Antoinette Raquiza
16 March 2005
The highly contested May 2004 presidential election and its aftermath reveal the current limits of Philippine democracy. Almost 18 years after ousting authoritarian rule, the country still struggles to develop a full-blown democratic political system. Anomalies in the conduct and outcome of the polls indicate that we have not even met the most basic requirement of such a system: the institutionalization of competitive elections.
Clean, fair, and open elections are said to represent the threshold of political democracy, mainly because they contribute to a consensus among political elites on how to resolve competition over power and state resources. Democracy theorists from Dankwart Rustow to Adam Przeworski, for instance, argue that for democratic processes to endure, competing political parties and groups must accept that under the new rules of the game, everyone has a fair, if not an equal chance at one day winning political power. The relatively level playing field that comes with the robust rule of law, the free exercise of political rights and civil liberties, and a relatively balanced media mitigates the advantages of incumbency, and encourages counter-elites to regard procedural democracy as the only means to advance their power and policy agendas.
The May 2004 Philippine presidential election failed to meet this standard. From the outset, Malacanang issued two memoranda, instructing Cabinet secretaries to mobilize their agencies and devote publicity and resources to the presidential campaign. During the campaign period, public spending increased tenfold—ostensibly for service-delivery—in ways that blurred the line between governance and campaign. In response to the legal question of whether a sitting president can run for the same office despite a one-term limit imposed by the Constitution, the Supreme Court issued a more limited opinion that Gloria Macapagal Arroyo could run, since she came to power through the rule of succession after the ouster of then President Joseph Estrada in 2001. The Court refused to address the spirit behind the constitutional ban, designed to prevent an incumbent from using his or her office to stay in power. By its silence, the Court indirectly countenanced the use of public funds for electioneering, a clear violation under the Omnibus Election Code. Arroyo also chose to fill two vacancies in the Commission on Elections (Comelec) after Congress had adjourned for the elections, thereby breaching a constitutional provision requiring the Commission on Appointment’s approval on appointees to the electoral body. (See Art. 9, section 2.2.)
The opposition’s charges of massive electoral fraud were summarily dismissed by both the Comelec and Congress, dominated by the administration party. Moreover, establishment media generally refused to publish stories against the president and flatly rejected the dominant opposition Koalisyon ng Nagkakaisang Pilipino’s efforts to present its unofficial tally, demonstrating that its standard-bearer and vice presidential candidate were winning. In fact, barely a week into the national canvass, the Department of Justice issued a press statement, warning against the publication of any reports that cast doubt on the credibility of the elections, citing such reports as a threat to the state. The administration was also quick to use the state’s full police power: security forces, implicated in many cases of election fraud, linked election-related street protests with destabilization and used strong-arm crowd-control techniques, reminiscent of the martial law years, to break up opposition rallies.
All told, the May 10 elections revealed the shallow ground on which the country’s democratic institutions lie. That the electoral process, whether by design or chance, worked to shut out the dominant opposition’s standard bearer suggests the resilient factions that exist among the elites, eating away at our democracy’s heart. It has been said that the dismantling of authoritarian rule in 1987 saw the return of “cacique democracy,” or laissez-faire oligarchic rule. Walden Bello has called attention to the “EDSA state” that combines regular political competition between the ins and the outs, belonging to the same class, with an “insurrectionary” tradition (i.e., people’s uprisings).
Nevertheless, perhaps a more defining feature of the present political configuration appears in Malacanang’s ability to lodge itself at the center of the state. Today, we witness a political pyramid in the Philippines, with power and state resources being rapidly centralized in the presidency. Two key mechanisms link public authority with the incumbent’s personal gain: the spoils system and the ruling elites’ apparent fear of class outsiders intruding on what has historically been their private preserve.
Three years under Arroyo have institutionalized personalistic rule and eroded the democratic system of checks and balances that constrains the abuse of power. Arroyo appointed to the Supreme Court a senior partner in the law firm that represents her and her family, thereby facilitating executive-judicial collaboration. She tightened control over Congress, not only through the pork barrel system, but also by appointing loyal politicians or their surrogates to Cabinet positions, and so undermining Congress’s fiscalizing role. Equally important, she appointed top-ranking military officials, media barons and practitioners, and civil society leaders to choice or lucrative positions in the national government or government-owned corporations. The network of Arroyo appointees and beneficiaries grows virtually impregnable as economic interests develop to support these political alliances.
