ANALYSIS

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

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

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

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