The 2010 Philippine Elections Series

In May this year, Filipinos will be heading to the polls to elect a new set of public officials, including a new President. After more than 9 years of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in Malacañang (something I should probably write about later on), my guess is people have been looking forward to 2010 as a key point in Philippine history, a chance to make a serious case for change, a time when we can hopefully set the country on the right track on the way to a future of shared decency and prosperity.

Some friends have been talking a lot about these elections. A few have asked me to weigh in. I haven't been able to do that, having been stuck in the routine/vortex/matrix/hell that legal studies can sometimes turn into. So I've figured I'd write from time to time, just to add to the discussion, and maybe to help myself as even I try to grapple with the choices that lie ahead.

While I've been told that it's usually bad form to start any opinion article with a disclaimer ("Because you come off as apologetic," they said), I will: I have been pretty isolated from a lot of what's been happening, due to being busy, and will admit that sometimes I prefer just watching DVDs instead of catching the news. This is far different from say, how I followed the US elections last year (which seem so much saner by comparison). So, I might not have as good a grasp of the issues as I might want.

Here we go.

I think it will be a pretty fair assessment to say that people jockey for positions of power all the time. And in the context of the Philippine elections, I think things started brewing a lot when the whole "Hello Garci" thing broke out in 2005. We assumed then, and we assume now, that 2004 was the last time we'd ever see Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo find her way into the top executive post. While it's true that there has been a lot of talk about finding ways for her to stay in power (martial law, constitutional amendment/nihilism, and so on), I think that the reason people never really got around to setting fire to Malacañang to flush her out was because we knew, at some gut level, that 2010 would be different. 2010 would be a turning point. 2010 would mean change.

Well, it's 2010, and I think that there are a few interesting things that are happening. First, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her allies seem to have finally desisted from trying to cling to power by changing the rules by changing the Constitution. That's a pleasant development. I do not think anyone has the clout to push for charter change at this point in time. I also don't think that any ambitious politician wants to change the way things work if it means a threat to their future, and believe me, putting Arroyo in a position of strength will be a threat. That's why her running for a seat in the House of Representatives is something that bothers me until now. She and her party mates just might score a number of decisive electoral victories to secure a large-enough voting bloc to threaten any President, no matter how popular, with impeachment. That basically means any agenda aimed at making her answerable for whatever she's done as President can get seriously hampered. The reason why this is all very interesting, though, is that we just might see how colorful an interplay between the executive and legislative branches of government will be, now that GMA is not in a position to grab the top office in the country.

Second, we will be having automated elections, at least as far as COMELEC is concerned. While that means that a whole chunk of some of the pertinent laws are now irrelevant (i.e. all those dreadful provisions in the Omnibus Election Code and related laws on how to fill up ballots, etc.), it also means that the dynamic of the electoral narrative changes significantly. Automated elections mean that we will have results coming faster (in theory). They also mean, at least in theory, that cheating will either be ridiculously difficult to pull off due to all of the security and novelty offered by the technology, or it can also mean that cheating will be ridiculously streamlined and efficient. It is easier to eradicate electronic paper trails than physical ones. Hacking isn't something that will prove to be impossible for Filipinos. And because the whole process of putting together the automated election system has been pretty much politicized, because the COMELEC is itself politicized (it is, whether it admits it or not), we may have just built in cheating into the automated system. The narrative also changes because results get in faster, affecting how we will rely on things such as exit polls. We might have an unofficial winner declared early thanks to fast counting, giving whoever that person is enough media leverage to set the tone of political discussions. An unofficial winner based on the machine returns will have a lot of talking points and a presumption of victory, which will take the most insane acts of political maneuvering to reverse.

Of course, elections can just fail. The situations projected by some people are largely exaggerated. They are pretty stupid. Ideas like "the military should form a junta if there is no President or Vice President elected" are not only stupid, they are ideas that basically advocate a situation that is illegal, unconstitutional, and pretty much unacceptable. For your benefit, please go through the provisions of the Constitution on the election of the President. If there is a failure of elections, there is a line of succession. The only situation that I can think of that will result in a failure of elections is a concurrence of the following circumstances: one, there is failure to select a President and Vice President, and two, all members of Congress and the Supreme Court die at the same time on June 30. The first is unlikely. The second is also unlikely.

The third thing that makes this election pretty special is the field of candidates. There were quite a lot of people who submitted certificates of candidacy for President (the most interesting one coming from a person who claimed to be a six-star general, and whose campaign platform was essentially to try to become Emperor of the Planet Earth after he was elected President of the Philippines), but the mainstream media (I will refuse to apply Sarah Palin's choice of appellations such as "the liberal media") seems to recognize only a few as "serious" contenders: Noynoy Aquino, Manny Villar, Joseph Estrada, Gilbert Teodoro, Dick Gordon, Eddie Villanueva, JC de los Reyes, and Nicanor Perlas.

