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By Amante E. Bigornia
(Second of three parts)
While the proposal to lift the limits on the
terms of elective officials from the Constitution will likely meet
more vociferous opposition from the people than that resuscitating
the political party system, the latter, while also open to debate,
is definitely a more urgent and crucial amendment to the fundamental
law of the land.
For unlike the issue of term limits that can be
put aside temporarily without any significant harm to the nation,
revival of the party system cannot or must not be ignored. The
longer the old parties remain inutile and the people continue to
elect officials not responsible to them because they were elected
only for their popularity, not for party programs for the betterment
of the country, the longer the nation will continue to be mired in
abject poverty and wallow in corruption and criminality.
The party system, particularly the two-party
practice, was perverted and eventually destroyed mainly by two
constitutional provisos, one encouraging a multi-party system, the
other creating the so-called party-list that allows nonpolitical
groups to elect members of the House of Representatives from their
respective ranks.
Paper parties
Section 6 of IX-C of the Constitution, which
states, “A free and open party system shall be allowed to evolve
according to the free choice of the people … ” triggered the
proliferation of so-called parties.
In the elections that followed the ratification
of the Charter in 1987, just anyone could form a party and run for
office, including the presidency. Some used their paper parties to
get invited by the more viable groups to be their candidates; in
some instances, they eventually gained control of their host
parties, like the camel did to his Arab owner in the middle of the
desert.
The classic example is the way deposed president
Joseph “Erap” Estrada, a former movie hero turned politician,
climbed to the highest post in the land in spite of the odds stacked
against him and his own limitations as a person.
First, he used a paper party, the Partido ng
Masang Pilipino, to run for president. However, when he realized he
could lose, he agreed to run for vice president as running mate of
business tycoon Eduardo Cojuangco, who had also formed another paper
party, the Nationalist People’s Coalition. Erap won but his
“host” lost. And in the 1998 presidential election when he
finally ran for the presidency, Cojuangco was his principal
cheerleader.
Others were not as successful as Erap, but the
trick became virtually institutionalized and parties became a dime a
dozen. So did political leaders who, using variations of the ruse,
got elected even without the help of parties. As a result, the
parties became “marginalized,” a word coined to replace the
biting term “inutile.”
Survival of the fittest
Real political parties are not merely meant for
gaining power through the election process. Just as important are
their function as a training ground for political leadership and as
a sieve to separate the capable from the incompetent. Through the
party system, aspirants for leadership compete with each other
within the party, starting from municipal chapters to the topmost
councils. In the process, the aspirant also hones his political
savvy.
The competition begins at the barrio level where
aspirants run for nomination for positions in the barangay and
municipal government. The winners then go up the political ladder up
to the provincial and regional levels, and eventually to the
national government. By then he would have acquired enough political
savvy to be part of the national leadership of his party. Through
this system, only the best and the brightest are selected to vie
against the best and the brightest in other parties. This, at least
theoretically, assures that only the capable will run the nation.
Accountability
Another important and crucial function of the
political party is to collectively formulate policies and programs
for the achievement of national goals. Political parties present
their platforms and are duty bound to fulfill these if elected to
power. Failure to do so would cause their defeat in next elections.
This makes the winning candidates accountable to the people, one of
the most crucial bases of representative government.
Unfortunately, these political concepts and
principles have gone with the demise of the political system. People
no longer need parties to win in elections. Paper parties would be
of some help but are not indispensable. A former television
personality, Noli de Castro proved it — and how. He easily topped
the last senatorial elections even if he had no political background
and was even reluctant to run for the Senate.
It might be all right if mere lack of political
know-how or experience were the only hindrances to a person’s
aspirations for high office. But the party-less political system
prevailing today has produced queer if not anomalous political
situations.
Take the case of Sen. Luisa “Loi” Ejercito,
a doctor by profession. Although she is the wife of deposed
president Estrada, by all accounts she never had anything to do with
politics until her husband was ousted and she won in the last
elections handily. Then there was wife of a mayor who was in prison
serving a life sentence for rape and multiple murder. She was
elected to replace her husband.
The clincher, however, was the reelection for a
third term in the last polls of a member of the House of
Representatives although he was already serving a life sentence in
the national penitentiary for rape of minors.
Political opportunism
Contemptible as these may be, they are not as
pernicious as the other political and social consequences of the
death of the party system, especially those that abetted the culture
of opportunism, because they were insidious and therefore could be
overlooked, even tolerated by the unwary.
“Political opportunism” had its roots in the
aftermath of the Marcos regime. With the political opposition either
going underground and/or shying away from partisan politics when
Marcos declared martial law in 1972, only new aspiring leaders with
inconsequential constituencies remained in the political field. To
survive, these new pols were forced to make alliances with others in
the same predicament, in many instances without the benefit of a
shared vision and program of govern-ment, the only acceptable
justification for such unions.
In due time, the once abhorred practice gained
virtual popular acceptance and hopping from one party to another
became a matter of course. The only logical consequences of this
unfortunate circumstance were the emer-gence of mediocre leaders who
naturally wrought havoc on the economy of the country, allowed peace
and order to deteriorate, made governance at best a haphazard
exercise and, worst of all, eroded the moral fiber of the nation.
Federalist cause
So far-reaching, indeed, are the implications of
the constitutional provisos that caused the death of the party
system that it is difficult to see how, without them first being
approved, even if tacitly, the other proposed constitutional
amendments could be expected to sufficiently rectify the other flaws
in the Charter.
For instance, how could a federal form of
government achieve the main purpose for which it is proposed under
the circumstances cited above? This type of government was initially
proposed by the political leaders of the Visayas and Mindanao who
were chafing under what they claimed the usurpation of all
governmental powers and influence by “imperial Manila” or their
counterparts in Luzon.
This inequity, they claimed, was the main reason
for the two other geographical subdivisions of the country being
less developed and prosperous than their regions, particularly
Mindanao. Since their battle cry did not click, they have taken a
new tack, this time pointing out that the economic and security
problems in Mindanao would only be solved if the present unitary
form of government is replaced by a federal system, obviously hoping
that the Muslim population in the third largest island in the
archipelago would rally in support of the change.
Multiplied mediocrity
However, the advocates of federalism have yet to
address the problems brought about by the absence of a party system,
which in the first place caused poor governance. For one, in their
proposals, the proponents of the change have not specified how the
country would be divided into virtually autonomous states,
The possibilities are many, from three —
Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao — to 12, if Metro Manila is made into
another District of Columbia or Washington.
Either way, the problems, particularly those
resulting in the lack of a political party system, would multiply
with the number of states. This will cause a major political
upheaval; the 12 semi-independent states governed by separate groups
of mediocre political leaders can not at all be expected to become
progressive or at least be stable simultaneously.
The human and natural resources of the various
regions vary, some widely. There are those that could easily be
developed or have already been developed. Others are as backward as
Nepal. Would the luckier states automatically go to the aid of the
states who cannot keep up with their pace of development? How much
aid would states be willing to extend to neighbor ravaged by violent
events like rebellion or natural calamities?
The clincher might even be: What if a state,
like that of Muslim Mindanao, decides to secede from the
Philippines?
These are only a few of the many multi-faceted
problems that a federal system of government will face. Other
proposed Cha-cha, like the shift from the present presidential to
the parliamentary form of government, pose equally or even more
difficult problems.
(To be continued)
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