Conjuncture

On Monday, the President delivers what should be her most important State of the Nation Address (SONA).

Technically, the SONA is the chief executive officer’s report to the Congress on the gains, problems and directions of government during the preceding period. It is the occasion for the chief executive to define the priorities of government, presenting those in the form of a budget proposal for congressional approval and a legislative agenda for congressional action.

The delivery of the SONA has, in our political history, become the symbolic day for the various political forces to converge and advertise their own respective interpretations of reality, their respective agenda for the future or, it must be said, their respective pet peeves and fetishes.

Intense media coverage of the SONA encourages all political players to be as close to the site of the President’s speech as possible. This ensures a piece of scarce television time.

The SONA as the preferred site of protest began with that historic moment in January, 1970 when protestors in large numbers massed before the Congress and clashed with the police. That was a highly charged moment, poisoned by the proposition that the 1969 presidential elections was stolen by reelected Ferdinand Marcos. That clash marked the start of a long season of protest called The First Quarter Storm.

This year, the symbolic political significance of the SONA is magnified by the atmosphere of political tensions and highly emotional demands for the President to resign her post.

This is a speech that may calm the situation or aggravate the tensions. Indeed, as the risk of sounding unduly alarmist, it is a speech that may make or break the Macapagal-Arroyo presidency.

We are in a very difficult conjuncture. There is a high degree of disenchantment at the social base – conditioned as much by the inflationary stresses created by world oil prices which we cannot control as by pompous expectations of what a cash-strapped government should have done to make life better for our impoverished communities.

The disenchantment reflects in the approval and trust ratings of the President. It is dry tinder that a variety of political opportunists have tried to spark by throwing up scandals and building up agitation.

Twice in the past few weeks – the first on June 11 and then on July 8 – two diverse coalitions tried to spark the disenchantment and produce a political conflagration. Twice they failed.

The first push was initiated by leftwing groups, advocates of a military coup and desperate loyalists of deposed president Estrada along with those of defeated presidential contender Fernando Poe, Jr. They threw up scandals, expecting these to be incendiary points for rousing popular outrage. Then they called for a "National Day of Mourning" on June 11 that flopped miserably.

The second push was initiated by politicians, business leaders and personalities from the largely centrist civil society groups who were alarmed by the possibility that a critical trend in our politics was being led by populist mobs and leftist ideologues. They sought to recapture leadership of that critical trend by recapturing the initiative in defining what seemed, for a moment, to be an inexorable rush to pre-terminate the incumbent President of the Republic.

When the military reiterated their neutrality in the political crisis and the bishops chose to be an influence for restoring sanity to our politics, the second push fizzled out.

Although the Arroyo presidency survived those two critical moments, it has had difficulty retaking the initiative and rapidly consolidating its political position. The disenchantment is profound. It is aggravated by the severe economic challenges we confront at this time.

The biggest handicap of the Arroyo presidency is its inability to inspire a despairing people.

The valid solutions to the nation’s problems are, unfortunately, not painless.

To restore our fiscal stability and reduce our propensity for indebtedness, additional revenue measures need to be enacted. To reduce bleeding on the cost side, the bloated bureaucracy needs to be streamlined – a move that will create employment uncertainties in the public sector. We probably need twice the proposed budget to make any real headway in pump-priming the economy, upgrading our infrastructure deficiencies and cutting more meaningfully into the poverty rate.

Our political arrangement seems designed to fail in meeting the stresses confronting governance in a period of difficulty and high expectations for rapid change. The constitutional arrangement encourages gridlock, grandstanding and greed. It has fostered acrimonious politics rather than democratic consensus-building. It has demonstrably diminished the quality of the political class that is supposed to lead the nation out of the rut and towards a more preferable future.

The President’s SONA must, at the very least, ensure our people that our nation has not condemned itself to doom. It must tell our people that their government is functional and not just functioning. It must convince our people that, despite the faulty constitutional design and the propensities of our political culture to drag us to dysfunction, things could still work.

Against the odds and the images produced by this political crisis, the President must convince a despairing and agitated people, that our democracy is safe and our fate secure.

This has to be a great speech, on the same eloquence and historical importance of Churchill’s memorable blood, sweat and tears speech when Britain had its back to the wall and had to plumb deeper into the inner strengths of her people.

The President must address the issues head on – even if most of them are trumped up or endowed with malice. Although the opposition has succeeded in making her the issue, the President must use this speech to lift herself up to the status of a great statesman so that she can stand above the fray, define the drift of debate, direct the course of political events.

This might be a tough benchmark to set for what is really an executive report to Congress. But the political conjuncture requires that it be done.