Ten Thousand Things

A good read……

The socio-political landscape in 2010: The unending quest for political stability

Randolf S. David

Professor, University of the Philippines

Perhaps it is because we are a relatively young nation-state, it has always seemed that we are more burdened by politics than served by it, more preoccupied with responding collectively to recurrent political crises than with attending to the regular tasks of governance. Indeed, as a people, we have probably devoted more time to politics than to the other things that usually make a nation great – science, the arts, education, the economy, etc.  More than ever, we are convinced that unless we get our politics right, we will not move forward on the other things that matter.  In other societies, the solution has been sought in the erasure of politics itself through authoritarian means.  In my opinion, the solution must be sought within politics itself — not through its authoritarian dissolution, but by hastening the evolution of politics into an autonomous sphere – distinct from the family, the Church, or the economy.  The theory states that this differentiation of the political system from the rest of society is best achieved when it undergoes its own internal differentiation.  Just to cite a quick example – politics is best conducted not by political families but by political parties.  But where political parties have not matured, their function tends to be taken over by families.

But, what does it mean to get politics right? Basically, I think it means that a society is able, through its political system, to entrust to a group of people the right to make decisions that are binding to all. Such decisions are presumed to be valid — and thus freely accepted by most everyone — when they are made by legitimate authority.  Legitimacy is a key term here, and I shall define it simply as the uncoerced acceptance, for whatever reasons, by the governed of a given system of authority.  In short, we regard a government as legitimate when it is freely accepted.

Anything can go wrong in a country’s politics.  But the most severe problems – the ones that lead to persistent instability – arise when political power is gained other than by fair and peaceful elections or lawful means.  Thus, when voting outcomes are highly disputed, and the procedures for resolving the dispute are not trusted for any number of reasons, the competition for power can easily degenerate to armed conflict.  Persistent political crisis burdens the legal system, and, in the long term, all the institutional spheres of society – the economy, religion, the armed forces, etc.

So important is institutional stability to the functioning of a democracy that one of the greatest achievements of any government is the peaceful and orderly transfer of power to a new set of leaders. That is why the election of a new president is always a milestone in the life of a democratic polity, and it is especially significant after a society has gone through a long period of instability.

A brief history of instability

Our first taste of sustained political instability in the post-war years came with the declaration of Martial Law.  Marcos’s second term as president would have ended in 1973.  But, having hijacked and interfered in the work of the ongoing Constitutional Convention to enable him to continue exercising the powers of the presidency while the emergency supposedly existed (which meant indefinitely), Marcos did not transfer the reins of government at the end of his term in 1973.  From that point, it became uncertain when and how his regime would end.    Hardly anyone expected the so-called “New Society” to end in a non-violent way.  Having installed itself by arms, it was logical to think that it could only be ended by arms.  Thus it was not surprising at all that the armed struggle led by the New People’s Army gained its largest following during this period.

No one believed that the Marcos regime could be removed in the way it was actually removed. The snap election called by Marcos in February 1986 paved the way for Cory Aquino’s rise to the presidency in a completely unexpected way.  Having officially lost the election, Cory did not draw her mandate from the snap election.  She drew it rather from the peaceful People Power revolution that broke out in the aftermath of that stolen election.  That is what justified the declaration of a revolutionary government under a Cory presidency.  Wielding the absolute powers of government, she appointed a Constitutional Commission consisting of members especially handpicked by her.  Nobody questioned her right to do so.  She was the de facto legitimate president.  The first regular elections under the new government were held after the ratification of the 1987 Constitution.

Elections did not end Cory’s political troubles however.  Seven failed military coups, including two very serious ones, challenged her right to govern and prevented her from focusing on the regular tasks of governance. It is sometimes said that Cory’s biggest achievement was her survival.  I will modify that a little by saying that her biggest achievement was presiding over the transfer of state power to her duly-elected successor, Fidel V. Ramos.  There were 11 candidates in the presidential elections of 1992, and though he won the presidency, FVR obtained only 23% of the votes, the smallest mandate in the nation’s history.  The margins separating the three front-runners in that election were so slim that, under a less credible Comelec, and under a distrusted presidency, the results would have been violently contested.  Yet the Ramos government went on to enjoy the benefits of political stability, the seeds of which were planted by a supremely credible predecessor.  There were attempts to change the Constitution towards the end of Ramos’s term to enable him to continue beyond 1998.  These did not prosper, and it is a testimony to the country’s growing stability that the winner in the 1998 election – Joseph Estrada – who was not the choice of the elite nor of the Edsa I forces – would be sworn to the presidency without a hitch.  What happened after that, however, is another story.

