The devil in May

Whoever first came up with May as the month to hold elections in this country deserves to be hanged. Of course, I’m exaggerating. Besides, I’m on record as opposed to the death penalty. But that’s how badly I feel about moving dates and all such cynical tinkerings that today bedevil politics in this country.

I believe that it’s pure and simple idiocy, if not sado-masochism, for people to troop to the polls when the summer heat is most unbearable and everybody is in the fiesta or siesta mode. Or perhaps that’s the whole point: to reduce politics to total nonsense and therefore an exercise in futility unworthy of citizen participation. Spare yourselves the trouble; just let the exploiters and crooks have their way.

“That’s exactly what was in Ferdinand Marcos’s mind, “ says a respected and jaded political pundit of why elections were moved from cool November to the merry month of May beginning with the Batasan election in 1978. “Even with his absolute power, Marcos didn’t want to take chances in staging his electoral farces. He made sure students and all other angry types would be out of school or attending fiestas in the provinces.”

Unfortunately, the guru adds, this dubious tradition got cast in cement because Cory Aquino and all her successors from Ramos to her own son Benigno III found out that that what did wonders for Marcos could immensely benefit them as well.

Indeed, everybody has forgotten all about the Novembers of yesteryear when elections were more benign and less stressful compared to the present Marcos-style political season that gets brewing at Christmas time and turns the first months of the new year into a Grand Prix of intrigue and dirty tricks. 

Far better it was when the season would be in full swing from June to October. Summer vacations would be over, students were back in school and could participate in the political process. That was when getting young people involved was considered a good thing instead of an unpredictable risk for the ruling order.  

No matter how bitter or divisive the November polls turned out to be, the advent of the Christmas season would be at hand and tend to heal all wounds. By Dec. 30, when the winners would take office, the heady spirit of the New Year could not but augur new beginnings and a fresh burst of good will.

In contrast, today’s May elections take place in the hot months when schools empty out and nobody bothers about political issues. Its always-contentious aftermath runs into the beginning of the typhoon season, which adds another level of misery and denial. There can only be bad blood and more bad news. And if we are to go by the great havoc inflicted by recent super-storms like Ondoy, Sendong and Pablo, people would face untold suffering and government resources stretched to breaking point.  

There was no serious problem when Marcos ruled with an iron hand. But the return of democracy has upped the ante for bitterness and confrontation instead of renewal and reconciliation. In the event of disputed results, there would be hell to pay after schools open in June. There would be an avalanche of protests and calls for the overthrow of the disputed winners. In 2004, Gloria Arroyo, who allegedly stole the presidency from Fernando Poe, Jr., had to move her inauguration 500 miles away to Cebu. Better safe than sorry. 

So heartbroken was the presumed winner that he died of a massive stroke in early December. On the day he was buried, the government was on red alert, fearful that angry mobs would storm Malacañang and throw Arroyo to the dogs.

Although FPJ’s followers grudgingly kept the peace, there was no let-up to the tidal wave of protest. Eight months later, the “Hello Garci” tapes were leaked, giving solid proof that Arroyo had indeed betrayed the people’s trust. It was downhill after that. The next six years would be of agitation and paralysis until the hated regime came to a dismal end in 2010.

Once she was out of power, Arroyo would be arrested and made to face trial for the non-bailable crime of plunder. It was the same lethal weapon she had used on President Joseph Estrada when she took over in a repeat of the EDSA revolt in 2001. She jailed him for some seven years, got him convicted and then inexplicably gave him a pardon.

Perhaps she wanted to placate the disgraced but still-popular president, who, by running for president and placing second in the presidential race of 2010, bounced back to respectability. But Arroyo may be in for a rude surprise, her own successor having publicly vowed that she won’t be pardoned after her near-certain conviction

What does the month or time in which we hold elections have to do with good or bad luck for the nation?

Everything. It’s part and parcel of the continuing Marcosian charade that has turned elections into exercises of absurdity and irrelevance. Entertainers and athletes have joined the warlord dynasties to crowd out the few good men and women still turned on to politics.

I come from the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” school of thought. We were doing fine when elections were held in November. The Americans introduced the idea as part of a whole political package based on time-honored traditions in their country. From the early 1900s to 1971, this was the way it was in the Philippines.

As mentioned earlier, the sudden shift to May happened during martial law. Elections hadn’t been held for seven years until Marcos called for interim parliamentary elections in May 1978. This surprise was sprung from out of the blue to jolt the dismembered and dispirited opposition into facing certain defeat.

The real reason, some quarters say, could be that the regime was under extreme pressure from the Carter administration in Washington to put on some show of democratic freedom. Perhaps November was too far away in early 1978 when the lobbying was most intense and the hectoring American media was constantly on Marcos’s back.

It was ominous that Ninoy Aquino, the opposition leader, was locked up in jail and the two parties, Liberal and Nacionalista, had been effectively neutered for years. There was no time for them to mobilize and certainly little or no resources to draw upon. That was the clever reason to hold the farce earlier — and to time it in May when the students were out of school and, even if they dared, incapable of mounting any mass action that could embarrass Marcos before world opinion.

Student power had been Marcos’s undoing during the prolonged and turbulent First Quarter Storm of 1970-72. His regime could not control the streets or the Lopez-owned and pro-opposition media. Martial law was his last weapon and the game-changer of all game-changers.

The Marcos boys also came up with a more self-serving argument: November elections reeked of American influence, a colonial hangover that must be scrapped to strike a great blow for Philippine nationalism.

