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Arroyo rearranges the deck
chairs
By Leslie
Davis
MANILA - In the maritime world, a
listing ship will list to one side until the point
of 26 degrees. At this exact point, the boat can
no longer be saved, it tips over and sinks.
In the world of Philippine politics,
people often talk about the tipping point to refer
to the time, or more exactly a certain event,
which serves as the final catalyst that renders a
government no longer viable. In 1986 it was the
Catholic Church that proved the tipping point of
the regime of Ferdinand Marcos. In 2001, it was
the military withdrawing its support from Joseph
Estrada, which resulted in the ultimate tipping
point of his administration.
Without a
singular doubt, the administration of Philippine
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo resembles a
severely listing ship plying stormy seas. Caught
on tape planning the rigging of the presidential
election in 2004, her family implicated in
allegations of involvement in kickbacks and
illegal gambling syndicates, scandal after scandal
knocking at her doorstep, amassing a debt burden
destined to be borne by generations yet to come
and her credibility all but completely shot, one
could easily liken Arroyo's boat to the Titanic 30
minutes before it sunk to the bottom of the
Atlantic.
But has the ship of the
Philippines state reached the point of 26 degrees?
Well, not exactly. Arroyo's government looked like
it had hit the tipping point in early July when
nearly half of her cabinet resigned en masse and
then called for her resignation. Quickly,
influential allies of the president joined the
clamor for her ouster: former president Corazon
Aquino, the Makati Business Club and the Liberal
Party led by Senate president Franklin Drillon.
But the Catholic bishops begged off from calling
for her resignation. The military insisted they
were staying out of politics.
With a bit of
breathing space, Arroyo has set about trying to
project a business-as-usual attitude. She has dug
in her heals and adamantly proclaimed that she
will never resign. She has quickly filled up the
vacancies in her cabinet. And she has endorsed
various ideas that she says will placate her
critics and allow her to get on with the business
of governing the country.
On July 25, the
same day the political opposition plans to file
its impeachment case against Arroyo, the president
will address a joint session of Congress in her
annual state of the nation speech and propose that
the country shift from a presidential to a
parliamentary system of government.
Along
with the few allies she has left, Arroyo believes
that the ills of the country can be solved by
wiping the slate clean and starting over. The
current presidential system, they say, is broken
and is in need of an immediate overhaul. They say
it doesn't serve the Filipino people, that it
creates logjams in legislation, that it promotes
personality politics rather than professional
political discourse. They claim that it's the
reason the Philippines is in the very mess it
finds itself in today.
Outside the halls
of Congress, the tens of thousands of protesters
who are expected to gather and demand that Arroyo
simply resign, will not only become more enraged
at this proposal, they might just fall on the
ground laughing. For they and an ever-growing
majority of Filipinos have already made up their
minds that it's not so much the system that is the
problem, but the people running the system,
especially Arroyo.
Arroyo is the last
person Filipinos would trust now to set about on
such a lofty goal as changing the form of
government. This is especially so because people
see it as a way for her to wriggle out of her
current predicament. She might claim to be cutting
short her six-year term as president, but then,
through the same old style of politics, she would
end up becoming prime minister under the new
system. Thus, the bottom line is that with Arroyo
battling furiously for her political survival, the
idea to change the form of government will never
fly now.
In addition to the constitutional
change she desires, Arroyo now says she wants to
create a truth commission to get at the heart of
the vote-rigging allegations. The commission idea
was proposed by the powerful Catholic bishops, the
ones who stopped short of calling on Arroyo to
resign. Arroyo says that the commission will be
independent and have broad powers, that it will be
composed of eminent personalities from various
walks of life, and that it will have powers to
protect witnesses who come forward. Arroyo even
claimed that she is willing to testify before such
a commission.
The problem for Arroyo again
is one of credibility. Who would believe any
commission handpicked by the very person who's
being investigated? And besides, Filipinos have
never seen a truth commission work. Twenty-two
years after the assassination of opposition leader
Benigno Aquino, the mastermind has not yet been
positively identified, this despite a high-profile
commission tasked to investigate the murder.
Then there's the impeachment of Arroyo,
which is the route being suggested by cooler heads
who want to see a proper succession without
violence or the smoldering pile of dung that a
military junta or revolutionary council might come
up with. Arroyo has been pushing for an
impeachment complaint to be filed in the House of
Representatives. As she controls the House this is
not surprising. Arroyo believes she can stop the
impeachment complaint from reaching the Senate,
where her conviction is starting to look more and
more likely, by having the complaint stalled or
thrown out in the House.
Like a truth
commission, a dismissal of the impeachment
complaint could create more problems for Arroyo as
the public would see the hand of partisan
politics. And the impeachment exercise has in the
past not worked in the Philippines. When Estrada
was impeached the trial collapsed because of
political bickering. When the opposition tried to
impeach the chief justice of the Supreme Court,
the court threw out the case against its own
member on a technicality.
With the
combination of a push for charter change, a
controversial and lengthy truth commission and an
impeachment complaint bogged down in the political
mess of congress, it appears the strategy of
Arroyo is simple: sue for time, keep the debate
going as long as possible, so that ultimately the
public simply tires of it all and leaves her
alone. The longer it lasts, she believes, the
better the chance she will survive.
Indeed, for Arroyo it's all about survival
and nothing else. This was exactly what the seven
prominent cabinet ministers and three agency heads
who resigned together in the first week of July
have been saying: that Gloria Arroyo was devoting
the whole of the government's time and resources
to her survival. Nothing was getting accomplished,
so they quit and asked her to quit as well.
Arroyo's former social welfare secretary,
Dinky Solaiman, wrote recently: "With government
programs utilized to deodorize the administration,
it's easy to project a 'business and
governance-as-usual' mode, deluding the public
into thinking that everything could continue as
is. Within this safety zone, corruption will
effortlessly persist because of a laid-back
acquiescence. It's difficult to go against the
powers-that-be who have all the resources to
negate genuine reforms ... If maintenance of power
is the only raison d'etre of the present
government, what kind of leadership do we look
forward to in the next few months and in the next
few years?"
This wasn't the opposition
repeating lines they've been shouting for the past
four years. These were trusted allies from her
coveted "civil society" abandoning the
presidential ship. But perhaps the most telling
trend now in this fast-moving drama that is
Philippine politics, and what should be most
worrisome for Arroyo, is that people of all walks
of life are waking up to the fact that she is
holding an office that very probably doesn't even
belong to her.
The poor masses, who make
up 60% of the populace and who mostly voted for
the late Fernando Poe Jr in the election, were
never with her nor did they believe she won
fairly. Now the middle class, perhaps her most
important constituency, is quickly distancing
itself from her. With the playing of the explosive
tapes, the rumors and whispers they'd been hearing
have come crashing home. They don't know how to
tell their children why someone they believe is a
cheater should be allowed to stay in office.
And so they are withdrawing support, some
individually, some collectively. These people are
not the military or the church, they are the
central conscience on which the nation revolves.
They do not represent the ultimate tipping point,
the 26 degrees. They represent the beginning of
the road to the tipping point.
And this
means that the ship of Gloria Arroyo is listing
ever more sideways. In the weeks ahead look for
her to create more diversions in an attempt to
halt this ominous trend. But with more than just
her traditional opposition moving against her, the
momentum is clearly irreversible. Once it reaches
26 degrees, whenever, however and by whoever it
gets there, that ship will be swept away into the
history books.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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