Approaching the third year of his 6-year term, Estrada became the subject of a well-publicized impeachment trial that threatened to strip him of the presidency.  It is unfortunate that the trial was aborted before it could be completed.  The whole process seemed to be going well until the matter of the second envelope cropped up, triggering a moment of confusion in the impeachment court.  An extra-constitutional transfer of power was the last thing the nation needed at that point, but something like that happened.  It put the Supreme Court in an extremely delicate situation.  It politicized the armed forces once more.  It made the Catholic Church again play a role in the political system that was way beyond its legitimate function in a modern society.  It brought the country close to a civil war, with the arrest of the ousted president, which prompted Edsa III. We continue to reap the bitter fruit of that moment of political recklessness.

The Supreme Court had to promulgate three decisions in its valiant effort to legalize Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s succession to the presidency on January 20, 2001, exactly 9 years ago today.  This political crisis strained the credibility of our legal system, but more than that, it set the political system on a destabilization course by installing a president who felt compelled to spend almost the entirety of her presidency fighting for political survival.

Instead of treating the remaining three-and-a-half years of Estrada’s aborted term as a transitional period, Ms Arroyo exacerbated the crisis when she decided to run for a full six-year term in the 2004 presidential election.  Encouraged by the Church, big business, civil society and the military, who feared another political catastrophe with the possible election of the popular movie icon Fernando Poe Jr, she charged ahead, like someone with a blank check to do anything or buy anyone, just to prevent the election of someone they thought was no more than the deposed president’s proxy.  Against a popular FPJ, GMA deployed everything within the powers of the presidency: state funds, the police, the military, Comelec officials, etc. in order to ensure victory.  This is exactly what the framers of the 1987 Constitution had feared and sought to avoid when they banned the re-election of a president.  But not having been previously elected to the position, GMA was not, technically speaking, seeking re-election.  In any event, the high court would have ruled that the ban did not apply to her. The dark campaign period for the 2004 election gave us characters like Joc-Joc Bolante, Virgilio Garcillano, and the Ampatuans of Maguindanao.  It recruited soldiers for functions they were not trained or meant for – like falsifying election results.  Not since Marcos have the top officials of the AFP and the PNP been as politically compromised as they were in that campaign.  The imperatives of presidential survival made the police and the military once more the fulcrum of politics.  The more GMA felt threatened, the more she turned to the armed forces for support.  The more she bought military and political support, the more unpopular and illegitimate she became in the eyes of the public.

Edsa III in May 2001, which was triggered by the arrest of the ousted President Estrada, was not to be the last instance of open defiance against the GMA regime.  This was followed by the July 2003 Oakwood Mutiny, the February 2006 aborted walkout of the Rangers and Marines, the July 2005 open resignation of Cabinet members belonging to the so-called Hyatt 10, and the November 2007 Manila Peninsula siege.  There were less dramatic, but no less significant, events like the NBN-ZTE Senate investigation that further polarized the political situation, making it almost impossible to bring the contending groups under an agreed institutional framework. Throughout this period, the Supreme Court alone stood as the last remaining support of a brittle legitimacy.  It became the arena of political combat waged in legalese. The few times the Court stood up to the power of the presidency by issuing decisions castigating presidential excess and abuse gave hope to those who had contemplated more drastic actions against the regime.

The political restlessness of the past four years only began to simmer down when the public started to draw fresh hopes from the prospects of change through the 2010 elections.  As soon as GMA’s allies stopped talking about Charter Change to effect a shift in the form of government before the elections, a semblance of stability quickly took shape.  Despite the uncertainties brought about by delays in the automation program of the Comelec, Filipinos do look forward, with enthusiasm, to participating in the elections.  I do not think that many of our people can imagine at this point a failure-of-election or a no-proclamation scenario.  This, of course, does not mean they will stand by and do nothing if any of these should happen.

