Estrada's Landslide Win, For Better or Worse?:

Lessons and Milestones in '98

By Ed Aurelio Reyes and Joydee C. Robledo

Sun*Star News Service Opinion-Editorial (Op-Ed) Dept.

THE 1998 political exercise was a turning point in Philippine electoral history. Never before has a candidate of Joseph Estrada’s qualifications, or lack of them, been elected mainly on the basis of very wide and very durable popularity.

And it is a very rich trove of lessons for political science scholars, party strategists, politicians and their handlers, media practitioners as well as the people and their civic and religious leaders. It has something for everybody.

The 1998 vote also starts a turning point in the history of Philippine democracy. This would be for better or for worse, depending on the quality and direction of the actual performance of the incoming Estrada administration.

The most important lesson for all is that it is actually possible for a majority of the electorate who are among the marginalized in our society to decisively determine the results of a presidential election, notwithstanding contrary preferences of the established political and economic elite. Even former Ambassador Eduardo Cojuangco firmed up his support for Estrada after some hedging. He decidsed to go ahead when he had ascertained that mass support for the former action star was not being diminished in the face of all tirades rained upon this candidate.

The experience of May 11 showed clearly that the surveys, not anointments from the incumbent President or from a number of religious groups, could reflect voter preference and carry a candidate to the Presidency. Why all those millions of people rallied behind Estrada against all odds, including a historically-rooted predisposition to defeatism on the part of the masses, deserves serious study. It is a question that can present complex combinations of lessons in Filipino psychology, sociology and political science.

But could there be a repetition of such a broad-based, if stubborn, act of faith in a single representative icon, as Estrada has become? Yes, but only if after winning electoral victory the masses would now gain a substantial uplift from their present social condition. That is, it they would now attain deliverance from their centuries-old bondage to poverty and hardships, If it does not come to pass, that would be the most important milestone to be marked in the history of Philippine democracy.

Other Major Lessons in Politics

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Aside from the most important lesson mentioned about this unique candidate’s winning that kind of victory (getting more votes than the 2nd and 3rd placers combined), there were other major lessons to be learned.

Foremost among these is the matter of machinery, in a situation where the party system is in shambles and elections are contests mainly among fragile coalitions. House Speaker Jose de Venecia, the administration candidate, had to take at face value the pledges of support he was getting from his partymates in the Lakas-NUCD. To a seasoned traditional politician like he has been, the phenomenon of junking is real.

"What De Venecia didn’t realize was that all those avowals of support and endorsements were based mainly on political patronage that he had liberally dispensed in the past and in his campaign for the presidency," Sun*Star-Clark columnist Art Sampang wrote a week after the polls. "In the context of present-day political realities, these claims were as dependable only as the word of the politicians."

Major lessons can also be exacted from the results of the failed experiment of presidential bet and former Cebu Gov. Emilio Osmeña. Sun *Star Daily (Cebu) decried this experiment in its Election Day editorial, which said in part: "The top imponderable of special interest to Cebuanos and other Visayans is whether the ‘noble experiment’ of Promdi’s Lito Osmeña will work. Osmeña has blazed a trail in Philippine politics – running with a fresh and vigorous idea of governance with no complete slate and nationwide machinery."

About a week later, Bong Wenceslao, a columnist of that paper, followed up with some more points of information and analysis:

"Also admitting defeat was Lito’s campaign manager and cousin Tomas Osmeña. He attributed the loss to two key factors: that Luzon didn’t like a Visayan president and that the surveys created a bandwagon for Estrada making the undecided shift to him. I beg to disagree with Tomas, however. The first point, for example is fallacious because it lumps together Lito, the person, and Lito, the Visayan. It doesn’t necessarily follow that if Luzon voters did not like Lito as a person, they also disliked Lito, the Visayan, and by extension, all Visayans. There are many who oppose Lito’s maneuverings and contempt he reserves for the masa – the marginalized sectors like the farmers and the fisherfolk, workers and the urban poor.

Thus it would be presumptuous to say that Luzon is not ready for a Visayan president because it did not go for Lito. It’s just that we haven’t yet produced a leader capable carrying the aspirations of Cebuanos but charismatic enough to win votes in other provinces to his or her side."

If we may add, Osmeña’s "Promdi" experiment may have failed because it was actually two simultaneous experiments that were both trailblazing: first, running without a machinery; and, second, running on a platform of giving due attention to the people outside the metropolitan areas. The "Promdi" philosophy may have been served better if an appropriate ticket and full machinery had been formed for Osmeña’s bid. The lack in this area seemed to imply an inadequacy of bright minds and potential winners for that advocacy. It is safe to say that the experiment failed because it did not produce a clear conclusion.

