Political maturity remains elusive in Philippines

International Herald Tribune
By Carlos H. CondePublished: MONDAY, JULY 18, 2005

MANILA: When Fidel Ramos, the former president, showed up at the presidential palace a little more than a week ago to express support for Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who was going through the most trying 24 hours of her administration, he not only lent his weight to the president's efforts to calm a country on the brink of damaging political turmoil. He also underscored the reality here that the same old faces, the same old families and the same old interests continue to hold sway over the political life of this country.To the outside world, it might seem confounding that people like Ramos, who was president from 1992 to 1998, or Corazon Aquino, who replaced the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, still feel morally obligated to weigh in on national political events.But the reality is that this country of 84 million people, which once boasted an intelligentsia that was deemed the most sophisticated in Southeast Asia, is still going through what one Filipino columnist recently called "the most drawn out political adolescence in modern history."Why do a few oligarchic families continue to dominate the political life of this former Spanish colony, in a pattern once familiar in many Latin-influenced countries?If there is any consensus coming out of the current political crisis, which began with allegations that Arroyo rigged her election last year, it is that the system has to go, says Manuel Quezon 3rd, a political analyst and historian.

"The problem is, no one agrees whatsystem to replace it with," Quezon said.Experts on politics and governance do agree, however, that the families and politicians who have a lock on government here have been the bane of Filipinos, thriving on so-called patronage politics that keeps democratic processes in a state of dysfunction.The result is a faulty electoral system, a low level of political awareness among the populace and a degree of corruption that has seriously damaged Philippine society and hobbled economic development.All of these factors conspire to push the country near the edge of chaos in a kind of cyclical pattern that has decayed what was once among the region's most promising democracies.Worse, the few new and young leaders who emerge are frequently co-opted by traditional politicians. These new leaders then establish political dynasties themselves or fortify existing ones, perpetuating a vicious circle.Clarita Carlos, an expert on governance and politics at the University of the Philippines, said she believed that Philippine politics merely facilitated the "circulation of elites, people who have mastered how to be economically and socially mobile by taking advantage of the limitations of the system."As a result, the Filipino political class "has become so inbred that they've become detached from the concerns of the majority," said Quezon, who is himself the grandson of a former president.In a healthy political environment, Quezon said, the oligarchy would relinquish power to a new political class. "Sadly, this is something most Filipino oligarchs never did," he said.Steven Rood, the country representative here of The Asia Foundation and an expert on local governance, thinks it is not so much a question of why Philippine politics has the same faces but why the situation has not changed over many decades."I would say that the basic fundamental reason is that the people who run the system are the ones benefiting enough from it that they're worried about change," Rood said.The American anthropologist Brian Fegan, writing in "An Anarchy of Families," a book published in the 1990s, said that "the Filipino family is the most enduring political unit and the one into which, failing some wider principle of organization, all other units dissolve."Filipinos look at political continuity as merely the transfer of power among family members, Fegan said. Thus, they also look at political competition in terms of rivalry between families. "A family that has once contested an office, particularly if it has once won it, sets its eye on that office as its permanent right," Fegan said.That has been the case for decades and, as Rood of The Asia Foundation explained, "there's an enormous amount of historical continuity at play" in the present crisis. Rood traces this back to the period of Spanish colonization and the American colonization that followed it.The Americans, Rood says, did not change the Filipino social structure. "They imposed a political system that allowed this social structure to gain political power," he said. "It's been the marriage of social position and political power ever since that produced essentially the same state that we have now."Luis Teodoro, the executive director of the Center for People Empowerment in Governance, a political research institute in Manila, said the Americans had a hand in this predicament. They supported regimes led by powerful political families who, in turn, furthered American interests and helped suppress the nationalist politicians who tended to undermine them.Without U.S. support, he said by way of example, the regime of Ferdinand Marcos would not have lasted as long.Marcos persecuted the oligarchs who went against him and befriended those who were willing to cooperate with his regime. While he used these families to prop up his regime and amass the wealth for which he would later be infamous, these families went on to exploit their ties with him, widening and strengthening their political bases and enriching themselves even more. Marcos, in turn, used these power bases, particularly in the provinces, to keep himself in the presidential palace.After Marcos was toppled in 1986, the political families that he cultivated werereplaced by new ones allied to the next regime, that of Corazon Aquino. As if that were not enough, the lines that at first separated Marcos and anti-Marcos politics became so blurred that it is not surprising today to find a former Marcos foe hobnobbing with the scions and friends of the former dictator.Switching sides thus became widespread. Filipino political parties had intermarried to such an extent that, today, it is difficult to know which party is allied with whom. "We're paying for this damage now," said Nereus Acosta, a congressman.