In that sense, we Filipinos are incurable optimists.  We prefer to see the bright side of things.  We trust too much.  But we don’t like being deceived; and so we tend to react impulsively when we feel betrayed. Thus far, we have been lucky; we have been able to avoid the kind of armed confrontation in politics that in other societies have directly led to unending civil war or military rule.  Always, at the last minute, someone has been able to tap a connection that averted a bloody resolution.  Our culture is rich in these types of resources.  But we may not be so lucky the next time around.

What happened in Maguindanao province on Nov. 23 last year must give us pause.  It could be a portent of things to come.  Where people are prepared to kill to stay in power or to get it, no stable political order is possible.  Here is a local warlord who was allowed to accumulate so much wealth and power he practically annexed the state to his family empire.  National politicians coddled him and turned a blind eye to his corruption and murderous ways.  Nothing could restrain him anymore – neither culture, nor law, nor a higher power.  All he knew is that he must stand his ground, because without power, he becomes a sitting target.

GMA, of course, is not an Ampatuan, although she was never above dealing with his kind.  But neither is she a Cory Aquino who could not bear staying a minute longer in the presidency.  We don’t know what GMA is planning to do exactly after she leaves the presidency.  But of two things we are sure: First, that she does not intend to be out of power after June 30, 2010 when her presidential term ends.  Second, that she is running for a congressional seat – and she will get it – for reasons other than to quench a burning desire to remain in public service.

Is there anything wrong with this picture?

Legally, perhaps none.  Politically, everything.  When you have an incumbent president who intends to remain an active political player by moving to another public office as soon as her present term expires, chances are high that there is going to be no smooth transfer of power to the next government.  We are already seeing this in the concerted effort to preempt appointments to important positions in the judicial system and the armed forces even before the vacancies have actually occurred.

A congressional seat by itself may not mean much politically.  But an incumbent president can certainly do much during the campaign period to shape the political probabilities so as to ensure that she will have enough allies in the next Congress to elect her to the Speakership.  Some commentators say that perhaps that is a long shot.  I do not think so.  It really depends on how many of her allies are returned to Congress using foul or fair means.  Yet, by itself, the Speaker’s position may not mean much either without the support of the new president. Indeed, under our present system, while the Speaker can make things difficult for the president, the latter has all the weapons at his disposal to counteract and undermine the power of the Speaker.  But that is assuming there is going to be a new president.

The fact of the matter is that anything can happen when you have an incumbent president who is prepared to do everything to remain in power.  That, to me, is the most important given in the present political landscape. It is the one factor that fuels continuing instability.  It colors everything. It forces us to take a second look at events which, at first blush, may seem innocuous, unintended, or insignificant.  It makes us ask questions that, under different circumstances, we might feel too embarrassed to entertain.  Such as – is the automated election being deliberately programmed to fail?  Is a failure-of-election scenario or a no-proclamation scenario possibly the premise of GMA’s congressional bid? One is prompted to ask questions like these after reading and listening to various analyses of the vulnerabilities and the state of current preparations for the automated elections.

Consider just two items to illustrate the formidable challenges facing the Comelec. There are 1,630 municipalities in the country which will require 1,630 different types of ballots, which in turn will require 1,630 different ways of customizing the PCOS machines.  As Ramon del Rosario noted in a recent Inquirer commentary (1/16/10), “The customization of the machines is scheduled for completion by April 18, a mere three weeks before election day.”  Each of these machines has to be delivered to the right town before election day, because if mis-delivered anywhere else they would not be able to read the ballots.  A second point deals with the so-called “shading threshold” of the machines.  Instead of writing the names of candidates, voters will be asked to shade an egg-shaped space across a candidate’s name.  Del Rosario writes: “On Jan. 6, Commissioner Gregorio Larrazabal reported that of 600 filled ballots inserted in the PCOS machines being tested, only 30 were properly read!  He attributed the failure to a ‘high shading threshold,’ which he said could be easily corrected.”  I understand the machines were subsequently calibrated to lower the shading threshold, and these made them so sensitive that they are now likely to pick up any form of discoloration on the spaces to be read. These may be minor points, but, as anyone who has dealt with a new machine for the first time can attest, they could set off major problems on election day itself.  Such problems could compound the usual problems we have faced in all previous elections –unscheduled power interruption, voting precinct confusion, long lines, voters taking too much time to fill up the strange-looking ballots, etc.