A lot has been said about the roster of candidates for ushering in the revival of two major political parties: Aquino is running as the Liberal Party bet, and Villar is running as the Nacionalista bet. Teodoro is running under the Lakas-Kampi party, Estrada is running under the party he created, Gordon is doing the same, as is Villanueva, and de los Reyes is running under Kapatiran, and Perlas, under the Partido ng Marangal na Sambayanan (PANGMASA).

Honestly, I think this would be much more interesting if the parties actually stood for something other than being convenient labels and clubs that end up reshuffling members between electoral cycles. I'm sure that the Liberal Party and Nacionalista Party probably used to stand for something, and that there is probably more to Lakas-Kampi than being a political creature fashioned by the ambitions of GMA allies. Kapatiran apparently has a platform, but I still wonder how popular it is. Right now, parties simply mean numbers of voting members in Congress. That's pretty much sufficient if you want to talk about congressional dynamics, but that really means nothing if you want to talk about clear positions and philosophies that, while perhaps all sharing the goal of moving the country forward, differ about how to get there. Of course, that may be a function not of philosophical differences in policy but rather one of how the electorate act: It looks like it is a cultural thing for Filipinos to simply gravitate towards the person who offers the most gimmick-ridden short-term fixes. Too few among us actually seriously think about policy or developmental direction, and too many are awed by ridiculously ambiguous motherhood statements like "good governance."

Now, it's either I haven't done enough research about how these parties are supposed to be different, or all of them have absolutely failed in reaching me. So I'd like to revisit how parties seem to work, but not in this piece. But I'd like to throw in the idea that there is something seriously wrong with how electoral communications happen. Aside from the fact that the idea of premature campaigning is pretty much dead, at least for now, thanks to the Supreme Court decision in Penera v. COMELEC (the reasoning of which is something I find pretty strange), there seems to be little effort on the part of anyone to properly frame issues that people should probably be thinking about. The media has been pretty irresponsible in this regard.

This is something shared by the candidates, about whom I'll ramble for a bit.

None of the candidates has given us a clear idea of what the issues are and what they will do in concrete terms about these issues. Not one of them. All I can find, if there's even any hint of a sort of platform in any of their materials, is a collection of sweeping, abstract, noncommittal statements, with the possible exceptions of the discussions by Nicanor Perlas and Gilbert Teodoro. But not even what they've posted on their websites is concrete enough for me to have an idea of what their presidencies will be like.

I don't know if this is their idea of reaching out to the masses, or if this springs from some contempt for complexity, or worse, from a failure to appreciate the complex problems of the country. Maybe people like me, or people like you who have read up to this point in this post, are just not the targets of these people. But if the candidates hardly have any communicable platforms to speak of, what the hell are they doing running for President?

First, the candidates that I do not really want to consider: I do not think JC de los Reyes will win. His performances in the presidential debates made him look weak, indecisive, and inarticulate, which is sad because he probably means well. Thing is, you've got to do more than mean well when running for President. Eddie Villanueva will probably end up preaching more than practicing, and I do not like the idea of a cleric running the country. I think that the Presidency is one of the offices that has to be as religiously-neutral as possible no matter how god-fearing the President is. Nicanor Perlas looks pretty smart, but he has little charisma. He won't win.

Noynoy Aquino is enjoying his lead in the surveys. He's got so much going for him: a good political pedigree, an office of national stature, and a party that is starting to come together. But I cannot shake the feeling that the media is going easy on Noynoy. I also do not understand why he has not simply come clean about Luisita--if he has no idea what to do with it, he should just say so, or say that it's not up to him. Period. He also needs to take better control of his campaign and its messages. The "Hindi Ka Nag-Iisa" music video was a waste of good airtime and money. It's really pretty bad--the song is bad, the singing is terrible, and the video is pretty incomprehensible as a political statement other than show biz stars are backing him, which defeats any pretensions of trying to beat back personality-based politics in favor of platform based political reform. But then again, Noynoy Aquino's candidacy is in itself an exercise in personality politics. I seriously doubt he will be anywhere as competent as Mar Roxas might have been as President, or that his understanding of the issues and his day-to-day ability to work on the loneliest job in the country will be enough to bring about lasting change. If he wants to be taken seriously, he should use his leadership position in the surveys and constantly hammer the media with his platform, which is something he has to retool into things we can actually talk about (what the hell is transformative leadership? how does he intend "making education the central strategy for investing in our people, reducing poverty and building national competitiveness" to happen?). Noynoy is in the best position to define reform in concrete terms, and the fact that he has not is utterly disappointing.

