Corruption is a culture.Cultures can be reformed.

Miriam Palma Defensor is born on June 15 in Iloilo City, the eldest of seven. Her father is a judge, her mother a college dean. She is class valedictorian in grade school, in high school, and again as an undergraduate.

Political science, magna cum laude, at the University of the Philippines in Iloilo, then UP College of Law in Diliman. She becomes the first woman to edit The Philippine Collegian.

A master of laws and a doctorate in juridical science from the University of Michigan, then research fellowships at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at Cambridge. She also works as a legal officer for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, and resigns to come home when her father falls ill.

Appointed to the Regional Trial Court in Quezon City, the youngest judge in Metro Manila. She disposes of more cases than anyone else in the capital, roughly fifty a month, by refusing postponements. When the Marcos government claims the power to hold student activists indefinitely without bail, she orders the military to let them post it.

Corazon Aquino appoints her Commissioner of Immigration. She says out loud what the trade already knew, calls the country the fake passport capital of the world, and starts raiding the syndicates behind it, the Yakuza included. The death threats arrive quickly. Her answer becomes famous: “I eat death threats for breakfast.”

The Ramon Magsaysay Award cites her for “bold and moral leadership in cleaning up a graft-ridden government agency.” It is the credential the whole party is later built on.

Promoted to Secretary of Agrarian Reform and chair of the executive committee of the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council. She holds the post until January 1990, then returns to private life.

On February 19 she confirms she will run for president. She has no machine, no dynasty and no money worth the name.

The party is registered on one proposition: that corruption is a culture rather than a run of bad officials, and that cultures can be reformed. “Our task is to reform the culture of corruption.” The campaign is run largely by university students going house to house, because there is not the money to run it any other way.

She is badly injured in a road crash while campaigning and believes it was an attempt on her life. A priest administers the last rites. She is back on the road inside two months.

She leads the canvass for five days. Then a run of nationwide power outages, and when the count resumes Fidel Ramos is ahead. Final tally: Ramos 5,342,521, Santiago 4,468,173. A gap of about 874,000 votes out of some 23 million. In her own Western Visayas she takes 98 per cent. Newsweek runs the pair of them under the headline “Was the Election Fair?”

She files an electoral protest citing the outages as evidence of fraud. It is never heard on the facts. In February 1996 the tribunal dismisses it as moot, holding that by taking her oath as a senator she had abandoned the claim to the presidency. Her verdict on 1992 does not change for the rest of her life: “I won in the election, but lost in the counting.”

She wins a Senate seat and the party finds its actual method. Never the largest bloc, never the machine: one legislator, drafting law, and a reputation that made her hard to buy and harder to ignore.

A second campaign for the presidency draws 797,206 votes. The party does not dissolve into the winning coalition afterwards, which is the entire difference between it and most Philippine parties of the period.

She files the first version of what becomes the SOGIE Equality Bill, the first Philippine senator to do so. She refiles it, and refiles it, for the rest of her career.

Re-elected. The run of legislation the party is still known for starts here.

The first Philippine law to put real financing and incentives behind a shift away from coal and oil.

Creates the Climate Change Commission and makes adaptation national policy rather than a department memo. For a country in the path of the Pacific typhoon belt, this is not an abstraction.

Returned to the Senate, third place, more than fifteen million votes.

Elected a judge of the ICC in December, 79 votes in the first round, the first Asian from a developing country to hold the office. She defers her oath on health grounds and resigns in June 2014 without ever sitting.

After more than a decade of obstruction the Reproductive Health Act passes, co-authored with Pia Cayetano. The same month she reveals that the Senate President had handed every senator but three a two-million-peso cash gift out of Senate funds. She was one of the three. The disclosure opens the pork barrel scandal that follows.

She publishes a collection of her own jokes and put-downs and it becomes a national bestseller. It is not a footnote: it is how a generation who never watched a Senate hearing came to know exactly who she was.

On October 13, with lung cancer she says her doctors have stabilised, she announces a third run for the presidency. The campaign is built almost entirely on the youth vote and on social media, and she wins university straw polls by margins nobody else comes close to.

She finishes fifth with 3.42 per cent. She tells her supporters to cheer up. The phrase that attaches itself to her afterwards is “the greatest president we never had.”

She dies in her sleep at 8:52 in the morning at St Luke’s in Taguig, aged 71. Her husband gives her last words as: “I accept this. I do not want to do anything heroic.” Iloilo City declares a day of mourning and flies the flag at half mast for nearly three weeks. She is buried on October 2 at Loyola Memorial Park in Marikina, beside her son Alexander.

Conferred posthumously on December 3. It is the highest honour the Republic gives. She is the sixth person ever to receive it and the only woman.

Narciso Santiago Jr. becomes party president. The party continues to contest national elections and to organise locally.

Republic Act 11963 renames Agham Road in Quezon City as Senator Miriam P. Defensor Santiago Avenue.

The party publicly condemns corruption and abuse of power and commits its support to the people harmed by both. The founding proposition has not changed, and neither has the fact that it is unfinished.