Things fall apart
May 25th, 2004
Those who expected a return to “normalcy” could be in for a surprise in the aftermath of this political season.
“Normalcy” is defined by the cynical as the country’s settling back in the next six years to more of the same corruption, misgovernment and the country’s continuing slide into poverty.
The cynics predict that outrage over the fraud, corruption and even the unprecedented violence that have characterized the May 10 elections will be limited to the opposition groups and to the shrinking minority of people who still take Philippine elections seriously. The rest of the population, they argue, will turn to the concerns of survival, and will once more lapse into its usual political indifference.
The cynics also say that Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, aided by her allies in Congress and the Commission on Elections, will be proclaimed despite all the talk about a no-proclamation scenario. There will be the usual protests, but they will go the way of others, meaning nowhere. If Mrs. Arroyo cheated she will be rewarded with six more years in Malacanang. If there was vote-buying, the corruptors of the electorate will take their seats. If people were killed, the killers will go unpunished.
The country will continue hobbling along from one crisis to another until it self-destructs. Meanwhile, the legions of the poor will multiply. Suffering and injustice will worsen, if that’s still possible, and Filipinos will leave the country by the hundred thousands to seek relief in better climes.
Others of a more conservative bent define “normalcy” as the restoration of elections in deciding who shall lead the country, in contrast to the “people power” way that twice since 1986 has thrown out two Philippine presidents. Unlike the cynical, however, they’re already saying that the May 10 elections have done precisely that. The elections were not perfect, true, but they’re saying the elections did what they were supposed to do, which was to decide through the ballot who should lead the country.
Assuming, of course, that the votes were counted right or were not cast under duress. This lot, in any case, includes, at least publicly, the Arroyo administration, whose spokesmen have taken the greatest pains to proclaim the elections as credible and free from fraud.
To make sure that everyone gets and toes the party line of the moment, however, they have also labeled as seditious some of the opposition and poll watch groups’ charges of fraud, and threatened the media with criminal charges if they disseminate “false information”. And, oh yes. They have also filled the front pages and airwaves with press releases claiming the existence of destabilization plots and threats to “democracy” via mass protests to prevent Mrs. Arroyo’s proclamation.
Their point is to get Mrs. Arroyo’s proclamation over and done with, and with as little fuss as possible. This latter group, which primarily includes the administration and its allies—among which the Fernando Poe Jr. camp counts, with some basis, the National Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel)—hopes that with the proclamation over with, the country would then settle back to business as usual.
This is where the “normalcy as credible elections” group’s hopes converge with the cynics’ predictions. History would seem to favor them. In 1986 the politicians who had collaborated and shared power with, and generally benefited from, the Marcos dictatorship, but who had been thrown out into the cold by People Power 1, bided their time and awaited the country’s return to “normalcy”.
They were not disappointed. After a less than decent interval they were soon back in their favored seats of wealth and power. Some of them, recidivists in the game of deceit, are in fact back these elections, after having been booted out twice, in 1986 and in 2001.
In the aftermath of People Power 2 in 2001 everyone—the politicians, the police, the military, the Church and even your favorite civil society groups– made sure things would eventually return to “normal.” Meaning to the usual corruption, mismanagement, brutality, injustice and mass misery that’s the price of the pampered lives of the Filipino political, religious and economic elite.
Again they were not disappointed, despite Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s pledge to nurture new politics, which could have meant, among others, the beginning of the end to the politics of money, deceit and violence that has ruled this country since 1947. Many of them are back, this time ensconced in the lap of Malacanang.
But events in the post election period have so far defied the first group’s predictions and the second’s hopes. While, given history’s lessons, the odds favor both groups, the spectacle the country’s being currently treated to is that of a political system’s being strained to the limit and threatening to burst at the seams.
It’s not solely because, as the so-called opposition would like everyone to think, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo cheated, but primarily because the administration and opposition both, as well as certain sectors of Philippine society and the electorate, remained as true and as committed as ever to the precepts of traditional politics.
If things seem to be falling apart, and no one able to predict what can happen except chaos and disorder, or at best an Arroyo administration that would find it difficult to govern effectively, blame it first on Mrs. Arroyo.
It was Mrs. Arroyo, after all, who went back on her word last October, 2003 when she declared that she was running for President after all, in defiance of her own declaration in December 2002. Then she had candidly admitted that she was the source of the divisiveness that was and still is ripping the country apart, and that it would be best for the country for her to leave the field to others.
It was also Mrs. Arroyo who put together the Franken-alliance called the K-4, basically an alliance of convenience made up of individuals with no known unity on any public issue. It was she who used everything and everyone to win, in many cases brazenly, and whose war chest was primarily the near-inexhaustible treasury of the Philippines.
It was she who lured Noli de Castro into her camp, and she who has now left the country with the awful prospect of a de Castro presidency in 2010. It was she who lured actors and actresses, singers and comedians, and other celebrities into her campaign, thus obliterating every possible difference the administration could have had from the mainstream opposition except the persons involved.
But it was also the mainstream opposition which was stubbornly divided and remains divided to this day—but which could offer to the electorate no alternatives to Mrs. Arroyo except an inarticulate high school drop-out and a former police officer whose favored approach to governance is the mailed fist.
It was the Poe camp of this opposition that relied on Poe’s popularity as a movie star’s sending him to Malacanang despite his silence on every public issue known to man or woman. This was the same camp that sought and obtained the support of the Marcoses, and which was identified with Joseph Estrada as well as the worst of his minions, some of whom ended up in the Poe senatorial slate.
It was this same camp that put together with hardly any serious thought a gaggle of economic and political advisers that would have assured the continuity of the same policies that have been in place since the International Monetary Fund forced its conditionalities on the Philippines in 1965. Most of all, it was this same camp that made the campaign a battle that could turn on who had the most celebrity endorsers, and who could sing and dance better.
Thus the inevitable consequence in the form of an unpredictable present whose prospects for the future are scaring not only foreign investors, but even those Filipinos who wouldn’t be caught dead applying for an immigrant visa.
If the May 10 elections once more demonstrated the triumph of money and alliances of convenience, it also completed the total destruction of the multi-party system by demonstrating that the elections were all about individual politicians and personalities rather than about issues and platforms of governance.
But it may have also done something worse from the system’s main beneficiaries’ standpoint. It may have strengthened rather than weakened the sense that, as 1986 and 2001 demonstrated, the political system is so deeply flawed the aggrieved have only extra-constitutional means to rely on. Mrs. Arroyo, in short, could officially be proclaimed President. But the possibility that things will fall apart before 2010 could haunt her henceforth.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com)