Post-mortem of the Philippines National Elections in 2022
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As I was writing this — the news reported that the Philippine Congress has just finished the counting for votes for the president and vice president. It is said that the winning candidates — Bong Bong Marcos and Sara Duterte got an overwhelming number of votes, 59% and 61% respectively, the largest mandate even given to a candidate post-EDSA in 1986.
This article is an attempt for me to understand a plausible “why” to what just happened in the 2022 national elections.
A co-worker of my mine from the US sent me a message after the May 9 elections about how it might have been difficult for me and my family to live in a country that is so divisive. I said in response a country that is composed of 7,100 islands perhaps make us a divisive country already.
The story of democracy in the Philippines is an interesting study. I have spent a good part of my professional life, working in the Philippines. One thing I have learned is that democracy is not an end in itself, democracy is not the goal. Democracy is the “how” to achieving a society that is fair, just and respectful of people’s universal and God-given rights. When the Americans gave us “democracy” in 1946 — that was the beginning of the process of building a democratic state for the Philippines. This process of democratization — the process of building power of the people and exercising this power to establish a government “ of the people, by the people and for the people” — is continuous. A democratic state is only as good as its people who made it.
I have spent a good 10 years working for the Philippine social movements working towards building the democratic space for farmers, fishers, women and indigenous peoples.
When I started back in the 1990s — the focus of our work then was opening up the “eyes” of the people in the margins, people who are powerless and at the bottom end of the social and political strata — about their rights and how structures of the economic, political and social — kept them poor and powerless. Our enemy was very clear and that is the oppression of the Filipino elite to the poor by propagating historical injustices dating back to the Spanish colonial rule.
Agricultural land is mainly owned and controlled by the rich mestizos and influential families hence farmers remain tenants in the land they are farming for years. Our indigenous peoples including the Muslim minorities suffered the injustice of being driven away from their ancestral lands by way of massive mining and logging led by businesses of the Filipino elite. And those that controlled economic power also held the political power.
Our struggle for correcting these structural issues have led us to seeming victories — mostly credited by the collective work of civil society movements. We have won landmark laws and policies that distributed farming land, recognized rights of ethnic groups, gave preferential rights to small fishers over large scale commercial fisheries. We have won massive reforms in local governance where civil society and people’s organizations are recognized by law as partners for local development. Civil societies were give space for representation from the village level up to the Congress by way of sectoral representations. We have won policies that protect women against violence. We have won laws that protected the rights of the urban poor and slums. By the middle of 2000s — at least for me — we have a great sense of victory for the fight for the rights and democratic spaces for the least in Philippine societies.
While these structural reforms have happened poverty in the Philippines continued to persist and stagnated for years (between 22% to 30%). That is 3 out of 10 Filipinos live below $1.5 a day according to the benchmarks set by the World Bank.
My take is that we may have won policies and laws but the social norms and political culture hasn’t really changed since the first time I did my first social analysis in my student activism days.
There is still prevalence of patronage politics until now. Local governments are still run by political families we call dynasties (husband is mayor, wife is Congressman, eldest son is Vice mayor in one town/municipality). Our politics is still personality-based politics versus politics based on platform of government. Why the persistence of this patronage culture? Is it because Filipinos have been subservient for very long to the Spanish colonizers and mestizos for 200 years that we are too lazy to get a handle of politics and delegate this to certain elite? Is it because pre-Hispanic Filipinos are really tribal in terms of community affairs that we are “wired” to follow and put our trust on individual politicians rather than on democratic institutions? What is your take. Let me know.
The significant gains in the policy front in the 90s to 2000s, have diverted the attention of many social movements towards addressing the challenge of poverty and access to basic services by the poor. I felt there was a collective pivot of the social movements that it has forgotten the fundamental structural flaws of Philippine society that perpetuates ineffective democracy, poverty and powerlessness.
Development donors also played part as many of them started to become “apolitical” and focused on supporting anti-poverty programs more than supporting human rights education, community organizing and civic engagement. The engagement of most NGOs has been in the area of delivering anti-poverty programs to communities mainly on health, livelihoods, access to education and disaster relief and recovery.
The work for community organizing, mass education and civic engagement has declined compared to when I started working in the 1990s. Despite all of these collective attention by both government and social movements to poverty reduction — poverty in the Philippines remains high until today. Why is that?
