Is the Philippines finally having its soft power moment?
Ally De Leon
Inquirer.net
26 September 2026
In 2026, we’re reaching a point where Pinoy Pride no longer feels forced onto anyone with a drop of Filipino blood. Alex Eala’s been making tennis history, Olivia Rodrigo’s cemented her pop princess status, while Sophia Laforteza of Katseye and the members of Bini have been soaring to new career heights after their Coachella sets—and yes, ube’s the new matcha.
 |
| Olivia Rodrigo |
For a nation whose global news headlines usually revolve around natural disasters and political corruption, these wins are quite the comforting distraction. They also beg the question: Is the Philippines finally developing its own soft power?
Soft power equals cool
Soft power is a term that refers to a country’s ability to influence and persuade people without the use of military or other coercive means. For countries like ours that don’t necessarily have or need strong militant forces, we can consider soft power as a culture of coolness.
Soft power brings in new tourists, TikTok vlogs that romanticize what you may consider mundane about your country, and the priceless recognition of your nation and culture as something “cool.”
All thanks to soft power, Japan exceptionally rebuilt its image after World War II, and South Korea became a global force to be reckoned with through the Hallyu wave after experiencing financial crises. Everyone being in a “very Chinese time of their lives” is another form of soft power—albeit a bit more unserious.
Soft power is more than capable of becoming a launchpad for countries that would otherwise be overlooked or overshadowed. For a country as multicultural as the Philippines, the development of tangible soft power could spell wonders for our already exceptional creative industries—as well as a solidified identity that no longer gets conflated with Latin American or Pacific Islander cultures.
 |
| Bini |
Everybody gets more Filipino now
There’s an apartment in Monaco that’s probably blasting Rodrigo’s newest album as we speak. That flat is probably owned by Anya Granados, the only Filipina journalist who’s accredited to cover Formula 1, Formula 2, and Formula E.
 |
| Anya Granados |
Like the newly crowned pop princess, Granados is also a mixed Filipina working to put the Philippines on the map in industries that have traditionally leaned Western. From mainstream pop music to motorsport, it’s initially been rare to see Asian voices at the forefront, but recent years are turning the tide there.
“Olivia has reached a point where her Filipino identity doesn’t have to be introduced to a Western audience as a novelty or an educational footnote,” Granados shares. “It simply exists within the global cultural picture she occupies. She is Filipina American, but she is also one of the biggest young artists in the world.”
“When she brings Filipino elements into that world, millions of people encounter them without being told, ‘here is a Filipino person you should know.’ They are simply encountering her,” she adds.
The world has been consuming Filipino culture for years
This distinction is of particular importance: for Granados, the world has been consuming Filipino culture for years. It just wasn’t paying attention to what was Filipino. In the early 2000s, we already had stars like Enrique Iglesias, Shay Mitchell, Nicole Scherzinger, and Vanessa Hudgens who had Filipino heritage, one way or another.
“There was a real pressure to assimilate, sometimes even to distance yourself from being Filipino,” as per Granados.
That pressure is a natural side effect of centuries’ worth of colonial mentality, despite an overwhelming Filipino presence scattered across the globe through our diaspora, and the “unusual amount of raw material” we have in music, fashion, beauty, food, film, literature, design, and sport. Raw materials like capiz shells and ylang-ylang, for example, are often associated with luxury and opulence first (see Ibiza-style dresses and Chanel No. 5), and their Filipino-ness second.
 |
| Sophia Laforteza of Katseye |
Anchored in their Filipina identity
What makes Rodrigo and Eala’s ascents to superstardom extra admirable is the visceral shift from that urge to distance oneself. Rodrigo and Eala are consistently anchoring their Filipina identity when they’re making their press rounds.
(Unless one lives under a rock, they’re bound to know about the aforementioned stars’ Filipino roots because they make where they hail from crystal clear.)