There are election-related scenarios worth pondering which could exacerbate the political instabilities that have prevented us from attending to our more basic problems as a people.  I will take up four such scenarios here starting from the riskiest to the most benign.

Scenario # 1: Failure of Elections

Instead of a last minute decision to shift to manual election, the automated elections proceed as scheduled.  But on election day itself, the system breaks down in many areas, preventing the holding of elections.  Comelec fails to put manual voting in place to meet such contingency.  Long lines of voters feel frustrated and, sensing sabotage, they vent their fury on election authorities.  Spontaneous protests break out everywhere, threatening to turn violent.  The military and the police step in to quell lawlessness.  Martial law is declared by the President, who holds on to power beyond June 30, and proclaims the formation of a Transition Council to restore order and prepare the country for a fresh round of elections.

Scenario 2: No Proclamation of National Winners

The automated elections proceed as scheduled.  But the PCOS machines break down in many precincts in some regions of the country.  The results are however sufficient to immediately declare the winners in local races – councilors, mayors, congressmen and governors. But the winners for national positions like senator, vice-president, and president could not be proclaimed because the slim margins could be offset by awaited results from the other regions.  The House of Representatives is able to convene, but not the Senate.  The Speaker is chosen by the newly-elected House, but not the Senate President.  The results for the national level remain inconclusive even after June 30.  In the meantime since a Speaker has been chosen by the new House of Representatives, that person can validly assert a claim to serve as acting President.  That person could well be GMA.

Scenario 3: Wholesale automated cheating

The automated elections proceed as scheduled.  Votes are counted, and the winners are proclaimed.  But the results appear to contradict popular expectations.  Charges of systematic rigging of the results through control of the source code gain credence as evidence of a pattern of automated adding and subtracting of votes piles up.  With no parallel manual precinct count to validate the automated results, voters become agitated.  Protests and demonstrations erupt in many parts of the country.  The troops are called in to suppress violence and disorder.  The President declares Martial Law to save the Republic.  GMA holds on to the presidency until June 30, and then gives way to a multi-sectoral Transition Council to be led by her.

Scenario 4: A new government is in place

The automated election is successfully held.  The results are accepted.  A new government is elected.  GMA gains a seat in Congress, and is elected Speaker.  Or, at the very least, she controls a large enough block to be able to determine the agenda of the House.  A law convening a Constitutional Convention is passed, and the election of delegates to the Convention is held simultaneously with the barangay elections scheduled for October 2010.  A new Constitution changing the form of government from presidential to parliamentary is ratified in 2011.  Speaker GMA becomes the first Prime Minister under the new Constitution, while the Presidency is transformed into a largely ceremonial role.  Before all this can happen, of course, GMA will have to face many cases for corruption committed during her presidency.  It will not be very easy to pin her down given the way she has handpicked the members of the high court and the Office of the Ombudsman.  The ensuing battle will be protracted and will be fought on various fronts.  Once again, political conflict will burden the judicial system. We cannot discount the intervention of the military at any point, especially if civilian authority is deadlocked and is unable to govern and respond effectively to emergencies triggered by natural calamities.

Clearly, what these scenarios suggest is a political horizon that will continue to be characterized by recurrent crisis. In addition to those factors specific to the Arroyo regime, other problems that have remained unresolved through the years are bound to crop up in an opportunistic way: the Mindanao problem, the communist insurgency, vulnerability to natural disasters and global epidemics, and changes in the global economy that may displace our OFWs from their present jobs and undermine the only steady source of foreign exchange we have at the moment.

Political instability is the last thing we need — especially after a national election.  Without a clear mandate to rule, it will be very hard for any government to attend to the complex problems that all nations must face in this era of globalization.  Even more so in a society like ours where the basic social institutions have all been weakened and compromised by excessive politics.

GMA has stayed in power long enough to be able to privatize and distort the functioning of our institutions.  It is difficult to see how her influence can be erased overnight, or how she can be effectively made answerable for her past actions as president without a decisive change in the leadership of our government.

