As may be gleaned from this quick summary, the post-EDSA period was far from a period of change, but was basically a period of restoration: of elections as a means of choosing leaders, yes, but primarily of traditional, elite-based and elite-monopolized politics through parties that offered no platforms of governance and which were basically ad hoc groups built around dominant personalities.
The implementation of the party list system after 1996 did mean the eventual election to Congress of program-based parties, but even that process invites qualified exceptions, among them the fact that even the traditional parties and sectors (for example, business and religious groups) that cannot be characterized as under-represented have managed, together with pseudo-progressive groups, to send their representatives to Congress.
May 10 Elections: complete restoration of neo-colonial politics
This is the context in which the May 10 elections occurred. Despite near-universal hopes for change and efforts by progressives to make it possible through their participation in the parliamentary struggle to further political reform, May 10 could mark the completion of the process of restoration—which had accelerated beginning 1992– of the very same politics that had ruled it since the end of the country’s status as a formal colony and the beginning of its neo-colonial captivity in 1946.
The paradox is that the most obvious difference May 10 had from past elections since 1992 in the end made it no different from elections since 1947, and in many ways made it even worse. One way of accounting for this is to realize that built into the political system is its capacity to protect and perpetuate itself no matter what the circumstances, and despite the best intentions of the progressive framers of the 1987 Constitution.
The difference in the May 10 elections was first of all the existence of a situation that very Constitution itself had sought to prevent: an incumbent president’s running for office, and his or her inevitable use of government resources. The consequence of this factor among other factors was the triumph of money, of alliances of convenience, the use of public funds for private ends, and over-all, the decline of the political system to its lowest point since 1972.
The trapos call Philippine elections an exercise in democracy. But May 10 has once more shown that they are no more than contentions among the a handful of families of the traditional elite, the poor being so out of it except as window-dressing.
The practice of elite politics demands, in the first place, huge war chests running into the billions on the part of those running for national office, and millions even to run for councilor. Estimates that a “credible” national campaign for president can be waged only with P3 to 10 billion in campaign funds are not exaggerated. The result is the exclusion of even millionaires, and certainly of the poor, from any opportunity to run for office.
In almost cynical recognition of the exclusionary rather than democratic character of Philippine elections, a candidate’s finances are the first thing the Commission on Elections looks into to determine his or her capacity to wage a “credible” campaign.
The second is “machinery”—a word that among others means one’s possession of a “party” or “coalition,” a network of campaigners, poll watchers on election day, etc.– all of these being dependent on the capacity of the candidate to spend billions.
In Gloria Macapagal- Arroyo’s case, campaign funds and “machinery” also meant whatever public funds she could get her hands on to further her campaign, whether from PAGCOR or the Department of Agriculture, as well as the entire government bureaucracy of over one million, from department secretaries down to barangay chairs.
In the provinces and even in certain parts of metro Manila, “machinery” includes the retinue of thugs in one’s employ who can dispense both largesse as well as threats, blows and bullets. When a candidate is said to have “a machinery” what he or she may have could include—it usually does—the means with which to buy or coerce the electorate, whose sole function in this “democracy” is to renew every so often their rulers’ “democratic mandate.”
The May 10 elections not only demonstrated how true this still is, but went even further, as may be seen in the unprecedented number of election-related deaths.
But Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s strategy was not limited to the use of billions of pesos from various sources including the government. It also included putting together alliances of convenience held together only by the prospect of personal advantage.
Thus did Arroyo include in her so-called “coalition” even the likes of John Osmena and Miriam Defensor Santiago, on no other basis than her anticipation of the votes these former “political enemies” of hers could bring to her campaign.
At various levels, the Arroyo campaign crisscrossed and virtually erased party-lines, as groupings such as the Nationalist People’s Coalition hedged their bets and spread their support among the major contending groups including Arroyo’s– in yet another demonstration of the essentially opportunist character of the so-called “parties.”
Destruction of the multi-party system
The Arroyo strategy in fact proved once again that there are no political parties among the elite in the Philippines, only groups held together by dominant personalities. That strategy thus completed the destruction of the so-called multi-party system, as she cobbled together alliances based solely on the prospect of mutual advantage. If Arroyo wins it will be on the ruins of that system.
It is the absence of authentic political parties—meaning groups contending for political power on the basis of visions of an alternative future, platforms, and programs of government—that has reduced Philippine elections to popularity contests in which the most alluring in terms of looks, singing and dancing ability and capacity to entertain the crowds wins.
This has made inevitable the involvement and even candidacies in what should be a serious matter of comedians, actors, singers and other personalities the mass media have popularized. Indeed, despite Arroyo’s disparaging remarks about actor Fernando Poe, Jr., she herself made free use of celebrity endorsements as a necessary element in her own campaign.
The likely victory of Gloria Macapagal- Arroyo would be no more than another triumph for traditional, elite politics. But it could also mean the end of at least one consequence of that politics’ civic bankruptcy: the myth that anyone made popular by the movies can be president, which in the present context would represent an inch of progress.
As things are now turning out, not even Fernando Poe Jr.’s kingship in Philippine movies won’t make him president. For that his supporters can blame Arroyo for having so expertly risen from third and even fourth in the surveys to first by utilizing every conceivable means at her disposal, including the release of political prisoners and finally getting the government’s peace talks with the National Democratic Front somewhere, while steadfastly supporting the United States in Iraq and elsewhere.
Into the Arroyo witches’ brew of wild spending, alliances of convenience, and celebrity endorsement, that by themselves eroded Poe’s earlier lead over Arroyo, add the disenfranchisement of millions of voters, the possibility of wide-spread fraud, and the partisanship of the police, the military and the Commission on Elections. The result: an Arroyo “victory” through virtually the same overkill tactics Ferdinand Marcos used to win a second term in 1969.
Arroyo did not achieve this alone. In further testimony to the bankruptcy of elite politics, the so-called opposition failed to put up candidates no better than Poe and Panfilo Lacson. Fernando Poe Jr.’s camp so believed in the myth of the dumb voter they thought their candidate didn’t even have to campaign and would win points by being, if not dumb, at least silent. Steadfast in that belief, they were so confident in Poe’s winnability because of his popularity as a movie star they wrote off a Poe-Lacson unity so early that that effort was doomed from the start.