By doing so, they and their successes become instrumental in developing a more positive and nuanced view of Filipino people, which is important when the Western world still tends to associate Filipinos with the stereotypical roles of caregivers, nurses, and service workers.
Granados describes this unsettling, cognitively dissonant reality as something “almost surreal.” As she attends afterparties and makes connections, she can’t help but be conscious of the Filipino workers serving the food, clearing the tables, and picking up the rubbish, whom everyone else at the party renders completely invisible.
Crab islands
What do Liza Soberano and Eala have in common, aside from being Filipinas making waves across the globe? They both prove how the Philippines is a country that loves to celebrate winners but cannot get itself to celebrate the process that makes them winners.
“Once there is a medal, a championship, a ranking, a record, suddenly everyone wants to claim them. But the years of development that came before the victory: the money, coaching, travel, sacrifices, and uncertainty, are much less glamorous and therefore much harder to get people excited about,” shares Granados.
Sports like tennis, gymnastics, and weightlifting only started to become palatable to a Filipino audience when Eala, Carlos Yulo, and Hidilyn Diaz started winning internationally. Prior to that (and honestly, even after that), we as a society only cared about basketball.
Similarly, before “Forgotten Island” became the highest-rated DreamWorks film at debut, people were too busy calling Liza Soberano an ungrateful woman for burning bridges in the Philippines.
These are just a few examples of the crab mentality that pervades the Filipino people. Generations raised on “hiya” and “utang na loob” make up a volatile Molotov cocktail that teaches us to look down on people trying to make a better life for themselves.
That’s why it’s easy to call people social climbers, ingrates, and other insulting terms: Filipino crab mentality tells us that if we can’t have something, other people can’t and shouldn’t either.
In Granados’ pursuit of sponsorship and support in her motorsport career, she has also encountered naysayers who unfortunately happened to be her own kababayans. According to burner accounts, she doesn’t seem famous enough to humbly ask for sponsorship—despite her growing repertoire of work.
“Sometimes we demand that Filipinos prove they have already succeeded before we’re willing to invest in them,” she shares. “But you cannot develop talent that way. If we only support people once they have become successful, then we’re not really supporting development. We’re rewarding the finished product.”
In a very Filipino time of our lives
Filipinos will only continue to make waves across different industries globally from here on out. For Granados, she fears that as we develop stronger cultural exports, the culture takes off before the people do. That is to say, you’d find ube and Jollibee in an isolated Spanish town before you find a fellow Filipino, based on her own experience.
“Something so specifically Filipino has traveled far enough to become commercially desirable in a place where Filipinos themselves are barely present,” she says as she recounts that irony.
While a development of soft power is mostly ideal and desirable, we have to exercise caution because we might end up exporting our problems alongside our culture.
A timeless example of this would be the distinctly Filipino value of resilience. Yes, there’s something beautiful about it, but there’s also something disconcerting about the concept of celebrating an ability to survive unsurvivable conditions.
Celebrating global success versus seeking validation from the West
Granados also thinks that we ought to strike a balance between celebrating global Filipino success and treating Western recognition as a final stamp of legitimacy on our culture.
“I hope we learn to support every kind of Filipino—not just the well-spoken, half-white person who wins a beauty pageant crown, the middle- and upper-class athlete who makes it into an elite sporting system, or the actor whose Filipino heritage we discover only after they’ve become famous abroad,” she says.
“Because if we only support something once it is aspirational, we never give ordinary people the opportunity to become extraordinary,” she adds.
As the world enters a very Filipino time of their lives, Granados thinks we can benefit from exporting the value of bayanihan, especially as “the idea that somebody else’s success or survival can be a collective responsibility.”
That said, the true power lies in learning how to celebrate and build bridges for the wins of our people while simultaneously unlearning the urge to tear people down for exercising some form of upward mobility.
“I’d rather the Filipino value we export be: your success doesn’t diminish mine, and my success doesn’t have to come at your expense,” she ends.
