Continuity

The Bongbong Marcos (BBM) administration is quickly taking shape. Soon it will breathe a life of its own.

From the pool of talent he has begun to assemble, we know the next administration puts great premium on competence. We have seen how the president-elect turned down nominees from certain political blocs and insisted on installing experts in the key Cabinet posts. His awesome political capital is now coming into play.

People were quick to draw a comparison with Marcos Sr.’s preference for experienced state managers. The predisposition for competence is not unique to the father, however. All successful leaders recruited the best and the brightest. Reliance on mediocrity never produced a successful regime.

We are sure BBM is his father’s son. But he does not dwell in his father’s time. The past is not the future. The son also rises.

During the long political campaign, the opposition tried to sell the specter of the past resurrecting to haunt us. That was non sequitur. The mass of our voters, in their immense wisdom, saw through the charade the opposition was trying to peddle and voted against them. BBM won by the most massive landslide we ever saw.

The opposition propagandists threw their shadow on the wall and were terrified by it.

Last week, my doctor reported to me he recommended several patients (all Leni supporters) to seek professional help for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I asked him what the symptoms of that disorder might be. Extreme anxiety, he said.

That very evening, I had dinner with an old friend who was a passionate Leni supporter. She repeatedly asked if the country would be fine, now that BBM will be president. As the long dinner ended, I told her she had PTSD and must seek help.

Of course the country would be fine.

Although set back by the pandemic, our economy is strong. We have just held our most uneventful election that produced a great mandate for the next government. Our institutions are much stronger today. Our regulatory agencies are the best they ever have been. Our civil society is several trenches deep and profoundly committed to transparent governance.

I am impressed by Ben Diokno’s bullish attitude towards our debt. We might not have to raise taxes, said the incoming finance secretary. We should concentrate on growing our economy.

True. If the economy continues growing above 6 percent, the debt becomes manageable.

It is easy to startle people and foment despair by saying the nation’s debt load is now P13 trillion. We incurred a lot of debt to fight the pandemic and protect our people. Still, our debt-to-GDP ratio is 63 percent – or only slightly above the prudent level of 60 percent. Diokno first served government when that ratio was close to 100 percent.

In the previous century, embattled nations floated war bonds to fund their armies. Then they paid down those bonds and went on to become great industrial powers. We have just been to war against the virus.

Many years ago, incoming BSP Governor Phillip Medalla told me: “The solution to high prices is high prices.” That stuck to my mind like a piece of wisdom from the Buddha himself. Inflation will not rattle this man.

The core economic team assembled by BBM impressed banks and think tanks globally. This is a team that will ride the momentum of the major economic policy reforms enacted over the past few years. This is the value of continuity. The team need not reinvent the wheel.

Fifty years ago, when Marcos Sr. ruled, the Philippines was a very different, almost unrecognizable country. All the major businesses were politically leveraged. Protectionism kept our domestic market isolated from the rest of the world. Our consumers were prisoners to our own inefficiency. Our enterprises did not have to conform to global benchmarks.

At that time, to use the words of the philosopher Antonio Gramsci, “the state was everything.”

In those conditions, any effort to change society had to be done through the instruments of the state. Only the state could raise capital for industrialization. Only the state can set market norms. Authoritarianism was the only method for change.

Half a century hence, the country is in a much different place. We have a more open economy that plays by the global rules of efficiency and transparency. Access to capital is open. The entry of investments has been liberalized.

The state is a player in the evolution of our affairs but no longer the hegemon it once was. Information is borderless and no longer a monopoly of the oligarchs who controlled the centralized media. Enterprises thrive or fail on the basis of their merits and no longer on the basis of state patronage.

The last elections reestablished the role of political parties in aggregating interests in society. Had Leni won, the political parties would have died. That was the worst possible outcome. There would be no institutions mitigating the exercise of executive power.

Those who try to discredit a proper party system as “transactional” politics are precisely the ones who put our democracy in peril. They prefer a government installed by a fans club: a personality-centered movement undisciplined by structured negotiation. That used to be called fascism.

By contrast, the coalition of parties responsible for bringing BBM to the presidency restores the discipline of pluralism in our politics. The incoming president must constantly labor to forge consensus in order to be operable.

This is the best guarantee for democracy to subsist and for accountability to be enforceable.