NEWS ANALYSIS
What
Went Wrong During Arroyo’s First 100 Days
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo started her presidency on the wrong foot. She may have been right in consolidating her power first but the process itself went askew; it was based on a shallow understanding of what real consolidation means and in the traditional way. She was not “proactive,” so to speak -- she was only reacting to events. The siege on Malacañang by pro-Estrada forces was a culmination of what went wrong during her first 100 days.
By
EDMUNDO SANTUARIO III
Unlike Corazon Aquino who, in 1986 ascended the presidency in the fragile republic on the crest of a perceived popularity, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo became president with a very low mass appeal. Aquino, widow of the assassinated senator Ninoy Aquino – whose name many young Filipinos won’t even remember today – was robbed of the presidency in the 1986 snap polls through widespread fraud by the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, driving an enraged electorate to mount a civilian uprising. Arroyo? As vice-president and social welfare secretary, she was part of the disgraced Estrada administration and only switched sides when the surge of mass protests against the former president’s corruption and plunder was starting to burst.
Thus, Arroyo began her presidency on Jan. 20 without a strong political base. The militant and “civil society” groups who provided the power to People Power II and whose tactical alliance was only meant to bring down Estrada, cannot be counted as her political base. The military and police defections mattered only so long as these two institutions are showered with a big budget, privileges and concessions which no other agency enjoys.
Expectedly, the new president addressed the problem of consolidating her power as a priority. Prime attention was spent on appointments for the defense portfolio as well as the top Armed Forces and police posts based, as she herself would put it, on the nominees’ ability to “unite” their men and, of course, on their loyalty to the commander-in-chief. Only days after taking over the presidency, she immediately drew flak from many sectors for pledging a new package of pay increases and benefits for both the AFP and Philippine National Police (PNP).
Arroyo and her close advisers tried to cash in on “civil society” support by appointing some of their leaders to a number of key Cabinet positions. But, as in the Aquino presidency, most of these positions went to the social democrats. On the whole, top positions were occupied by either ex-senior military officials or traditional politicians and technocrats.
It was to be the May 14 national and local elections, however, that Arroyo was banking on to buttress her hold on power. Toward this goal, the People’s Power Coalition (PPC) – a motley group of varied albeit basically traditional political persuasions – was formed to lead the electoral derby. She pushed in a platform of “new politics” – a phrase she appropriated from the Left’s Partido ng Bayan in 1987 – as a device to lend a fresh wind to the elections.
But, except for claiming that “new politics” is a politics of ideas and not of “personalities,” her own version remains nondescript and uninspiring. The way many of her PPC senatorial candidates and local aspirants conduct their campaign, it is everything but “new politics.” In the long haul, the elections will be decided on logistics and popularity. Which is unfortunate because, assuming she is earnest about it, Arroyo herself could have used the elections to campaign for her centerpiece politics.
Arroyo inherited the presidency with a bankrupt treasury (a public deficit of P170 billion or $3.4 billion), a general economic slowdown, a low investors confidence, a corruption-ridden bureaucracy and low morale among government employees. By early April, no significant foreign capital was flowing in and, while inflation was mounting, economic growth targets were being lowered. In the blueprint to reduce deficit was a plan to implement new tax reforms that would surely hurt the poor taxpayers, among other sectors, even more. The trade and industry department is peddling a new bonanza of investment incentives – actually, a revival of a similar package offered by the Estrada administration.
Meantime, Arroyo officials resumed peace talks with both the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The president herself said that she is reversing her predecessor’s all-out war policy against the two revolutionary movements in favor of an “all-out peace” plank.
Last week in Oslo, Norway, the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and NDFP panels ended preliminary talks on how to implement the Comprehensive Agreement on the Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHR-IHL). They also agreed to proceed with the next agenda, social and economic reforms (SER).
Talks with the MILF, on the other hand, were to depend on an agreement on a foreign venue and its being brokered by a third party, a condition put forward by the MILF panel.
The whole idea behind Arroyo’s peace efforts was to restore political normalcy even as she agreed with the principle that poverty and social injustice are the roots of war. From the government perspective, however, the real strategic goal remains the same: to eliminate such “national security” threats by tying down both organizations to negotiations and offering some sham commitments in order to blunt their revolutionary spirit. Whether Arroyo can succeed where her predecessors from Marcos to Estrada failed, remains to be seen.
Except perhaps in the reversal of policies with regards the NDFP and MILF, no significant breakthroughs took place during Arroyo’s first 100 days as President. It was anticipated that the new administration would launch bold initiatives in the areas of pro-poor development and social justice. After all, to many of its participants, People Power II sought not just the ouster of Estrada but to begin as well the process of instituting genuine economic and political reforms.
Many analysts point out that Arroyo started on the wrong foot. She assumed that power consolidation was simply allocating rewards to the military and police defectors as well as her leading supporters from the traditional elite. She tried to institutionalize her so-called “four core beliefs” which, except for the pledge to “eliminate poverty within the decade,” remained meaningless and toothless. (The other three are, a philosophy of transparency and free enterprise; high moral standards in government; and a new politics of program and consultation.)
Bayan Muna president and Congress party-list nominee Satur Ocampo put it correctly when he said that Arroyo should have first addressed people’s issues by immediately declaring programs that would concretely address poverty, unemployment, landlessness and other down-to-earth problems. The acknowledged most decisive segment of People Power II – the national democrats – have yet to see their Comprehensive 20-Point People’s Agenda taken with serious note by the President.
Ocampo noted that in failing to assuage the prevalent mass unrest by confronting people’s issues more squarely and definitively, Arroyo helped fuel the massing of misled segments of the poor at the Edsa Shrine who, fired up by agitations of traditional opportunists and coup plotters from the pro-Estrada camp, marched to lay a riotous siege on Malacañang on the 100th day itself of the new President.
Arroyo will spend 1,155 days more to complete the term of her ousted predecessor. That should be more than enough time within which to satisfy the people’s short-term expectations and to begin the process of introducing long-term programs as demanded by the times. Otherwise, the rest of her term will be rough sailing all the way and danger will continue to lurk outside – even inside – Malacañang.