The situation we face today is very reminiscent of the dying years of the Marcos regime when the nation, propelled by the hope of finally terminating a despised regime, could not wait to start anew.  No one expected to see Marcos leave government peacefully, nor that a new democratic government could be put in place without resistance from the forces of reaction.  But, we can draw a lesson from the fact that, instead of being deterred by the doomsday scenarios that were swirling around at that time, the Filipino people in 1986 responded to every challenge that came their way.  After Marcos announced the holding of a snap election, they gathered themselves around Cory, campaigned and protected their votes even when they knew that Marcos would steal the elections.  In so doing they created a momentum that carried the whole nation forward to Edsa I.  No one expected that Marcos would be hounded out of the country just like that, and that the Filipino nation would be given such a chance to redeem itself in the eyes of its children and of the rest of the world.

Those of us who were lucky to become part of those precious events can never recall those moments without feeling that somehow we had failed to do justice to the greatness of those events, that we had been handed a gift on a silver platter and we did not know what to do with it.  I still often feel that way today.  But over the years I have also learned to take a more philosophical view of those events.  I like recalling what Marx once said: “Men make history, but they do so under circumstances not chosen by themselves.” As important as interpreting what we do to change our way of life is understanding the circumstances in which we act to rebuild our society.

Let me end by briefly describing what I think these circumstances might be.  They are not unique to us.  They are found in all societies, although the manner in which they manifest themselves may vary because of the contingencies of every nation’s history.  But, in general, the problems we have gone through and are going through – the multiple crises, the almost unending instability, the cycle of confusion, despair, hope, disenchantment, and cynicism — that have accompanied our evolution as a society are part and parcel of the often wrenching transition to a modern society.  A transition is a particularly confusing stage – marked by what Gramsci once called the dying of the old and the inability of the new to be born.  The old habits of our culture are quickly vanishing, yet the ways of modern society have not fully taken root.  In the interim, our people suffer from a surplus of dependence.  They are subservient even when they no longer need to be.  They slide into the easy habits of the powerless even when the tools of emancipation may already be at hand.  They seek patronage even where it is not necessary.

Our leaders and rulers, on the other hand, suffer from a nobility deficit.  A sense of honor, drawn from tradition, no longer deters or restrains them.  The poverty and ignorance of the masses brings out the predator rather than the hero in them.  They take advantage of the weaknesses of the legal system and the persistence of the old habits of an unequal society, even as the old values like delicadeza no longer compel them.

But all this will pass as our society slowly moves from a hierarchical order to a more democratic one.  There are many drivers of modernity in our midst, not the least of which is the migration of millions of our countrymen to various parts of the world.  Working abroad, they are no longer just improving their material lives; they are also discovering new values, developing a work ethic appropriate to modern settings, and building a strong sense of self that had been denied them in a traditional society.

In the near future, inherited status will no longer be an asset.  Occupations and public office will become more accessible to those born without privilege.  Politics will be more accountable to the general public, to the citizens, rather than to a few dominant centers of influence.  Kinship will decline in importance as a passport to economic or political mobility.  With universal education, which has so far eluded us, citizens should be in a better position to distinguish between roles like entertainment and governance, between public service and profit-seeking, and between the quest for spirituality and the quest for justice.

What I am describing here is the trajectory of the transition to modernity.  Our political institutions, modern as they are, came as a legacy of American colonialism.  They were grafted onto a feudal social order and culture defined by the values of a patron-client system.  The disconnect became apparent to us only after the generation that had been schooled in colonial America’s modern ways had left the stage.  We are just starting to grasp the logic of these institutions. Our hope is that the next generation can make them a reality.

I began these remarks by noting how much time and attention politics seems to demand of us as a nation.  We need to harness it back to its institutional moorings, and make it less spectacular, so that we can use our collective energies for other worthwhile pursuits.  I mean, just enough to give us respite from crises. For, I do not think we would want the opposite extreme – where life has become so predictable and politics so boring that people no longer bother to even cast their votes in elections.  There is an advantage to being a young nation: change, for us, is a religion, and we’ll never run out of reasons to look to the future with hope.

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