Reinventing Arroyo
June 26th, 2004
Congress in joint session proclaimed Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Noli de Castro President and Vice President of the Philippines at dawn the other day. It was the end of a process whose outcome, for all the debate that went on in the last three weeks, was anyway predestined by the overwhelming numbers of the administration coalition.
Not all is over except the shouting, however. There is little proof of fraud vast enough to affect the outcome of the presidential and vice presidential elections. But Mrs. Arroyo and de Castro will nevertheless take their seats under a cloud of doubt as to their mandate. Unless Mrs. Arroyo plays her cards right, any hope for stability in the next six years will be futile.
The most recent reason for doubt over her legitimacy was the refusal of the majority in Congress to accede to even the most reasonable request during the canvass, and its recourse to those legal technicalities which, while validating the status of its most prominent members as lawyers, did little to erase suspicions that the administration was hiding something.
Prior to and during the congressional canvass, there were also all those nasty reports about the disenfranchisement of as many as 33 percent of the electorate, of election-related killings, of elections not having taken place in some localities, of ballot boxes being stuffed, of military and police officers acting as vote canvassers at the precinct level, and even of missing Certificates of Canvass right in the premises of the House of Representatives.
Of equal relevance is the use of government resources and facilities for Mrs. Arroyo’s campaign, which was so obvious as to make all denials from the Palace unbelievable.
In these circumstances, the call of Mrs. Arroyo for “forgiveness” and “letting go of the past” was probably sincere. She certainly doesn’t want anyone to keep remembering what happened before, during and shortly after the elections—or even to go farther back, to that now (for memory-challenged Filipinos) mist-shrouded time in December 2002 when she said she would not run in 2004.
As for her call for forgiveness, opposition Senator Aquilino Pimentel’s reaction was understandable. He thought it patronizing, and Mrs. Arroyo’s way of saying she was forgiving the opposition—for what offense Pimentel could not fathom.
“She thinks everyone wronged her,” Pimentel told a Manila newspaper, “she thinks she has not committed any wrong.”
Pimentel could be wrong. Mrs. Arroyo could very well have been asking the nation for forgiveness. Among other sins, there was her use of their tax money to solicit their votes, and her turning her back on her mandate at EDSA. Although she owed her presidency in 2001 as well as her 2004 “mandate” to People Power 2 (it was what made possible her running while an incumbent), she nevertheless rejected it by turning into a trapo worse than Joseph Estrada ever was, and by including in her Senate slate two of the latter’s best allies, one of whom lost and had the gall to proclaim that he shouldn’t have switched coalitions.
Then again, Pimentel could be right. Mrs. Arroyo’s asking for forgiveness for all of these and more would be uncharacteristic. Which is probably why, after she had made all those noises at dawn the other day, her spokesman Ignacio Bunye was telling the media that the Arroyo II administration would welcome a “honeymoon” period during which both the opposition and the media would stop criticizing Mrs. Arroyo.
Bunye in fact made it a request, and asked the media to be “more generous with us” and to be “more understanding”, even as he expressed the hope that the opposition will “reciprocate.”
The opposition doesn’t seem likely to do so—at least not the wing of it represented by Edgardo J. Angara and Juan Ponce Enrile. Angara said Mrs. Arroyo’s offer of reconciliation was “empty rhetoric,” while Enrile pledged not to keep silent “if she does not do the right thing.”
The call for a “honeymoon” between itself and its critics, whether in media or in the opposition, would be reasonable if a truly new administration had been elected, which means that the slate has been wiped clean, and things could begin anew. The Arroyo II administration is not in that category. It comes to power not only burdened by a mandate that for its lack of certainty could always be questioned. It is also returning to power with a less than respectable record of achievement.
Government statistics say 35 percent, but it is more likely that as much as 60 percent of the population are poor. The treasury is bankrupt, and the public debt has grown to nearly $60 billion.
The social services the Arroyo administration promised to deliver in 2001 to more Filipinos have deteriorated. Government hospitals are understaffed and under-equipped. The country’s elementary and high schools still suffer from shortages of just about everything from chalk to qualified teachers.
Corruption has metastized throughout government as well as much of Philippine society. Human rights violations have escalated in the last three years—a fact acknowledged even by the US State Department.
It is difficult for anyone to agree to a “honeymoon” with a “new” administration that’s not really new, and that’s coming to power with a record as sorry as the Arroyo government’s.
A “honeymoon” is premised on mutual pleasure if not mutual love and respect. There is, at the very least—and there is no putting this delicately—a presumption that the screwing’s mutual and not one-sided. A truly new government could have merited that presumption—but not a government that has elicited the response from a majority of the people that they’re worse off than before, and are less optimistic about the future.
Absent this presumption—and under circumstances in which her administration could face challenges more serious than some criminal crackpot’s throwing nails on the streets and burning schools for much of her term–Mrs. Arroyo has no choice except to act the statesman and to allow the policy maker and manager the traditional politician in her has trapped to emerge to the light of day.
Most fundamentally will she have to address the basic weakness of the Philippine state—ironically one she claims to have addressed by supposedly strengthening the Republic—which consists of its being the creature of the many economic, political, familial, class, sectoral and even religious interests that are ruining Philippine society.
It is the intervention of these interests that’s at the heart of the failure of the Philippine State to decisively address such basic problems as the persistence of land tenancy; the vast networks of corruption in government and the rest of society; unemployment; and the unrestrained growth of the population.
Beyond all this lurk the twin issues of giving this country’s independence the substance it has lacked for all the decades since 1946, and of resuming the social revolution that, in the 1960s, Mrs. Arroyo’s father, Diosdado Macapagal, had declared unfinished.
If she wishes history to be kinder to her than it is likely to be at this juncture, Mrs. Arroyo needs to craft the policies that will address these problems regardless of which interests are hurt, and no matter what the cost to her political partners and even herself.
Mrs. Arroyo, in short, will have to reinvent herself from trapo to authentic leader. Only in so doing will her worst detractors fail in cutting her term short. And only by so surprising the rest of us will the violence done against the electoral system by her flawed mandate be worth the cost in lives and the possible subversion of the people’s will
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com)