What are foreign observers for?

Some 30 foreign observers will be monitoring the conduct of today's midterm elections. They will be fanning the length and breadth of this country and later make a report about the political exercise.

I don't know why these foreign observers keep descending on our country, measure our processes against their own, and then almost always make unflattering, if not derogatory, tales about our elections.

Admittedly, our elections can be likened to one giant circus, even if far less pleasing. The exercise is far from perfect and many aspects of it vastly need improvement. But they are our elections.

True the consequences of our elections can have an impact on how the Philippines relate and interact with other countries. To a certain extent, the results of our elections may influence global affairs.

Nevertheless, no single activity engaged in by a nation and its people is as patently domestic and internal as an election. This exercise of the right of a people to choose their leaders is the one thing that demands no foreign intervention.

This is not to say that the foreign observers are intervening in our domestic and internal affairs. On the other hand, it is just as difficult to say they aren't if the only thing they can report about our elections are their shortcomings.

Indeed, the implied reason for their coming over is that, somehow, they do not trust us to conduct our own business. Somehow, they seem to think that only by their presence can a sense of genuineness and stability be achieved to validate the vote.

I don't know how far back this practice has been allowed, but the earliest I can remember is right in the thick of the dictatorship when Marcos called for snap elections, more out of a need to project a semblance of democracy than for anything else.

In that snap election, Marcos invited foreign observers (others, I think, invited themselves). Since then, there has not been an election in which foreign observers were not around to validate the democracy we have loudly been proclaiming ourselves.

Yet, all things being equal, there is no single perfect democracy in the world. Even the United States lops off large swathes of democratic icing off its cake whenever it suits its interests to do so.

There being no perfect political system, democracy prominently so, the question now begs an answer as to why our country, the bastion of democracy in this part of the world, must repeatedly come under foreign observation each time an election swings around.

Sure, we can also send Philippine observers to the United States to observe their elections. But these are largely occasions for the US to showcase their elections and for the foreign observers, including ours, to gush in admiration.

Foreign observers come to the Philippines for other reasons and admiration is certainly not one of them. As to ensuring the conduct of our elections is at par with democratic ideals, I don't think a handful of foreigners can do that, no matter what they report afterward.

And that is because no matter what they report out or recommend to be done, everything that happens in Philippine elections is still essentially a Filipino affair. How we choose to create our democratic environment is entirely up to us.