More than 50 million Filipinos have registered to vote. Up for grabs on the May 10 election are the vice presidency, 12 senatorial seats, 287 district and party-list representatives' seats and more than 17,000 positions as local officials.
Ten candidates are seeking to become president.
Sen. Benigno Aquino, 50, the only son of former President Corazon Aquino and Sen. Manuel Villar, 60, a wealthy tycoon hounded by corruption charges in the Senate, are leading the presidential race, according to the latest opinion surveys released last week.
Trailing behind them are ousted President Joseph Estrada, 72, a convicted plunderer, former Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro, 45, a bar topnotcher.
Two other senators, a preacher, an environmentalist, a local official and a financial consultant complete the list of this year's presidential wannabes.
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whose term ends in June, is running for a congressional seat in the second district of her home province of Pampanga, north of Manila.
As in past elections, film stars, ex-military men, coup plotters, including those languishing in military jails, are among the candidates seeking public office.
The candidates started making pit stops early Tuesday morning to kick off the election campaign.
Aquino, who was swayed to join the presidential race after his mother's death in August, headed back to his parent's home province Tarlac to kick of his campaign.
A marching band was brought in to perk up the mood of the campaign. Clad in trademark yellow, Aquino urged the people to pray for his quest for the presidency.
Villar, who spent his childhood in Manila's slums and hauled fish in the market to earn a business degree, visited wet markets in Laguna, a province south of Manila, to shake hands with fishmongers and market goers there.
Villar is now the country's ninth wealthiest man with a fortune of $530 million, according to the latest rich list from Forbes magazine. But in spite of his immense wealth, he has cultivated an image as the friend of the poor.
His catchy political jingle has dominated the airwaves and television since before the campaign season started.
Ousted in 2001, convicted for plunder and pardoned by Arroyo, Estrada is staging a political comeback to "vindicate" himself.
He chose to hold his campaign rally in the historic Plaza Miranda in Quiapo, Manila. A few months after he was released from jail in 2007, Estrada did the rounds of Manila's slum communities, doling out bags of groceries to the poor.
Administration candidate Teodoro, Aquino's second cousin, struggles to win the confidence of voters, according to the latest opinion polls. Analysts blame Teodoro's anemic popularity rating to his association with unpopular Arroyo.
Months before the official 90-day campaign season opened, politicians, especially presidential hopefuls, have been mounting large-scale advertisements, with candidates putting their names on giant billboards or attaching political posters on trees and lamp posts offering Christmas or Valentine's Day greetings.
Some candidates have taken on cameo roles in movies or in popular television shows.
The campaign platforms of all potential candidates are vague and hardly differ. All promise a better future, meaning more growth, more jobs and fewer crooks and criminals, and to stamp out decades-olds issues besetting the Philippines like poverty and corruption.
Caravans of movie stars and politicians are expected to barnstorm cities and villages, croon love songs, hug babies and dance on stage to win votes. Sloganeering and mudslinging are expected to intensify as the campaign unfolds.
But whether or not the election will be peaceful remains to be seen.
Violence is a fixture in Philippine elections. A day before the political campaign, another local candidate was shot dead in Cotabato City in central Mindanao. The incident was the latest in a series of political and poll-related killings in the country.
