This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 35, October 9-15, 2005
By now it has become a virtual mantra.
Professionals, students and small traders, when asked why they're not out in the
streets demanding that Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo resign the presidency she's
likely to have usurped, inevitably ask why they should, given the alternative.
While the Arroyo government has welcomed
middle-class skepticism that the "constitutional process" could mean anything
meaningful, this sentiment is actually bad news for the ruling elite. It also
shows the limitations of middle-class capacity to explore alternatives bolder
than that of Arroyo's being succeeded by Vice President Noli de Castro, whom
vast sections of the middle class dismiss as unprepared for the presidency and
even as a party to electoral fraud in 2004.
These limitations are as much the result of
middle-class habits of thought as of Arroyo administration efforts.
Very early into the current political crisis,
the Arroyo administration made it a point to convince the people that the only
"solution" to the crisis would be a "constitutional" one.
It defined "constitutionality" to the exclusion
of another People Power exercise, and limited it to impeachment in the knowledge
and anticipation that any impeachment complaint before the House of
Representatives would be doomed, given the overwhelming dominance in that
chamber of Arroyo partisans.
Academicians, church people, members of civil
society organizations as well as the traditional opposition walked into the
Arroyo trap by abandoning street protests at a critical juncture and
concentrating their efforts on the impeachment process despite the evidence
offered by the numbers that the effort was unlikely to prosper.
The result of the process was expected. But the
killing of the impeachment complaints not only confirmed middle-class
skepticism. That skepticism has since morphed into cynicism—the widespread
belief that state institutions, particularly the Executive, Congress, and even
the Judiciary, are hopelessly mired in the sole pursuit of self-interest to the
detriment of national interest.
Distrust of the Estrada, Marcos and Lacson
forces that are part of the effort to impeach and/or force Mrs. Arroyo to resign
has further fed middle-class cynicism.
The involvement of these forces as well as their
leading lights in the anti-Arroyo effort has led to the pre-eminence of the
"lesser evil" view, which, while distrustful of and despising Mrs. Arroyo,
regards the possible re-emergence of another Marcos and of Joseph Estrada
himself, or Senator Panfilo Lacson's assuming the presidency or something
equivalent, as a worse disaster.
While that view is debatable (Arroyo is
perceived in much of the media and in academia as in fact a worse president than
Estrada and even Marcos), the result is that the same vast sections of the
middle-class that believe that Arroyo cheated in 2004, that she is incapable of
governance, and which regard her as unscrupulous and greedy for nothing more
ennobling than power and wealth, are the same sectors that refuse to be involved
in the efforts to oust or force her to resign.
While Mrs. Arroyo is the beneficiary of her own
grievous flaws, it is at the expense of the very political system over which she
currently and fraudulently presides. But it is crucial for the ruling circles of
this country—the domestic economic and political elite, as well as their US
patrons—to halt the immense erosion of public trust and confidence in the system
itself.
Sooner or later they—the US particularly—will
conclude that the restoration of public trust in the ruling system cannot happen
as long as the Arroyo government remains in power, from the pinnacles of which
it only fans the crisis further through its systematic acts of repression –
which, among other consequences, have divided the Philippine military to an
unprecedented degree. It should also be increasingly clear to the same circles
that the Arroyo government is no longer able to govern effectively—and that, on
the contrary, it is actually jeopardizing the interests of the domestic and
foreign elite.
The long and the short of it is that the Arroyo
regime is unlikely to survive in the long term, having so alienated itself from
the people that it has become a liability to the interests of both the domestic
as well as foreign elite.
This helps explain the unrest that now afflicts
the military, in whose officers' thoughts, the country has been told, "breaking
the chain of command"—a euphemism for a coup d'etat—has steadily become
an acceptable option. Under these conditions the future of the Arroyo regime is
at best uncertain-- and at worst exceedingly bleak. Bulatlat
© 2005 Bulatlat
■
Alipato Publications Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified.
Uncertain Future
The future of the Arroyo
administration is at best uncertain, and at worst exceedingly bleak. CenPEG is a
public policy center set up shortly before the May 2004 elections to help
promote people empowerment in governance and democratic representation of the
marginalized poor in an elitist and patronage-driven electoral and political
system.
By
the Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG)
Posted by
Bulatlat