Lesser evils
June 26th, 2003
As the coffee-shop pundits say, the political situation as far as the 2004 elections are concerned is still fluid. But assuming those elections will take place, you can more or less tell who are most likely to be running for president come that crucial year.
In that pantheon of not-so-greats are, so far, the incumbent herself, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, 2002’s sole declared noncandidate; Panfilo Lacson, by the grace of his record as a macho police officer now a senator of the Republic; Eduardo Cojuangco Jr., who was one of Ferdinand Marcos’s closest associates; and Raul Roco, a former senator who, while a testy secretary of education, succeeded in antagonizing more teachers than a roomful of DepEd supervisors.
Because of this sorry list (which understandably does not include Juan Flavier and Loren Legarda, both of whom are unlikely to be any party’s official nominees for president), those Filipinos who seriously take the responsibility of voting in this putative democracy sigh that it looks like 2004 is going to be like past Philippine elections.
What that means is that as usual, in 2004 they will have to make a choice between several evils, among which the only difference is who’s likely to be the lesser one.
“Is there no one else?” they ask each time the talk comes around to who’re likely to run in 2004, summing up in that plaintive question the understandable frustration of a people for whom neither independence (self-governance) nor democracy (the rational rule of the majority) has ever quite been real.
Their plaint is understandable. Some questions like whether it will be Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo or Eduardo Cojuangco Jr. Lakas will field in 2004 may still be awaiting answers. But one thing most people are sure of is that, come 2004, no one among the candidates for president will be in the category of Brazil’s Joao Goulart, Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh or Chile’s Salvador Allende—all elected to office between 1951 and 1973, but who shared the common fate of being overthrown by the US Central Intelligence Agency because they dared institute the reforms their respective societies needed when those societies needed them most.
Democracy is most of all about the right to choose, whether in terms of ideas and opinions, organizational affiliation or residence, but most of all about whom to entrust the governance of one’s country.
The democratic assumption is that a sovereign people can make a rational choice as to who or what can best meet their expectations, hasten the achievement of their aspirations and lead them to a better future.
Never mind the assumption of rationality, which the cynical say is the one thing most lacking in the electorate, who come election time has to express the sovereign people’s will.
Begin with the choices available, and one can understand why the electorate tends to choose clowns and idiots for leaders. After all, if there is no discernible difference between one candidate and the other except in their ages, gender and voice, one might as well go for the most photogenic, or the one who can dance and sing best. And this is exactly what happened in 1998 and later, as the leadership question was resolved in favor of actors and comedians.
There’s not much hope that it will be different this time. What would be the difference in economic and foreign policy between, say, Mrs. Arroyo and Cojuangco that would merit the electorate’s making a rational choice between one or the other, rather than on the basis of who photographs better, or sings more readily?
What would be the difference between one or the other, and Panfilo Lacson’s and Raul Roco’s own plans of government that would merit the same rationality? If there’s any, we have so far not heard it, thus the degeneration of the question of who’ll be President into who has the better or worse personality.
Of course personality does matter, but only in terms of that critical element, trust. In 1998 that element did play a part in making people decide between someone who’s been described as being as trustworthy as a used-car salesman, and an actor. But even in that department, thinking Filipinos have doubts. They look at Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and can’t help feeling that they’ve been had, first in 2001 when she promised the reform of both Philippine governance as well as Philippine politics, and second in December 2002 when she said she will not run in 2004—a promise that’s rapidly being exposed as a tactic to boost her approval ratings so she could run.
They see Cojuangco and his partisans in Congress, and are reminded of martial law, and how some of the very same people in the Cojuangco camp once served Marcos, sang his virtues and shared his loot. On the other hand, they can’t help associating Lacson with the salvaging of the Kuratong Baleleng suspects, and wondering if behind Lacson’s cultivated boyish good looks lurks something far more sinister than a few foreign bank accounts.
About Roco they can’t be sure now, despite his performance during the Estrada impeachment trial. Then he seemed only righteous. Today he only looks arrogant, and sounds like the kind of person with a short fuse you would hesitate to place in command of an army—or in short, someone who, except for the gender, is exactly like Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Because the choices the country is likely to be faced with come 2004 will excite neither passion nor hope, who will be president will be decided, not by who has the best to offer the country in terms of seeing it through its present sorry state and into a better one, but by popularity, party machinery and money.
That means it will be traditional politics all over again, which in turn means six more years after that of much of the same thing, and it will especially be the case if it’s Mrs. Arroyo who runs and wins in 2004 as her foreign supporters George W. Bush and Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad wish.
What “much of the same thing means” is the continuation of such policies as the country’s ever closer military reengagement with the United States in furtherance of US strategic interests (defined by the Bush administration as the destruction of international terrorism, but in truth the achievement of total US dominance over the planet), which in turn means addressing domestic conflicts through military means, if possible with the help of US troops, even as the economy goes to hell, social injustice thrives and corruption flourishes.
But given the choices they’re likely to have in 2004, there are people, all of them adults and presumably mature enough, who sincerely believe that this is the lesser evil. What’s distressing is that they may actually be right.
But this is to assume that elections will take place in 2004. Believe it or not, the elections are not certain, given the efforts in the House of Representatives to convene as a constituent assembly and to rapidly shift to a parliamentary system by the first quarter of 2004.
It’s a possibility its critics have denounced, but one that could have merit in that the country will be spared having to make impossible, expensive and ultimately futile choices in 2004 in favor of achieving the same results anyway by extending the terms of everyone from Mrs. Arroyo to the entire House of Representatives.
It is a measure of the Philippines’ desperate straits that in this country of lesser evils, where elections used to be taken so seriously people actually killed and died for them, the no-election-term-extension option is actually turning into a choice far more attractive than having to choose in 2004 between fiddle-dee-dum and fiddle-dee-dee. It’s easy to see why.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, June 14, 2003)