Quo vadis, FVR?

The issue, now that former President Fidel V. Ramos’s demand that GMA step down before 2007 has been rejected by the party he co-founded, the Lakas-Christian Muslim Democrats, is whether he should still merit our attention. Some academic types who call themselves political analysts have even begun to chant FVR’s political epitaph.

When the stakes are that high, the losers typically attract not sympathy, but vultures bent on dining on the carcass of the fallen. In FVR’s absence – he left for India after that national directorate meeting of the Lakas-CMD last weekend to fulfill a speaking engagement – he has been dismissed as a spent force, and as yesterday’s political Alpha male who has long overstayed his welcome.

So, were FVR’s public declarations all sound and fury signifying, well, not that much? His partymates deny that he was humiliated at that Saturday meeting. FVR himself put on a brave face and said that one has to be "flexible," meaning, I suppose, that one can always hope to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

FVR affects satisfaction with the evident party consensus on charter change, particularly on a unicameral parliamentary system. Maybe so, but that, after all, was never in doubt, as we’ve maintained in previous columns. But insofar as his pet issue was concerned, his demand that GMA "sacrifice" and step down by 2007 to give way to a full-fledged Parliament and Prime Minister (as opposed to an emasculated assistant to the President), FVR met his predicted Waterloo.

The party national directorate actually drove the nail into the proverbial coffin by unanimously stating its support for the President staying in office until 2010. But, for public consumption, the party leadership downplayed its action by leaving the issue to the Congress, and ultimately the people, to decide. While that stance may be legally impeccable, the express repudiation of FVR was no less consummated.

Is this the end of the road for FVR? Is GMA’s holding on to the presidency until 2010 now an accepted and established fact? Is the path now clear for chacha, as charted by GMA’s minions in the House of Representatives?

With all due respect to those who sincerely believe that FVR is a political, physical and intellectual wash-out, I think the rumors of his systemic collapse are gravely exaggerated. While we predicted his effective humiliation at the hands of deferential partymates whose marching orders nevertheless didn’t include making any concession to him in terms of the Boss Lady’s hanging on until 2010, I get this queasy feeling that the wily old fox was playing to a much larger audience, not merely to a lost one like the Lakas-CMD national electorate.

I can’t get rid of this nagging suspicion that disappointment with the party he co-founded may have been a necessary, albeit embarrassing, step to establish beyond doubt that he tried to work within the system in an effort to change it, but was foiled.

For no matter how you cut it, the unicameral parliament system that the majority has fashioned, with its "French System" transitory period and its No-El gift to incumbent elected officials, is a poor imitation of the no-nonsense, fast-tracked, no ifs or buts, full-fledged parliamentary system FVR wanted in place by mid-year 2006.

But the mutant that evolved from all the tinkering that’s happened is positively unrecognizable, even beside Joe de V’s version, presented before the Manila Overseas Press Club last year, of a parliament with a Prime Minister acting as Chief Executive Officer, and GMA staying on as a largely ceremonial President with substantially diminished powers.

The audience assembled at that MOPC function never heard of this new model of a P.M. serving as "Chief Operating Officer" for three years, under a President who would retain all her powers but delegate, albeit apparently not irrevocably, only those powers she wanted to delegate. Joe de V may have his reasons for being ostensibly happy with this new formulation, but I haven’t seen FVR flashing his patented grin at it .

Let me be up-front with the acknowledgement that I do not pretend to be able to divine FVR’s plans for the future or even whether he has any such plans. For all I know, he may have agreed to go quietly into the night after having been appropriately enlightened by the Lakas-CMD national directorate. Frankly, though, I doubt it.

That a man in his position, a former President of this Republic who generally earned the respect of his peers in the international community, and who arguably has nothing to gain by publicly urging GMA to step down by 2007, would beat a hasty and ignominious retreat after enduring a thrashing by some partymates just does not compute.

But assuming his silence merely indicates a strategic retreat, to provide time and opportunity for serious reflection, what exactly can he do? In the context of today’s somewhat toxic political atmosphere, despite the can’t-we-all-just-get-along pleas of the incurably romantic "mag-kaisa na tayo" brigade, he can do quite a lot, really.

His options, I would suppose, range from doing absolutely nothing and continuing to enjoy his golfing retirement and his frequent sallies abroad to dispense nuggets of wisdom to admiring foreign audiences, to mounting another life-defining adventure a la EDSA I. The latter assumes he can find another Johnny Ponce-Enrile, or a group of latter-day Enriles, to join him in a foxhole somewhere in town, a group that presumably will be significantly more on-the-ball than the earnest but hapless Abat-Enriquez-Seneres triumvirate that launched that Republic of Club Filipino non-event recently.

The latter conjecture, though, would strike many as downright laughable. Legal purists would thunder that it’s rebellion, pure and simple. And, of course, it is and the aforesaid purists will not be assuaged by reminders that the recent history of this country shows that definitions of crime and prescriptions of punishment are made by the victors.

So, I won’t further speculate. I certainly can’t read FVR’s mind, Nor do I have any intel on what resources, human or otherwise, he can access. Maybe the skeptics are right. Perhaps his recent new-found prominence was nothing but hype by a breathless media that released a balloon into the heavens, which balloon is in the process of crashing to earth by virtue of an alarming loss of helium. Maybe the cruel observation of non-admirers that the man, now in his late seventies, is ready for the funny farm, is right on the money.

So how come I don’t see everyone laughing at the hilarity of all this. And how come even those who pooh-pooh him keep looking behind them when they walk to their Mercedes B’s or other less pricey chariots.