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By Annie Ruth C. Sabangan, Senior Reporter
(First of two parts)
JANUARY has proved to be a month for the
copycats of Janus. Candidates who were former political opponents
have become strange bedfellows in the 2004 election. Nothing is odd
about somersaulting politicians, though. Political analysts say
turncoatism is a certified trait of the elitist Philippine electoral
politics.
The political analyst Joel Rocamora believes the
time-honored tenet of addition has made chameleons of candidates.
“That’s the logic of Philippine politics.
The camp of Fernando Poe Jr. would capitalize on EDSA 3, the
wellspring of poor voters who are still supporting Erap. At the same
time, they would still want to maximize votes by not only wanting
their EDSA 3 cake but eating [EDSA 2 protagonists] Loren Legarda and
Nene Pimentel too,” said Rocamora, executive director of the
Institute for Popular Democracy.
That’s what the other camp is doing too. To
maximize votes, Rocamora says President Arroyo’s camp would
obscure the EDSA 2 and EDSA 3 framing, especially EDSA 3, which has
become a disadvantage to the present administration. This explains
why oppositionists and Estrada’s men and supporters—Orlando
Mercado, John Osmeña, Robert Jaworski and Miriam Santiago—were
accommodated in the coalition of the ruling party.
“It’s a question of shaping the discourse
leading up to the election. Poe would capitalize on EDSA 3 and also
maximize votes from EDSA 2. GMA [President Arroyo] would not want
this divide to remain and so she will sing the melody of
reconciliation,” Rocamora says.
But electoral strategies do not stop here. Since
Estrada had left a legacy proving stardom is a built-in advantage
and the shortest way to the presidency, a fact not lost on Poe,
Rocamora says the ruling party has to increase its chance by
matching Poe’s show-biz appeal. “Poe is an entertainer. So GMA
has to bring in entertainers too—the likes of Captain Barbell and
Lito Lapid—and even coin a name for her coalition that sounds like
the popular Taiwanese band that has mesmerized the masa.”
The administration coalition is called Koalisyon
ng Katapatan at Karanasan sa Kinabukasan, K-4, in short.
Paper tigers
What are the candidates’ motives for changing
political parties? Other than for winning the election, there
appears to be none. A reconciliation between Mrs. Arroyo and
Miriam—good for media-op, resolving differences over club
sandwiches between Loren and Estrada loyalists—another media hit,
and motherhood statements feigning sincerity that they switched
parties for “unity” and/or to “bring back the people’s trust
in government”—are the common things they do and say to cloak
their particularistic motives.
Philippine political parties are paper tigers.
Replete with influential and popular politicians, parties may look
powerful on the outside but are ideologically weak and hollow on the
inside. More often than not, parties are sold to voters not through
social and political ideologies but through personalities. For
instance, K4 would choose to sell Captain Barbell than promote the
Christian democracy ideology supposedly being espoused by Lakas-Christian
Muslim Democrats. The opposition would rather sell the popularity of
Poe than the ideals of a pro-poor ideology such as social or popular
democracy. Using Poe as a political myth, in much the same way that
Estrada was packaged as a symbol of the poor’s hopes and
aspirations would only evoke passion but not reason among the
masses, but of course it would translate into votes.
(Perhaps, the only political party in the
Philippines with a clear ideology, though still outlawed and on the
terrorist list of the US is the Communist Party of the Philippines,
whose platform is based on national democracy.)
Historically consistent
Political scientists and analysts agree nothing
is surprising about the shifting loyalties of Filipino politicians.
This, they say, is but an offshoot of an elitist, platformless and
personality-based makeup of traditional political parties.
Dr. Julio Teehankee, chair of the De La Salle
University political science department, noted the historical
consistency of such a makeup. During the American colonial times,
“electoral campaigns were neither venues for the discussion of
social issues nor mass appeal for voters, but negotiations between
national political personalities and the provincial landowning
elites.”
Teehankee says this character continues to
dominate electoral and party politics, thus “the quality of
democratic representation as an outcome of election has always been
held in doubt.”
He adds: “Clientelism, nepotism, fraud and
violence, among others, have reinforced the elitism of Philippine
electoral politics.”
The analyst Clarence Handerson of the
Asia-Pacific Management Forum agrees. He perceives that “from the
beginning, electoral competition did not revolve on class
differences.”
“Instead, politics was a game played by the
elite classes, who manipulated and controlled the political process.
They were a homogeneous group, having few substantive differences in
politics or philosophy.” Everybody was a conservative. One
consequence was that the political and electoral process was based
more on personality than on substance.”
Elite formations
Rocamora argues that parties anywhere in the
world are considered “elite formations”—whether the concept of
elite is defined as those who lead or those who hold economic and
political power.
What makes Philippine parties unique, he says,
is that they “at least try to organize regularized support from a
broader segment of the population . . . [which] results in a more or
less stable membership, regularized patterns of interaction within
and between parties, and characteristic forms of ideological or
political self-definition.”
He said parties in other countries are
distinguished from each other by having clear-cut platforms.
“There are elite parties which, for instance, would like the state
to solve economic problems through import substitution; some want an
export-led economy; others want to pursue economic development
through agrarian reform.”
In the Philippines, such concerns or differences
in platforms are hardly the reason for candidates to shift parties.
Rocamora says political parties comprise elites
and their “retainers” who do not usually fight based on platform
differences but on winning the electoral competition in order to
advance their selfish interest.
Since political parties are concerned only with
their competing demands from the government and thus depend on
government largess, Rocamora says it has become impossible for the
state “to formulate and carry out a coherent economic development
strategy or develop political institutions capable of providing a
reliable regulatory framework for the economy.”
(To be continued)
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