Although Marcos doggedly sought American patronage  (LBJ called FM “my right-hand in Asia”), he always made it a point to brandish his so-called nationalist credentials. His aggressive think-thank was dominated by former Recto bright boys and girls. He and his wife were not beyond taking well-calculated swipes against “American imperialism.” 

November elections became passé under Marcos, especially in late 1985 when Washington was pushing for a snap election that Marcos could not resist. Again, the dictator assumed that the opposition, hopelessly fragmented after Ninoy’s assassination in 1983, would be caught with its pants down. The snap had to be in February 1986 when Cory Aquino seemed a sure loser; November or even earlier in May was too far away and could give the opposition valuable time to regroup and pose a more serious challenge.

Well, Marcos never foresaw the EDSA revolt and his sudden downfall.

The wonder of wonders was that in their haste to write the Cory Constitution of 1987, Cory’s people saw no reason to change the date of elections back to November. Somehow, the month of May had crept into everybody’s mind and become some sort of established practice, no matter how dubious its origins or rationale.

But then again, Cory’s hand-picked commissioners weren’t thinking straight. In late 1986, they were racing against time to crank out a new constitution to replace the 1971 document. Their own pious concoction was a knee-jerk reaction to Marcosian deviltry — a single term with no reelection for president, term limits to prevent dynasties, dismantling the old two-party system for a vaguely-defined multi-party system, restricting vital sectors of the economy to Filipino citizens, etc.

From the time it was rubber-stamped by plebiscite and the inevitable recycling of the old political order into the new (the Marcosian KBL simply morphed into the Corazonian LDP), the Cory Constitution has been a massive political inconvenience that even its diehard supporters have wanted all these years to amend in bits and pieces, if not in its entirety. The only thing holding them back was that they were too embarrassed to admit they had goofed big time.

Also, there has been no clear agreement about how the sacred document could be given a second look or altered without its becoming hopelessly mangled or, horrors, setting the stage for more pesky contradictions to come out.

For instance, the still-thwarted moves to take out the prohibitions against foreign ownership of mines, public utilities and media has led to wide-scale legal contortions and bizarre exploitation of loopholes.

Tinkering with the more sensitive political provisions has been a no-no. So far.

At least once, in 1998, Cory Aquino herself led a grand coalition to prevent the scrapping of the no-reelection clause that would surely have allowed Fidel Ramos, her supposedly ungrateful successor, to secure a second term and perhaps indefinitely rule à la Marcos, his second cousin.

Ramos’s successor was amazingly popular and a potential strongman, but EDSA Dos booted out Joseph Estrada before he could preempt his enemies by amending the constitution in his favor. Gloria Arroyo was not in want of desire or dirty tricks but was just too discredited to have any chances of success.

Will Benigno Aquino III try and prevail where his immediate predecessors have failed so spectacularly?

For all the ritual disclaimers and faint denials, there’s ground to believe the present tenant of Malacañang is an iconoclast who’s dying to come out of the closet of political coyness and double-talk. He wants to make his own mark in history. Or so his over-reaching drumbeaters have been hinting for some time. Never mind the tender feelings of Jejomar Binay and Mar Roxas, touted as presidential candidates in 2016 assuming P-Noy would just fade into the sunset as provided by present law.

Of course, anybody who dares to tamper with Cory’s sacred constitution would have to tread lightly on the quick sands of political correctness. More so her only son and the torch-bearer of the Aquino legend. His siren song would have to be confined, at first, to so-called economic common sense and pragmatic nationalism.

Who could argue in this late day and age against welcoming foreign investments and letting market forces, not patriotic bravado, decide economic issues?

But then again, we’re talking of floodgates and open-ended precedents. No matter how hoarse proponents get about “limiting” amendments to economic matters, what’s to prevent a duly-constituted body from sliding into matters political? 

And if it’s Congress acting as a constituent assembly, how can a strong-willed president who got Chief Justice Renato Corona kicked out and Gloria Arroyo consigned to indefinite oblivion be denied the chance to complete the historic task of making this country truly great long after the unpardonable Marcosian catastrophe?

“If P-Noy goes down the path of constitutional change,” says the perceptive pundit, “He will go all the way. Binay, Roxas and dark horses like Jun Abaya or Manny Villar would have to step aside or fight an incumbent president with all his awesome powers intact. The point is: would P-Noy go through this messy gauntlet for anybody else but himself?”

How would P-Noy pull off this surprise of surprises? For one, he could invoke Manuel Quezon’s classic formula of 1941. He could propose the same clever bargain: he would volunteer to “give up” the last two of his non-renewable six-year term for a chance to run for a second four-year term. As the Man from Baler ingenuously put it: why don’t we let the people decide? Let them vote on the amendments by plebiscite and for the president to seek his mandate in the upcoming election. What could be more democratic and fair?

If P-Noy runs on a platform of “national unity” and to consolidate the gains of EDSA, who can possibly be against that noble goal? 

Aha, there’s the rub.

Once surging water is released, the floodgates cannot keep it from spilling out and leveling everything in its path. It would be like closing the barn door after the horses have fled.

Think again about that ominous plebiscite, perhaps no later than mid-2014 or the momentum would be lost. What could be more conducive to painless and unanimous approval by the vacationing masses? The dreaded PECOS cards or whatever would, of course, loom over any brave challenger assessing his chances.

Who could end up facing P-Noy in this titanic battle? Try Central Casting. They may have an Alejo Santos or Bartolome Cabangbang in deep storage.

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E-mail the author at noslen7491@gmail.com