On the other hand, the administration has successfully manipulated the fear of a possible populist electoral rise, to gain support from the oligarchs’ and an illiberal middle class. The fear of the unknown—sharpened on the specter of a Ferdinand Marcos, or an Estrada—may partly explain the collective resignation to Arroyo’s dubious election victory. This apprehension partly fuels the call for a parliamentary system of government that can insulate the political process from outsiders, mass movement leaders, and charismatic personalities. Under the “pure form” of parliamentary system, the electorate votes for political parties that, upon winning, select leaders who will form the new government, including the head of state, from among themselves. Hence, since the people do not directly elect their leaders, this system of government gives professional politicians and party insiders a stronger ability to prevent outsiders from attaining office.
The drive to concentrate power and resources in the presidency seems even stronger in the post-election Cabinet reorganization. In particular, two old military hands have been appointed as Executive Secretary and Department of Interior and Local Governments secretary—a masterstroke that will ensure Malacanang’s vertical and horizontal chains of command. The post-election reorganization provided yet another opportunity to dispense patronage among politicians and administration officials who were instrumental in Arroyo’s May election, with the co-chair of Congress’s joint canvassing committee (responsible for the national election count) appointed as justice secretary.
Indeed, the emerging highly centralized, personalistic rule has more in common with constitutional authoritarianism than the administration will admit. Centralization, by definition, almost always presumes an exclusionary political system, shutting out specific sections of the counter-elites, notably potential competitors. Perhaps the fundamental difference between Arroyo and Marcos, between today’s democracy and yesterday’s authoritarianism is that while Marcos blatantly used the state’s coercive power to manage political and social cleavages, Arroyo primarily uses patronage or “political payback” for the same objective. In this sense, the Philippine’s so-called democracy rests on a neopatrimonial foundation, fusing institutional legacies from both the pre-martial law period and the Marcos years.
Whether the present political configuration is tenable remains to be seen. Political alliances built primarily on largesse will be difficult to sustain in a cash-strapped country like the Philippines. After more than three years under the Arroyo government, the country’s finances are in the red: by the end of 2003, the national government’s total debt amounted to P3.36 trillion, equivalent to almost 75% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) while the public sector’s consolidated debt was more than 130% of GDP. At the end of election year 2004, the government’s outstanding debt grew by 13.4%. The country’s staggering debt, coupled with a dismal revenue collection of only 12.5% of GDP in 2003, prompted economists to warn of an impending fiscal crisis.
The viability of patrimonial rule rests on the national leadership’s ability to extract resources from society and the international community; on both fronts, the Arroyo government has been relentless. The government fast-tracked the exploitation of the country’s mineral resources and centralized transactions over large-scale mining operations, thereby marginalizing local governments and communities in the negotiations. With technical assistance from multilateral agencies, the administration is exploring ways to increase migrant remittances—the country’s main source of foreign exchange earnings—although it has not yet responded to charges that it used Overseas Workers’ Welfare Administration funds for electioneering. Finally, the Arroyo government is also set to sell remaining government assets such as its shares in the San Miguel Corporation, including the 27% representing the coco levy fund; these resources were designated to modernize the coconut industry (on which some three million small and poor farmers depend).
The government’s preoccupation with averting a fiscal crisis comes at the expense of any serious attempt to secure the country’s sustainable economic and social development. Mainly to meet its outstanding obligations, the government has sought to maximize “unearned” income (through aid and loans and by exploiting extractive industries and overseas workers’ remittances) as well as to raise fees and indirect taxes with no commensurate improvement in government services. Such measures represent significant financial impositions on ordinary citizens, including the middle class. As government resorts more and more to domestic borrowing (accounting for 52.5% of its total debt), it also begins to compete with struggling Filipino entrepreneurs for capital. Moreover, since the key decisions and developments leading to the country’s deteriorating fiscal position all occurred on Arroyo’s watch, she will have no one else to blame for the economic hardship that awaits Filipinos in the months ahead. Already, government moves have provoked protests from the affected sectors.
This apparently all-consuming drive to raise resources compels one to ask whose ends these revenues will serve. As the key questions about our democracy come more to center on substantive issues, it makes sense to remind ourselves that political power (i.e., who makes decisions and how) influences social and economic outcomes. Salient policy themes in current government initiatives aim unwaveringly at appeasing domestic big business, political allies, and international creditors. Yet such creditors, more than foreign investors, proved critical in Argentina’s economic meltdown, and Arroyo’s business and political supporters lie at the heart of allegations of electoral malfeasance. Since the elections did not produce a president with a clear, unassailable mandate, let alone one representing change, how the imminent crisis is resolved may prove to be the real crucible of Philippine democracy.
Antoinette Raquiza is a doctoral candidate in political science at the City University of New York. This piece first appeared in Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies, volume 19 number 2, 2004.
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