Pasig City Mayor Vico Sotto says the consultative streak that has come to define his time in office was not something he arrived at alone — he built it by studying the people who held power before him, including a senator he once turned to for advice and a local official he never actually met.
The mayor laid out that thinking during a June 11, 2026 sit-down on the YouTube channel of broadcast journalist Bernadette Sembrano, who pressed him on where his habit of consulting others before making decisions came from. Sotto pointed partly to temperament, partly to observation.
“Well, maybe there’s also an element of just being curious naturally,” he said. “But, beyond that, it’s really from what I’ve seen with other successful leaders.”
Asked by Sembrano whether those models were Filipino or foreign, Sotto answered without hesitation: “Dito sa atin.” She put a sharper point on it, noting the common public reflex of equating politicians with thieves. Sotto did not dispute that the stereotype exists, but argued it has roots in real experience rather than invention. “Yes, not all the time, but maybe the impression or the stereotype, it came from somewhere,” he said. “Hindi naman siya inimbento ng tao. Hindi natin nilalahat, pero may pinanggalingan yon.”
One figure he singled out was the late Jesse Robredo, the former Naga City mayor and onetime interior secretary widely held up as a benchmark for clean governance. Sotto was candid that his exposure to Robredo’s example was secondhand. “Looking at examples like, you know, Mayor Jesse Robredo before. Kung paano siya makipag-relate sa mga tao,” he said. “I’ve never met him personally, but I’ve talked to a lot of people who knew him personally.”
The connection he could speak to firsthand was with Senator Win Gatchalian, now the Senate President Pro Tempore and acting Senate President amid the chamber’s unresolved leadership standoff. Sotto described their early careers as near-mirrors. “So, halimbawa, si now Senator Win Gatchalian, naging Mayor siya 29 years old. I became mayor at 29 years old,” he said. Both, he noted, inherited city halls staffed entirely by appointees of the rivals they had just beaten. “Noong pumasok siya sa city hall, lahat appointee ng kalaban niya. Noong pumasok ako sa city hall, ganun din.”
That overlap is what drove Sotto to seek the senator out. He wanted to know how Gatchalian had handled holdover employees still loyal to a defeated opponent. “So I sought him out and asked him for advice, even political advice,” he recalled. “Like, ‘How did you deal with these people na loyal sa kalaban mo? Ano ang ginawa mo? Nagtanggal ka ba? Kinausap mo ba? Paano mo kinausap?'” By his account, Gatchalian was forthcoming, and the guidance fed directly into how Sotto ran his first term.
Sotto was careful to frame both men as illustrative rather than exhaustive. “I could name others, pero ang point ko is kailangan matuto tayo mula sa nauna sa atin—[in terms of] best practices and mistakes,” he said, describing a long-standing instinct to watch, listen, and draw lessons from those who came before him.
The recognition has not been one-directional. Sotto was named to TIME magazine’s TIME100 Next 2025 list of influential rising figures, and in May he was among 24 winners worldwide of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge 2025-2026 — an honor that carried a $1-million grant for Pasig to build out its floating parks project.
His 2019 victory remains the through-line in his record: a first-time candidate unseating then-incumbent Bobby Eusebio and closing out what Sotto and his supporters describe as a 27-year family hold on the mayoralty. He now sits in his third and final term, with his 37th birthday falling on June 17.
