Local Governments, Civil Society, Democratization, and Development 117 regard to the link between leaders of CSOs and the broadest constituency—the mass public. Engaging the state With regard to one dimension of the rst dilemma—engaging the state, the divergence of views exists, as Franco stresses, even among those who hold the popular view of democracy (the people empowerment-state engagement part of Macasaet's quadrant). This fault-line, however, seems to have been patched after the split of the national democratic movement in the early 1990s and as some CSOs crossed over to “political society” by organizing party list groups (PLGs) to vie for congressional seats from the rst party-list elections in 1998. From the 1998 elections to the present, a number of progressive PLGs have won seats in the Lower House through the party-list elections. These included groups such as AKBAYAN and ABANSE Pinay! Even those who held an “instrumentalist” view of the political-electoral struggle, the reafrmist groups, participated in the elections for the Lower House through party-list groups such as Bayan Muna, Gabriela, Anakpawis, ACT-Teachers, and Kabataan. The 2010 elections also showed a renewed recognition among the larger segment of CSOs that the political-electoral struggle presented an opportunity to push forward their agenda for reform as some CSO leaders organized new formations, such as the Change Politics Movement (CPM). Organized in May 2009 by leaders of various CSOs that chiey came from the CODE-NGO network, the CPM presents an interesting case. It showcases the capacity of a number of civil society leaders to seize a political opportunity, an electoral exercise that the voting public had increasingly anticipated as it would signal the end of what is arguably the most loathed post-EDSA 1 administration. The CPM declared that its aim was to extend the inuence of civil society by way of organizing “a reform constituency which is determined to assert power to choose national and local leaders in order to have a signicant impact in Philippine elections.” The CPM stressed that the vision of the movement is to ensure that “transformative politics will be the norm and the dominant culture by the year 2022 at the latest.” In pursuit of its goals, the CPM agreed on a process that would bring about nominees from among its members as to who the CPM will support for the presidential race. The process of voting was set in two stages, the rst held in late August 2010, and the second in early September 2010. In addition to this, the CPM also crafted an agenda, referred to as “Development and Reform Agenda for 2010-2013.” The agenda offered specic policy and program proposals to address what CPM called as a “triple crisis of governance, economic, climate/environmental change.” (Change Politics Movement website 2009)5 As the initial voting for the presidential nominee of the CPM proceeded, one