[OPINION | NEWSPOINT] Defaults and plain bad choices

No matter how poor a semblance of the real deal elections have become, they always inspire hope for change. And, because that’s especially true in our case, we’re able to overcome our own deep distrust in them.

That no one loses in our elections and that one only gets cheated may not be the rule, but certainly no small amount of electoral cheating goes on. Not even presidential contests are excepted from it, and two cases are particularly shameless, one favoring the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, the other Gloria Arroyo.

Electoral challenges take so long to be resolved that by the time one is won hardly any time is left of the challenger’s stolen term. If some redress was finally had in Marcos’ case it’s only because the process, rigged for him in his 14 years of martial law, was short-circuited: in a show of people power, we poured out onto the streets to bring him down and install his cheated rival, Corazon Aquino, in his place. But his heirs have managed still to stay in power, and done so still by virtue of the vote – our vote!

Arroyo’s own presidential run left no proud memories. Vice president to Joseph Estrada, a former movie actor who has built his own political dynasty, she succeeded him when he was ousted as president, also by people power. He was subsequently tried and convicted, but got a new lease on his political career when he was pardoned by his successor. He is now mayor of Manila.

After serving out the forfeited second half of Estrada’s term, his pardoner was herself found to have conspired with an electoral commissioner to rig the vote that would extend her presidency by an elective 6-year term. Cornered with damning evidence, she confessed to the fraud, but got off – on a mere apology. Possibly because of our experience with Estrada, we would rather take a chance on a cheat than another actor. So we picked Arroyo over Fernando Poe Jr, and got ourselves another bad deal. 

Arroyo ended up being indicted for plunder herself, but was let off again, this time by a Supreme Court whose majority owed her their appointments. Thus restored – again like Estrada – to eligibility for elective office (although not the presidency, which the Constitution restricts to a single term), she won a seat for her district in the Lower House. She is now Speaker.

Like the proverbial birds of the same feather, the Arroyos, the Estradas, and the Marcoses flock behind the presidency of another dynastic patriarch – Rodrigo Duterte. All 4 dynasties are fielding family and surrogates for the midterm polls in May, looking for the win that will allow them to consolidate power decisively, if not perpetually, and escape accountability. 

There lies the challenge of the midterms. And there, too, lies our hope of self-redemption from our habitual defaults and plain bad choices of leaders.

Actually, the midterms constitute a referendum on Duterte. Necessarily his flock also gains or loses depending on which way the vote goes. In any case, the issues are too stark to give any reasonable electorate any difficulty making up its mind. For one thing, Duterte has not one single achievement to show after more than two years as president. In fact, his has been a regime of high crimes, of which one is already a hanging offense: treason, for ceding our resource-rich western seas to the Chinese. 

In some ways, he has outdone his professed idol, Marcos. A mere 9 months in office, he put the largest of the country’s 3 main islands, predominantly Muslim Mindanao, under martial law on the fashionable pretext of Islamic State terrorism. And he has been reviving the communist scare to justify his express plan to expand the emergency to the rest of the country. It is to that end apparently that he has been recycling newly retired generals into the civilian bureaucracy and bribing the soldiers and the police with doubled salaries and a promise of protection from prosecution.

From the start, Duterte has left no doubt he would not be constrained by the rule of law. Upon taking office, he declared a war on drugs, and within one year it accounted for more than 26,000 kills (which appeared in a report published by the Office of the President as among its “2017 key accomplishments,” a Freudian slip apparently, since the count has not been updated officially); yet, drugs continue to slip past Customs – a recent shipment was valued at more than P6 billion, itself only a part, according to investigators, of a larger shipment worth 4 times that.

As typical with autocracies, corruption and cronyism are widespread under Duterte’s regime, and critics are persecuted.

Even more spectacular, he manages to conduct himself in the presidency not fully conscious – which makes one wonder whether sleeping on the job could be a legal defense in his unique case. The habit, which his apologists glamorize as “power napping,” was in fact revealed to fellow heads of state by his no-shows at certain events in a recent summit.

Duterte is one malignant phenomenon such as not seen since Ferdinand Marcos, and we are now being asked to promote it by voting for his candidates. In other words, we are facing an all-too-familiar test; we are being brought back to an ugly past for the basic lesson we failed to learn from it. – Rappler.com