The centerpiece

There are many reasons why Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte should be elected the President of the Philippines come May 2016.

His toughness is one, his being from Mindanao is another, his incorruptibility, his experience and record as the mayor of Davao with effective policies and proven performance and so on and so on. He has defects but his good qualities far outweigh his bad. We need him.

All that is important. But at the centerpiece of the phenomenal rise of Dutertism is his commitment to constitutional change to draw up a new map for our national journey to parliamentarism and federalism. Of these two, parliamentarism is more urgent but it can only function properly if it is partnered with federalism.

Federalism is not the BBL. It is the opposite. It is about unity in diversity. Right-thinking Mindanaoans whether Muslim or Christian support federalism.

Jose Alejandrino y Baluyut,  adviser to BayanKo, the crowdsourcing movement for constitutional change for the Philippines, today spells out the partnership between a parliamentary system and federalism. His paper “Parliamentarism and Federalism” will be distributed and read out in assemblies for Duterte all over the Philippines when the presidential campaign formally opens.

His ancestor General Jose Alejandrino y Magdangal championed federalism in the Malolos Convention when it drew up the first Constitution for the Philippines after a bloody war Filipinos fought against colonialism. It may have been a short-lived victory but it remains a groundbreaking historical event in our region.

Federalism may seem like an old fashioned concept (indeed as old as Athenian democracy that set up great states out of small cities. But its revival has given it a modern meaning.

“It is a political concept that binds a group of members by agreement or covenant. It refers to a system of government where sovereignty is constitutionally shared between a central governing authority and constituent political units such as states or provinces.” (Wikipedia).

Federalism as a political system is distinct from unitary states that provide for local autonomy without political power. In it sovereignty is shared between a central governing authority and constituent political units, giving political power to both.

“The central governing authority has certain exclusive federal powers such as in the realm of monetary matters, foreign policy, defense, while the constituent political units have certain powers, sometimes known as states’ rights, and there may be some shared concurrent powers.”

Examples of such a political system or federation include the United States, Canada, Germany, Australia, Switzerland and India.

“When the first Philippine Constitution was drawn up in Malolos in 1899, its style was patterned after the Spanish Constitution of 1812 which many Latin American countries from the same period followed.

Felipe Calderon, who drafted the Malolos Constitution, wrote in his journal that the charters of Belgium, Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the French Constitution of 1793 were used as the basis for the Malolos Constitution since these countries shared similar social, political, ethnological, and governance conditions with the Philippines.

While the parliamentary terminologies used in the Malolos Constitution are different from Anglo-Saxon titles - Assembly instead of Parliament, Council instead of Cabinet, President of the Council instead of Prime Minister, Representative instead of Member of Parliament – there is no doubt the framers of the Malolos Constitution had envisioned a parliamentary system for the Philippines.

“One of the delegates to the Malolos Convention was my granduncle Gen. Jose Alejandrino y Magdangal. When the Philippines adopted the 1935 Constitution which was the American model of a centralized state, he warned Manuel Quezon it would bring with it all the worse features of the American political system such as vote-buying. He turned out to be right. He was a member of the Federal Party that advocated federalism. As the first appointed senator by the American governor-general Leonard Wood to represent Mindanao and Sulu, he understood that federalism was the better solution because of the diverse nature of our people.

Today former Chief Justice Reynato Puno who called our present political system as “insane” also said federalism is the answer to the development of the regions.

When CJ Puno asked me for my views on federalism, I said the best way to approach it is through the Spanish model. My definition of federalism, I said, was “a union of economically and financially viable states where power would devolve from the central government to these states to allow them to shape their own destiny.”

A revised Constitution, I said, should not state who are federal states but limit itself to establishing the procedures and criteria for becoming a federal state, as in the Spanish Constitution. It should be an “evolving” federalism left to the provinces to negotiate between themselves on whom they want in their federal state. At the end of the day, I said, what would force them to decide is whether the provinces they envision as part of their federal state can sustain themselves economically and financially,” he adds.

BayanKo’s adviser adds that he pointed to CJ Puno that the manner of creating a federal state must be in a revised Constitution and not by operation of law as in the case of BBL. In other words, it must be locked into a new Constitution. The union of Scotland and England was done by act of Parliament, that is, by operation of law. If Scotland today decided to secede from the union, it can do so by mere act of the Scottish Parliament. On the other hand, when Catalonian president Arturo Mas announced he was calling for a referendum by Catalonians to secede from the Spanish union, the Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy told him it could not be done because it would be unconstitutional. The Spanish Constitution states that any state breaking out of the union would require the approval of ALL Spaniards, not only Catalonians, before it can be effected.

The advantages of a parliamentary-federal system are clear and need not be enumerated here. What has to be borne in mind is if it is decided to create Muslim federal states with a parliamentary system, the same system must be adopted at the central government level. You cannot have two different systems existing side by side.

The best argument for a federal system is that in countries that have adopted it, the system has worked well. Among these countries are the most progressive countries in the world.”