Candidates have begun declaring for the midterm elections, in May. They also have begun declaring their party and coalition allegiances — turncoatism having become a casual matter of political convenience, they need to do that to bring the electorate up to speed.
For their part, the news media, as is customary, have begun stirring up excitement about the occasion. To what point, I’ve always wondered, but if it is to celebrate the democratic vote, I think it’s delusional.
I’ve lived long enough, and, as a journalist, been well-positioned enough, at least optically, to see enough. And from what I’ve seen, the assumptions from which all this hoopla proceeds are shaky, and the most fundamental assumption — that our elections happen in a working democracy — is the shakiest of all. Given alone the lopsided distribution of incomes and opportunities, a criminal inequality that has persisted and gone on unredressed since we began to be categorized as an independent nation, it’s difficult to make the case that democracy has worked for us at all.
I may have been too young to be a conscious witness at the time, but it’s a matter of historical fact that, in the early years of independence, our presidents were still virtually picked by our supposed American liberators and voted into office, pro forma, by a colonially hung-up electorate. Anyway, the unholy arrangement, as I have myself observed, has been continued between local patron and client; and where victory remains still uncertain, the election itself is fixed.
That’s why the theory that the popular vote guarantees a people’s say in the charting of their future is a joke in our case. The generalization that all election losers say they were cheated may have been intended to mean that all election losers are simply poor losers. The truth is that, in all likelihood, a fair number of those losers were indeed cheated, election cheating having become inherent in our electoral culture and made even easier by computerization.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is himself alleged to have been installed on a rigged vote, an allegation that gained initial credence when the Supreme Court gave due course to the case and ordered the Commission on Elections to answer the allegation and turn in certain records. The commission has failed to do that, yet goes unsanctioned.
Strongly favored even in the normally reliable surveys, Marcos could have actually won without having to cheat, but the Marcoses are known to not take any chances. Ferdinand Jr.’s own father staged sham elections to prolong his dictatorship, although by its 14th year, in 1986, the nation had gotten wise to it. Forced to stand for election in the full glare of international observers, he cheated still, but this time he provoked a popular furor that was to bring him down within the month.
Some electoral irregularities do get corrected, to be sure, but the corrective judicial process takes so long that often the contested term of office has just about expired before the verdict comes and the rightfully elected gets seated in the fraud’s place. Moreover, no one gets sent to jail. In fact, in the most remarkable case of electoral cheating, not only did all the cheats get away, the beneficiary, herself the chief cheat, even went on to become the longest-reigning president since Ferdinand Sr. — Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
Arroyo stepped up from vice president to succeed Joseph Estrada, who had quit in the middle of his impeachment trial, for plunder. After serving out the remaining years of Estrada’s term, Arroyo ran for her own regular term, and claimed victory. But before she could sit, she was found to have manipulated her own election. A conspiratorial phone conversation between her and an election commissioner had been caught on tape. She confessed, said sorry, and, correctly presuming that the absence of any significant protest constituted forgiveness, proceeded to grab the presidency.
When her turn was finally done — three years in an accidental presidency and six in a stolen one — she was charged with plunder herself, but, thanks to a Supreme Court she had managed to fill with her appointees during her unusually long reign, she got away again, and has continued to be voted into lesser office — the law limits the president to a single elective term. She now sits in Congress’s House of Representatives, in the minority.
Not that she holds an ideological or political view opposite that of the ruling coalition or pursues a different cause — those things don’t really matter; she was simply cast out of the old boys club after new chief old boy Ferdinand Jr. had taken over, got the House to switch over to his side, and made his first cousin Martin Romualdez Speaker, the position she had coveted herself.
The Senate, too, came around, save for a few holdouts from the camp of the president whom Ferdinand Jr. succeeded and at the first opportunity dropped as an ally — Rodrigo Duterte. These holdouts are apparently counting on Duterte’s daughter Sara, now the vice president, to beat whomever the Marcoses decide to field in the next presidential election, in 2028.
Which won’t be easy to do. A newcomer dynasty to national politics, the provincial Dutertes are simply no match to the Marcoses, who have been at it the longest and grown adept at exploiting the advantage of experience and incumbency. The senatorial lineup for the Marcos-led coalition for the midterms, the precise occasion for consolidating political gains ahead of the nationals, does admit odd couplings and not-too-agreeable characters, but nearly all those candidates have a good winning record at the polls, and all have been rating well in the surveys. Not to mention, the Commission on Elections, which referees the polls, is chaired by Ferdinand Jr.’s former election lawyer.
There’s just no guidebook for a crazy democracy like ours. In fact, our democracy is anything but democratic; it is, rather, cold-bloodedly Darwinian. – Rappler.com
