.
The big stoush of her career was the challenge to that 2016 win. Marcos lodged an election protest, and the Supreme Court, sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, threw it out in February 2021. Her camp pointed to the ruling as the end of the doubts about her win.
She has also been on the receiving end of plenty of smears. In 2019 the police's CIDG filed a sedition complaint against her and 37 others, and the Department of Justice finished its preliminary investigation that September. Vera Files later rated posts claiming she still had pending cases as misleading. In 2022 it also found no public record of her threatening chaos if she lost, and she denied any alliance with the NPA.
On the harm test, the record is clean. She publicly pushed for the SOGIE Equality Bill, which is the anti-discrimination bill for LGBTQ+ Filipinos, and spoke on gender equality at a Toronto forum in 2019. Her line there was “Gender inclusion is, at its very core, about sustaining the whole world.” We found no harmful statements and no dodgy co-stars, though the search leaned on her time as vice president.
The recent news is about 2028. In April 2026 she said “I am sure for myself that I won't take part in the national elections” and said she'd probably go for a second term as mayor. Senator Kiko Pangilinan warned that the opposition could splinter without her. In February she said politics wouldn't come up with Marcos, telling reporters “Malayo pa yung eleksyon”, meaning the election is still far off. Where you land on that depends on whether you read it as sensible local focus or a missed chance.
The good stuff is real. Her Angat Buhay anti-poverty programme reported reaching more than 321,000 families by the end of 2021. As vice president her office also ran free COVID-19 testing, the Vaccine Express drive, free dorms for medical frontliners and shuttle buses for health workers. In 2023 the UP Alumni Association honoured her as a distinguished alumna. Those figures come from her own office, not an independent audit.