Moreover, the experiment was not conducted under controlled conditions at that time. There was a bigger experiment also going on then – the "Erap para sa mahirap" candidacy.

No 'Wasting' of Votes

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A big lesson has obviously been learned by supporters of Sen. Raul Roco: that there is no such thing as "wasting" your vote if you cast it according to your conscience. The third-place showing of Roco could not have been attained if his suporters had voted for a "winnable lesser evil." The principled issues-based vote is shaping up to be a factor to reckon with in subsequent elections. That is, if the lesson from from the Roco experience shall have been learned well and kept in mind.

Parallel to the Roco performance was that of Philip Camara, president of the Zambali Foundation and Pinatubo Party, who placed a close second to traditional politician Vicente Magsaysay in the Zambales gubernatorial race. Sun*Star-Subic Midweek columnist Ed Reyes described it this way (May 20):

"The good showing of Camara somehow gives me the inspiration that the voting population of my home province can give an untainted newcomer in partisan politics, a man more well known for direct service to the people as a very civic-spirited private citizen, that many votes."

Similarly, the big lessons come from the initial breakthrough given by the new party-list scheme. Through this, people’s and non-government organizations get into Congress as lawmakers and no longer as mere lobby groups.

First lesson is that the window now exists, a point to be appreciated fully by those organizations and their membership and mass bases.

The second lesson is that there are difficulties every step of the way.

They would naturally be blocked by traditional power enclaves seeking to limit all of them to a token role. There are difficulties also from their own ranks. Of the latter, it has been observed that the votes they received were lower than the "command" or organized votes that they were expecting to get.

Another set of lessons pertains to the electoral system itself as defined by existing laws.

For example, the prohibition on the placement of campaign posters outside the Comelec-designated common poster areas in plazas should be lifted, unless the state can have a Comelec that can really muster enough will to enforce it.

As a Sun*Star News Service (SNS) editorial put it: "None of these law-breakers will be made to face a penalty whatsoever for this glaring violation. The Comelec is very busy trying to have a credible count to determine which law-breakers should be the next set of elected lawmakers. And law implementors for the nation. Too busy to consider disqualifying all those law-breakers, never mind if the elections got cancelled for lack of law-abiding candidates. And the majority of the people, whether in apathy or defeatism, are allowing them to violate the law just like that."

Further, the editorial said: "The campaign eyesore is obscene. But the eyesore can be scratched off, cleaned out and painted over. Already this is being done. But something remains and it’s more than meets the eye. It is the new reinforcement of the culture of committing or condoning the glaring violation of the law with total abandon and with total impunity. And that is the bigger obscenity."

Another is the computerization of elections, advocated by the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel). This was approved for pilot-testing in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). But even just there, many system weaknesses or "glitches" developed. This led to a tug-of-war. The poll officials wanted to abandon it for manual counting to be done in Manila, and Namfrel leaders wanted to stick to the scheme by solving the glitches.

Among the lessons to be learned about the role of the media, the first is that the media amplified the surveys that consistently showed Estrada ahead of all other contenders. Without media projection, the survey results could not have been significant.

Second, the ban on political advertising in the media did not achieve the avowed legislative intent of "leveling the playing field" for rich and poor candidates in terms of reaching the people with information about their credentials.

With the ban in place, politicians and their parties resorted to buying newspaper space and broadcast time not as properly-marked advertisements but as news reports and commentaries. These were thinly-disguised propaganda messages passed off as legitimate editorial material. At is turned out, showbiz personalities and other celebrities enjoyed a big advantage over the lesser-known bets. The ban also caused corruption in the media to worsen, with entire media establishments, not only individual journalists, selling various under-the-table service packages to politicians.

"Change. This seems to be in the mind of the milions of people who wrote the name of their former movie idol on their ballots," observed Eladio C. Diokno in Sun*Star Daily (Cebu) on May 18. "A change in the people’s outlook on the presidency. A change in our approach in solving the country’s major problems: unemployment and poverty, drug use and criminality, corruption and low productivity. A change in the way we educate our people."

A week before, Sun*Star Daily columnist Wilfredo Veloso took up this matter of voter education: "Our next leaders will have the herculean task of improving the literacy of people because the more literate our people the more difficult it would be to hoodwink them especially during elections. That’s why the charlatans and pseudo-leaders prefer to have ignorant followers. Not knowing any better, the latter can be herded like dumb cattle. (May 11)

Ramie Inopiquez, also of Sun*Star Daily wrote on May 16: "True people’s empowerment comes not from farcical display of democracy but from the collective effort of the people to break the shackles to their full development."

Ametta Suarez Taguchi, Sun*Star-Cagayan de Oro, May 16: "The secret to raising the political maturity of Pinoy is through education."

