Repudiation

The excluded have spoken, and they have crowned Rodrigo Duterte their champion.

President Aquino often said the 2016 general elections would be a referendum on his touted daang matuwid administration.

His “bosses” have given him a resounding slap, rejecting his anointed successor and picking instead someone who brags about human rights violations, espouses Charter change, and belatedly faced accusations of large-scale corruption. For vice president, the administration candidate is in a tight race against the only son of dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

For officials who aren’t tone-deaf, the repudiation of daang matuwid shouldn’t come as a surprise. I have written that Pinoys are increasingly unimpressed by rosy economic growth figures. P-Noy’s “bosses” see the benefits of growth going mainly to the real bosses – the long entrenched .001 percent of the population  – with crumbs tossed to the great unwashed through the conditional cash transfer. The masses are also aware that much of the positive economic news can be credited to the remittances of Filipinos forced to work overseas for lack of better opportunities at home.

Manila’s hosting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ summit last year sealed the perception of a yawning gap between the .001 percent and the rest of Pinoys. I wasn’t the only one who thought at the time that the summit showed up daang matuwid to be daang sarado. Inclusive growth was just a mirage that daang sarado went through the motions of chasing.

P-Noy himself is seen to have remained clean and is retaining his personal popularity to the end. But the personal approval has not rubbed off on those around him, who are perceived to be using him as deodorizer for abuses. The anti-corruption message frayed with the Metro Rail Transit (MRT) scandal, the Disbursement Acceleration Program and the pork barrel misuse that tainted administration and opposition lawmakers alike, except only opposition stalwarts went to jail. Red tape has remained pervasive and corruption persists in the Bureau of Customs.

Then there is the weak governance, unique to daang sarado: Mamasapano, the response to Typhoon Yolanda, again the MRT and its continuing glitches, tanim-bala on top of other airport woes, undelivered vehicle plates and driver’s license cards, port congestion.

Filipinos wanted firm control, and Duterte delivered the strongest message in this direction. It could turn out to be nothing but hot air, but he promised aksyon agad rather than teka-teka, and swift justice rather than the usual glacial pace.

Even the strong showing of Bongbong Marcos in the vice presidential race exposed a longing for a firm hand at the controls of government.

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As the unofficial count showed Duterte winning the other night, he thanked both his supporters and those who didn’t vote for him (for making their voices heard).

But he should give the loudest thanks to P-Noy and the demolition squad of the Liberal Party. P-Noy and the LP cabal made the Duterte phenomenon possible and created President Rody.

The demolition team first threw everything including the kitchen sink at the early frontrunner, Vice President Jejomar Binay. The VP’s numbers dipped but he remained at the top while the presumptive LP standard bearer remained near the bottom.

Binay’s ratings slipped when another potential rival emerged: Sen. Grace Poe. LP insiders told me over a year ago that Poe was being considered as the standard bearer by some of their members including P-Noy himself because of Mar Roxas’ consistently poor showing in surveys.

But it was not to be. Poe herself has said in public that the LP first tried to recruit her, but only as Roxas’ running mate. When she refused, she said she was hit with all the legal challenges against her fitness not only for the presidency but also for the Senate.

P-Noy could have leaned on Roxas and the LP to make Poe the party’s standard bearer. But after Roxas was forced by poor ratings and the national mourning over Corazon Aquino’s demise to slide down in the 2010 race, P-Noy understandably didn’t have the heart to ask Roxas for another “sacrifice” of personal ambition.

A reliable source told me that the meeting at Malacañang among P-Noy, Poe and Roxas was principally a waiting game, with no one daring to openly suggest that one or the other potential candidate would agree to slide down to VP.

So Poe and Roxas parted ways. And divided they fell.

As Poe surged in the surveys, Duterte said he might run because he did not want an American to become president. He would withdraw, Duterte also said, if Poe would be disqualified. But P-Noy’s legal advisers themselves, including the solicitor general, went against the decision of the Commission on Elections, arguing before the Supreme Court that Poe should be allowed to run. This fueled speculation that P-Noy was secretly supporting the senator instead of Roxas.

The SC, in a half-baked decision, allowed Poe to run. Duterte pushed through with his bid, eroding Binay’s support base and then sprinting ahead of everyone.

It’s like 2010 all over again, when the LP demolition team was widely suspected of being behind negative stories about Sen. Loren Legarda, at the time the frontrunner in the vice presidential race. Legarda was pulled down, but it wasn’t her rival Mar Roxas who surged to the top in the homestretch; victory went to Binay.

This time, there’s a sense of déjà vu as the woes of Binay and Poe translate into a stunning upset for Rodrigo Duterte.

He is the first president from Mindanao – a break from the political dominance of imperial Manila.

P-Noy pitched continuity; his bosses voted for change, hoping for inclusion after years of daang sarado.

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DAANG BALUKTOT: In Frankfurt last week, a delegate at the Asian Development Bank’s annual meeting complained to me that a lifter being donated by their NGO together with the government of Germany to the Tahanang Walang Hagdanan for use in livelihood projects by the disabled could not be released because someone at the Bureau of Customs was demanding a fee of P66,703 (about 1,200 euros).

The lifter, which arrived on April 27, costs about 250 euros. It bears a Red Cross stamp and is supposed to be a humanitarian shipment, which the delegate said usually carries a tariff of about 10 percent of the value of the item. The donor NGO, the European Metabolic Disorder Alliance, is registered in the Netherlands and Luxembourg. EMDA paid a total of 965 euros for the shipment, handling and insurance. In 2013, EMDA completed a center in Iloilo for making prosthetics, using money donated by churches in the Netherlands. The workers at the center are missionaries plus two priests from India and Uganda.

Such stories make the public disillusioned about the avowed straight path.