I sometimes find Manny Villar's campaign insulting to my intelligence. Consider this: His campaign song extols his being poor. Sure, it's a reference to how he might have started out, but seriously, he should harp on being self-made more than being poor. He should talk about his success story, and focus on the success more than being "tunay na mahirap." Otherwise, it's misleading. His campaign has populist objective of eradicating poverty. I find that pretty insulting because whoever tells me he can eradicate poverty in the Philippines is either an incredible risk taker, or is delusional, or is a liar. Call me cynical, but matter how hard people work over the next six years, poverty is not going away. Social inequality will not disappear after one term. You also have that time when his campaign put out survey results saying that he would significantly cut Noynoy Aquino's lead if it were a two-man race. Aside from the fact that there are serious questions to be raised about how his campaign likes to release results of a survey that they commissioned piecemeal, there is the more obvious fact that 2010 is not going to be a two-man race. To say so is not only misleading or delusional, it's downright insulting to the rest of the field. I don't care if Villar is a brilliant businessman or that he's self-made or that he's wealthy enough to not be corrupt. He's not getting any vote from me if he continues to run the way he's running.

Gilbert Teodoro's campaign is interesting to me, because he sometimes gives me the impression that he's the smartest among the candidates, or that he has the most astute understanding of what the job of the President entails. At least, he comes off that way because he's one of the most articulate among the candidates, and the one who looks like he'll be willing to cut the bullshit out of political discourse. Someone told me that his platform looks like what Fidel Ramos used, so there might be some promise there. But Teodoro has his own problems: He's GMA's candidate, which means that whatever negative press she gets might end up hurting him. The fact that he's GMA's candidate is probably one reason why his survey ratings are pretty down in the dumps. Of course, his party mates have a pretty scary proposition: Teodoro will win if he can pull a consistent 15% rating in surveys, since the party machinery is expected to deliver 25% more votes to him. That scares me because I know that at this point in time, given his survey ratings, Teodoro will not win unless a serious electoral upheaval takes place, which can happen through honest or dishonest means. Another problem is that for all of his purported intelligence and competence, people will probably remember how his work in the National Disaster Coordinating Council during the height of the whole Ondoy/Ketsana disaster was, to put it kindly, an utter disappointment. Teodoro looks like a President, but I don't know if he has the magnetism or charisma that voters look for in their leaders. He sometimes gives me the impression that he detests celebrity and would rather get to work. While I'm fine with that as a testament to his probably being the most cerebral of the candidates, that seriously undermines whatever promise he has.

Dick Gordon makes an interesting case. He's a decent orator (not the best I've seen, nowhere near the videos of Ninoy or Marcos or Reagan or Obama, but brilliant compared to Aquino, Villar, and the rest of the field). He's proven his competence in a number of capacities--a lot of Subic's success will probably (correctly or incorrectly) be attributed to him, he's gotten good press as head of the Philippine Red Cross, and he's got a bit of a record as a legislator. His choice of Bayani Fernando as his running mate is supposed to convey a sense of political will (if we strip away Fernando's detestable hard-headedness, we'll see that he's actually managed to change some parts of Metro Manila, for better or for worse) aimed at national transformation, even a streak of ruthlessness that a leader has to show from time to time in making politically unpopular, but necessary, decisions. He has no platform to speak of in concrete terms, though. And sometimes, he can be a bit unlikeable in some moments that don't get much press -- like how he is said to have hurled invectives at an Ateneo basketball player when they were losing (despite the player's being the team's scoring leader), or how he sometimes arranges for moments of grandstanding when the cameras aren't rolling.

The fact that Erap Estrada is still in the running for President is something that political science and law students will dissect over the next few years. I support the position that legally, Estrada should not have been allowed to run this time, since that appears pretty clear from a reading of the Constitution, and that's what the people who wrote the Constitution say that they meant when they put in the ban against presidential reelection. But there's a sense of twisted justice here: The COMELEC decision that has, as of now, cleared him to run for President looks like a bizarre response to the strange reasoning that the Supreme Court used to say that he had left office (for the record, please know that I am prepared to stick to my guns and have a healthy debate about whether the idea of Estrada's "constructive resignation" is one that deserves serious thought). But what disturbs me the most is why he says he's running for President again: He wants redemption. He wants to continue serving in the office that was stolen from him, as if the presidency was something that can be the subject of entitlement. He wants to be "king again." Other than his offering us a few funny sound bites here and there, I hardly think Estrada deserves consideration for the office he wants to regain.

All told, 2010 will be interesting because it is a year of change: The person in Malacañang will change. The way we do elections will technically change. But at the same time, some things indicate that things will stay the same: We still have a crop of candidates that do not have any indication of speaking very clearly to us about what change is supposed to mean and how they intend to bring it about. The way forward remains unclear. The tension and irony that we are faced with underscores the fact that 2010 will be an important year, regardless of what happens.