Dirty, chaotic and violent, the 2001 elections will do little to build public faith in politics. Winners will be proclaimed in a few weeks but the losers won’t be the candidates who cry foul and claim to have been cheated. When traditional politics reigns supreme, the people are the real losers.
By SANDRA NICOLAS
The voting is over and the counting (and
cheating) is underway. According to the Commission on Elections (Comelec),
Filipinos flocked to the polls with 85 percent of 36.5 million registered voters
going to more than 200,000 precincts across the country. Yet numbers alone do
not a democracy make.
Far from being the bright dawn of President
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s New Politics, the elections were solidly in the
realm of traditional politics. This augurs the worst kind of political
leadership that will eventually come out of it. Notwithstanding the entry into
Congress of certain sparks of progressive politics, the bright hope for
Philippine democracy remains with the people.
It was a disappointing affair from the very
beginning. Both administration People Power Coalition (PPC) and opposition
Puwersa ng Masa (PnM) candidates reduced their campaign sorties into a traveling
entertainment roadshow punctuated by mudslinging from the stage and handshaking
in the markets and back alleys. Programs and people’s issues were nowhere to
be seen nor heard.
The big parties’ political operators cast
their net wide to negotiate the delivery of votes and to set up the machinery to
rig results. At the crucial local levels, party lines were crossed whenever
expedient and there was trading in votes, pesos and political favors. Hired
goons in and out of uniform stepped in when violence was the better coin.
The elections themselves, including the
counting, were the final great battle. On Election Day itself, hundreds of
millions of pesos changed hands to buy votes and to secure the temporary
loyalties of mercenary election officials.
The evidence of massive fraud is
overwhelming. It was captured on film and in pictures across the nation: voters
dropped from the rosters; voters “voting” without even knowing it;
vote-buying; tampered or substituted ballots, tallies and returns.
The gross incompetence of the Comelec in
stemming the glaring irregularities as well as its criminal disrespect for
teachers’ rights probably goes beyond the persons of the commissioners. That
these recurring problems have been unresolved for years may just reflect the
basic contempt traditional politics has for the democratic electoral process.
And despite efforts by the Philippine
National Police (PNP) and the Comelec to downplay the violence, the 2001
elections are proving far from peaceful. The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP)
tagged 76 provinces and parts of Metro Manila as hot spots while the PNP’s
watch list has 395 municipalities as potential trouble areas. Since 1980, only
the 150 election-related deaths tallied in 1986 and the 149 in 1988 surpass the
AFP count of 98 deaths in these elections as of May 17.
The dust has yet to settle but already the
outlines of the victors are more or less clear. The Arroyo administration does
not get the overwhelming vote of confidence it desperately tried to craft.
In the race for 13 Senate seats, the PPC has
already conceded that a 13-0 sweep over the PnM is not in the making. The PPC
sees gaining 10 Senate seats as the best-case scenario and only 7 at worst.
Significantly, touted “alternative” candidates such as Wigberto Tanada,
Winnie Monsod and Perfecto Yasay have remained consistently distant from the
winning circle in “quick” and official counts.
In the Lower House, the combined strength of
the five parties in the PPC may be able to scrape a majority, but only just. The
executive hold over the pork barrel will be sorely needed to sway opposition
congressmen into the administration fold.
The competition for local government posts
has been intense and the make-up is still unclear. Resources from the national
PPC and PnM centers flowed sparingly and selectively, leaving local political
clans to fight it out based on their own capacities.
If anything, the outcome of the elections
will be due to the anti-democratic grinding of traditional political machinery.
What has been decisive is the control by traditional politicians of vast war
chests amounting to billions of pesos, of government (including electoral)
officials, and of the military and police — and of the backroom deal-making
based on this control.
The conventional wisdom is that political
instability will continue. The PnM forces have had no qualms in wielding its
diminished but still significant political and economic base, first in the
failed adventurist putsch of May 1 and now in fighting the elections. It has
succeeded in raising the level of political crisis, undermining the tenability
of the Arroyo administration, and strengthening its leverage.
The opposing traditional political forces can be expected to face each other off and engage in the vicious political deal-making they are accustomed to, albeit with the new twist of the trial of ousted president Joseph Estrada as a major point of contention. But at the end of it will still be governance and economic policy-making geared to serve mainly vested and powerful elite interests. The people are always at the losing end of these intramurals.
One major question now is whether Ms. Arroyo can resist falling into traditional political form and compromising to the winning pro-Estrada PnM candidates on the very issue that brought her to power: the criminality and plunder of Estrada and his clique.
Yet in crisis there is opportunity especially in the wake of the still historic People Power 2. More than ever, the Arroyo administration needs the support of the masses against the pro-Estrada forces. There is an opportunity for the people to forcing meaningful concessions from the administration through determined mass actions.
The people have shown their ability to meaningfully launch nationwide political struggles. The democratic mass movement in the streets that formed the core of People Power 2 that swept Ms. Arroyo to the presidency is in a position to demand meaningful political and economic reforms. Its newfound muscles in the parliamentary arena complement this.
“Ate Glo” is a sad attempt by Ms. Arroyo to match Estrada’s pro-poor myth-making. Instead, she should strive to genuinely address the root problems that bedevil the poor and thus craft a true democratic mandate from the people who count most. #