George Babsa-ay, Sun*Star-Baguio: Many would remember the days before May 11 as those when deeper meditation was in order, when clowning around was sheer folly, and when losing would mean an icy bitterness. I have never heard of a good loser or of a sore winner. Really there is no such thing as sportsmanship in politics except perhaps in statesmanship. And there were many statesmen who lost. (May 21)

Bishop Deogracias Iñiguez D.D. wrote in his regular column in Sun*Star Subic Midweek, May 13: "Our citizens have improved in discerning the person whose name they will write in their ballots. They have become wiser in looking for qualification of candidates. There are those who have liberated themselves from the ties of utang na loob, relationship or attraction to popularity/ We hear now of people persons feeling insulted by the cheap or circus kind of campaign."

The good bishop continued in the same piece: "If notorious are the disgraceful scoundrels who have made the term ‘traditional politics’ or ‘trapo’ elicit negative overtones, increasing is the number of those who make of politics a noble venture in the constructive advancement of society.

Change has really remained a continuing demand and expectation, especially as Estrada has shown signs of being an unorthodox leader who would not be stopped by elitist patterns of behavior.

But Sun*Star Cagayan de Oro columnist Edith Erecre Eco wrote the day after the elections that she didn’t "see major changes in the Erap presidency. The C, D and E crowds that are expected to vote for Estrada cannot expect a better life after May 11.

The matter still hangs, actually, as it will continue to hang for most of Estrada’s six years in office, unless developments in his first 100 decisively indicate a definite direction.

Sun*Star News Service (SNS) contributing opinion writer Ramon Casiple also wrote about this theme as demanded by the people who voted for the former action star: "(Estrada’s) victory underlined a certain trend towards the insistence of the masses, as opposed to the elite, for the further democratization of governance itself. The fact of an unprecedented 80 percent voter turnout, the growing role of the media, and the heightened activities of the non-partisan electoral monitors supports the view of the people at the grassroots are no longer content at leaving their electoral choices to the elite’s own choices."

Casiple, acting executive director of the Institute of Political and Electoral Reforms (IPER), went on: "The vote for Estrada can be interpreted as a protest vote against conventional wisdom as propagated by the elite. The usual institutional kingmakers – the Church and business – were not around to make much of a difference. There was no overt pressure from the U.S. aside from the usual statement on the need for clean and honest elections and the usual assurances from the candidates (including Estrada) for maintaining ‘special relations.’ Observers of Estrada have noted signs of optimism among various sectors, except members of Congress, when he chose as his first battleground the issue of "pork barrel."

SNS issued an editorial that said in part: "More than a month before being sworn into the Presidency, Joseph Estrada has chosen a really hot and sensitive issue for his baptism of fire. Reiterating a campaign promise, he declared war on ‘pork barrel,’ a practice that has menaced the check-and-balance system principle between the executive and the legislative branches of government. With this move, he has plunged himself this early into a possibly disastrous collision course with the same Congress that has yet to proclaim him President-elect." The SNS editorial went on: "Not that this ministerial function of Congress can be affected by any animosity or affection towards anyone who wins by a landslide, but any Philippine President’s relationship with the legislature can spell either success or failure for his administration’s programs."

Favoring the Sumilao Farmers

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Immediately, the now President-elect won the support of civic and religious leaders. He followed this with a declaration of his stand favorable to the hunger-striking farmers from Sumilao, Bukidnon, specifically support for their demand that the agrarian reform coverage be stored to them. His choice of a former leftist leader, Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM) President Horacio "Boy" Morales, for the post of agrarian reform secretary has elicited optimism among farmers.

Whether he would support Morales all the way despite all expected pressures from landlords and agribusiness investors remains to be seen. Many fear that Morales may go the way of Batanes Rep. Florencio Abad, who resigned his Congress seat to accept a position in the Cabinet of then-President Aquino as agrarian reform secretary, only to be rejected completely by the Commission on Appointments which is dominated by members representing the interests of the landlords.

Bigger changes, for better or for worse, involve the proposal to amend the Constitution, a move supported by church and civic groups as long as the amendments do not lead to the extension of tenures of incumbent officials.

Sun*Star Daily’s Wilfredo Veloso projected in his Election Day column: "If the elections are successful, the next step should be to call a constitutional convention to purge our Charter of some flaws. One of the changes should be for a return to the two-party system to prevent the election of a minority president and other national leaders. In the first place, it is the existence of so many political parties that have made the campaign a bollixed-up event." Veloso also said: "As long as we adopt the multi-party system, we shall never have a majority president. The multi-party system is good only for a parliamentary form of government. But I think it would be wise to keep the present terms of our elective officials. A no-reelection term for president and vice president would keep them from politicking during their term." (May 11)