Should we go back to our parliamentary past?

Last Monday, I sent a congratulatory text to our publisher Manong Max Soliven who wrote a wonderful column entitled, "A Hero from a Land of Heroes" about ship Captain Roman Alcantara Jr., who struggled and fought for his ship and crew and won despite all odds.

What a great way to start the New Year by telling us a story of courage…of the Filipino’s "can do" spirit, complete with the Filipino’s own version of a support system, which we call the "bayanihan spirit." It perks up our spirit to know that we Filipinos can hurdle any problem for as long as we continue to believe in ourselves.

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I just love the situation happening in Malacañang these days, especially in this new year 2006. The last headline of The Star for 2005 was "Palace wants Cha-cha plebiscite in early ‘06." Our faithful readers knew too well that I would be very elated to read this piece of news as this is a positive step in the right direction and also because President Arroyo (GMA) has done the inevitable… as Manong Max Soliven used to write, "it’s like stepping on a toothpaste tube… you just can’t return the contents back inside!"

Indeed, GMA can no longer reverse her stand on this, as our old political system is considered "kaput" and thanks to the "Hello, Garci" brouhaha, she can no longer govern using the old system all the way to the end of her term. Hence, Cha-cha is her escape chute. She knows it and we know it, too! So, even if she meets a hailstorm along the way, she must trod along until she meets her goal...one that is parallel to the goal of House Speaker Jose de Venecia, which is the shift to a parliamentary system of government.

I should be singing hosannas with this news except that I have always believed that this was a "tango" and as the old saying goes "It takes two to tango" (it just reminded me of that great tango scene between Al Pacino and Gabriele Anwar in the movie "Scent of a Woman" except that the Philippine version of this movie stars GMA and JDV!

Just to remind our readers, many of us who reside outside Metro Manila have always believed that Cha-cha meant a shift to a parliamentary and federal system of government. But taking off from the draft constitution forwarded by the Consultative Commission (concom) to the President — I guess by now Speaker De Venecia already got his copy — this plan is fast evolving into a parliamentary system of government only. Federalism was thrown out of the window because it was too radical and it didn’t fit the plans of Congress and I suspect Malacañang also.

For the nth time, most of us from outside Manila believe that the real "enemy of the state" is Imperial Manila and if you know what a parliamentary system is all about — the fusion of the legislative and executive branches of government — surely you’d easily understand that this institution would be more powerful than Imperial Manila. If we play into the hands of De Venecia, it is not difficult to decipher that the next Prime Minister would be … heellooow, Jose de Venecia!

Here’s another reminder for our readers who may have already forgotten our recent political history. Twenty years ago, the EDSA Revolt removed the unlamented Marcos dictatorship. But if you recall, we just didn’t remove the Marcoses from office, we also threw out our system of government, which was then a parliamentary system.

You want to know why our political system is in deep trouble? It’s because 20 years ago, during the EDSA Revolt we threw out the parliamentary system of government and returned the old presidential form (which was no longer working then) instead of moving forward by calling for a Constitutional Convention (Concon) and finally giving us a better political system of government. Instead, Tita Cory returned everything to the pre-Martial Law days, as if the nation was akin to Rip Van Winkle waking up from a 14-year slumber! In short, Tita Cory tried to put the toothpaste back into the tube that the Marcoses had stepped into… and the result was disastrous to say the least.

The Cory Constitution has only brought coups upon coups — two EDSA Revolts and "near EDSAs". What the Cory administration had done with her Constitution was create a weak Presidency. Thus, despite all the slogans or efforts of President Arroyo to steer the country to become a "Strong Republic" she isn’t going anywhere nor her administration getting any stronger! Hence, the ticket out of this mess is Cha-cha!

As always, my New Year’s Day starts with cleaning up my bedside bookstand and I was about to throw away my copy of an old "Facts about Germany" prior to its reunification and quite interestingly, I read about its brief political history, specifically about the Weimar Republic and allow me to reprint what it says about this government before the rise of Nazism.

"The ultimate collapse of the Weimar Republic began with the World Economic Crisis in 1929. Left and right-wing radicalism exploited unemployment and the general deprivation to their ends." Doesn’t this sound familiar?

Of course, there are many other forces that brought about the collapse of the Weimar Republic, but reading that paragraph sent shivers into my spine thinking that the situation that the Arroyo administration is now in was so strikingly similar to the Weimar Republic 80 years ago! Indeed, the world was in crisis last year with oil prices soaring to record heights. At the height of the "Hello, Garci" scandal, didn’t we see the fusion of the left-wingers and right-wingers marching the streets of Mendiola exploiting the nation’s unemployed in order to achieve their selfish ends?

So, the big question is: Are we going back to the old days of a parliamentary system with a weak presidency or a strong one like the the Marcos dictatorship? The answer to both questions is none of the above. One of the things that the concom has learned during their consultation sorties was that most of the people outside Metro Manila favored a shift to a federal system of government, a system that gives more power to the provinces or states or whatever you wish to call it, which serves as a counter balance to a powerful parliament. As what we’ve been saying, I would rather keep our present and rotten system than shift to one that would make Imperial Manila stronger than it already is!

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For email responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.thefreeman.com. He also hosts a weekly talkshow entitled "Straight from the Sky" shown every Monday only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 on SkyCable at 8 p.m.