End of GMA -- and the elite?

Whether GMA wins the official count and is proclaimed President is now of incidental importance. What these elections have established is that the people have spoken overwhelmingly against the GMA presidency and what it stands for. This is obvious from the sum total of votes cast for FPJ, Ping Lacson and Bro. Eddie, all of whom represent resistance to the GMA presidency and a desire for fundamental change. All three haven't concealed their distaste for traditional politics and the political morality which GMA and company represent. As of this time of writing (Sunday, May 23), reports against GMA's 7,952,228, and those official figures don't take to account the widespread electoral anomalies committed by the administration, ranging from vote buying to the notorious operation dagdag-bawas.

That is the most significant aspect of the elections and from there, one can only conclude that even if she manages to sit as President, GMA simply doesn't have the mandate to govern, and her post-election problem starts with that. For that matter, the country's post-election problem starts with that. Those who are opposed to GMA and resist her governance far outnumber those who voted for her, whether out of conviction or simply because they were bought.

This is a hell of a situation for a nation drowned in debts, reeling from fiscal deficits and overloaded with financial scandal, in the grip of widespread poverty and even hunger, and the credibility of whose political institutions is in tatters.

If the nation was in bad shape before the elections, one is at a loss to describe what shape it is in now, considering the literal deluge of public funds that flowed out to every government agency just to ensure that GMA stays in Malacañang.

But it isn't only the economy and the credibility of political institutions the elections have shattered. Equally in tatters is the credibility of the nation's “elite,” symbolized most prominently by the Makati business community which over the years has managed to identify itself with the nation's preeminent electoral watchdog... the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel).

Up to this point, what the Makati business community has had to say about presidential candidates and presidential policies has been given here and abroad a weight as ponderous as that given by the Church faithful to papal utterances. Hence, Makati's political endorsement has been much sought after by every presidential hopeful and we saw that in the course of this campaign where every “presidentiable” submitted himself publicly to the scrutiny of big business.

But all that may be considered past tense now. The economic elite have suffered a traumatic fall in public esteem through its identification with Namfrel, the nation's official private election watchdog whose “quick count” is supposed to provide a check to whatever hanky-panky the Comelec might be inclined to commit.

Now, perception is widespread that Namfrel has colluded with Comelec to mount a slow fraud count for the Filipino people, calculated to ensure the continuance of GMA in the presidency.

Rightly or wrongly, the elite are now overwhelmingly seen to have been part of a grand conspiracy to defraud the mass of deprived and dispossessed voters who flocked behind the standard of FPJ, and to have committed the fraud in order to perpetrate a presidency which — by official count — the electorate has clearly and decisively repudiated.

But if such is the perception, the Makati Business Club (MBC) has no one to blame but itself. It should have out of sheer delicadeza, simply pulled Mr. Guillermo Luz out of Namfrel before the elections because Luz is as prominently associated with the Makati business community as he is with Namfrel, and everyone knows just where the heart, and political bias, of Makati lies.

There was a clear conflict-of-interest situation in the case of Luz and if the MBC had any sensitivity and delicadeza at all, it should have compelled Luz to make a choice of either staying with Namfrel or staying with the MBC. But the elite obviously wanted to have their cake while eating it, which doesn't speak well for the ethics of the elite.

The point, however, is with or without Namfrel, what the elections established is a nation far more sharply polarized between the privileged and the underprivileged, between poor and rich, than has been generally supposed; and that, all things considered, we could well be edging faster than we think toward the class war on which the communists base its movement and on which communists pin their hopes.

Whatever it is, we can with a touch of accuracy, say these elections have demolished the commanding position of the elite in the nation's political life and that insofar as the post-election situation is concerned there isn't any credible elite to speak anymore.

The reputation of the elite — or at least the faction represented by the Makati business community — and the esteem with which it has so far been held by the nation went down the drain with Namfrel and the polling organizations.

But that isn't the real tragedy which the elite have brought upon themselves. In no electoral contest has the elite set themselves so starkly apart from, and in such sharp political conflict with, the masses. The elections have raised the class consciousness of the poor and the deprived to a level which even the Marxists couldn't bring about. With that, the task of the insurgents in fomenting class warfare has been made much easier.

To the extent that FPJ was seen by the poor as their one remaining chance as a way out of their poverty, and to the extent that the elite, through Namfrel, perceived to have colluded with an administration perceived as anti-poor in stealing the elections from the poor, one can rightly say the nation's elite have virtually self-destructed. The repercussions and implications of these elections go beyond the political aspect. They strike at the very core of the nation's social cohesiveness because from hereon class division, if not outright class warfare, has become a prospect more real than the prospect of national unity. And in that, FPJ, who ran on the platform of national unity, could find himself eventually isolated from his own constituents.

The nation no longer has any credible elite to speak of. And history tells us that a nation bereft of a credible elite heads toward social chaos and anarchy, and only a revolution or civil war from which would emerge a new elite would come with a new social order, could eventually stabilize it.

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