Starting in the 2016 elections when the first Duterte came into national politics, I have seen a rapid corrosion of whatever values and principles we have as the only Christian country in southeast Asia. As the social and political culture of patronage and personality-based politics remained unchanged since the 1990s coupled with how easy (mis/dis) information is shared today — the Filipino electorate are bombarded and fed with messages that solidifies further patronage and dynastic political culture. A message that Filipinos should trust individuals rather than trust the democratic institutions. Case in point — why would Filipinos go to the court of public opinion (of Tulfo) than the actual court of law?
I have seen how voters have rallied behind and became fanatics of their candidates, drunk with information they can get from social media. Family relationships have degraded around these candidates (considered next to gods I think by fanatics).
After the May 9 elections — news are replete of cases of massive vote buying where it’s no longer a secret but an accepted reality. Questions like “magkano bigayan ng sobre sa inyo?” (How much was in the envelops given here?” abound in my social media echo chambers and even here where I live. There are also news of vote control — a phenomena where an entire town voted 100% to a candidate and 0% to the opponent candidate. Statistically it’s impossible but with intimidation and vote buying — that is possible.
For the 6 years under the Duterte administration — human rights were touted as the root cause of the suffering of the poor. This message has been repeated and repeatedly fed to social media- addicted Filipinos. Our constitutional mandated Commission on Human Rights has been maligned and threatened to be de-funded because they are considered a waste of government funding. Many human rights leaders and workers either jailed or killed. Many human rights NGOs has been touted as communists out to topple the government and persecuted.
What makes this worst is that the majority (poor and all) considers these issues on human rights as unnecessary disruption to the pursuit of poverty reduction and welfare improvement. We have seen how easy it is to go viral in social media celebrating extra judicial killings. We have a cabinet secretary who can easily throw the F-word and cussing in Twitter then later on speak in a UN meeting.
I am truly sad that as Filipinos it seems to me we are in a collective decline of our moral compass as a country. This is not about the poor just being true to their nature as “bastos” or “mal-edukado” as this moral decay is also seen among the middle class Filipinos.
The return of a Marcos to power is not because 31 million voted for him. It the system that allowed a Marcos to return to power. It is the result of the confluence of high poverty rates and inequality that created a unique social psychology based on patronage subservient personality-based politics, dis and mis information from the new media at a massive organized scale and an overall decline of moral values. There is no logic why would 31 million Filipinos would believe in a carefully messaged and perpetuated illusion of a “Marcos golden age” except perhaps, the people voted for “continuity” of the Duterte legacy (whatever that is).
In 2016 — I can understand the voters elected a non-political elite to power, a middle finger to the long line of political elite running the national seat of power. But Marcos is a political elite, he is also an economic elite. He has nothing of common to Rodrigo Duterte. Was the illusion about — that if Marcos runs and wins with Sara Duterte, he would become like Duterte? Perhaps it is easier to believe in an illusion of continuity and restoration of a “Marcos prosperity” than swallow a bitter pill of reality and facts. The election of Marcos was a re-affirmation of how deep rooted the political gullibility of the electorate.
Our enemy is still under-development and poverty made complicated by climate change, conflicts and economic crises at a global scale. But there is also the enemy of dis/mis information, of patronage politics and political immaturity.
As Filipino members of the social movements, we need to bring back and shed light to the fundamental barriers to genuine democracy. We need to break patronage politics, stop political dynasties and create a politics based on platforms and not on personalities. We need to continue advocating for political reforms that will end political dynasties and promote platform-based (as opposed to personalities) political exercises.
Plato was a critique of democracy. He posited that regimes follow a certain progression from an oligarchy, the rule of the political and economic elite, to democracy, the rule of have nots and masses and then to tyranny, the rule of an autocrat who manages to get support from the masses driven by blind fanatical passion than political wisdom. Perhaps Plato was right and that where we are now as a country is a result of our failures of building a mature political wisdom of the majority.
The outcome of the elections is not because 31 million voters elected the president, it’s the dysfunctional political system that allowed Marcos to win the presidency.
The next six years under Ferdinand Marcos Jr. –is something that I am not looking forward to, disconcerting and troubling times ahead. We have a very divisive country, a looming economic crisis at the global scale and a pandemic to recover from.
