Issue
Analysis No. 12
October 7, 2005
UNCERTAIN FUTURE
By
now it has become a virtual mantra. Professionals, students and
small traders, when asked why they’re not out on the streets
demanding that Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo resign the presidency she’s
likely to have usurped, inevitably ask why they should, given the
alternative.
While
the Arroyo government has welcomed middle-class skepticism that
the “constitutional process” could mean anything meaningful,
this sentiment is actually bad news for the ruling system. It also
shows the limitations of middle- class capacity to explore alternatives
bolder than that of Arroyo’s being succeeded by Noli de Castro,
whom vast sections of the middle class dismiss as unprepared for
the presidency and even as a party to electoral fraud in 2004.
These limitations are as much the result of middle-class habits
of thought as of Arroyo government efforts.
Very early into the current political crisis, the Arroyo administration
made it a point to convince the country that the only “solution”
to the crisis would be a “constitutional” one.
It defined “constitutionality” to the exclusion of another
People Power exercise, and limited it to impeachment in the knowledge
and anticipation that any impeachment complaint before the House
of Representatives would be doomed, given the overwhelming dominance
in that chamber of Arroyo partisans.
Academicians, church people, members of civil society organizations
as well as the traditional opposition walked into the Arroyo trap
by abandoning street protests at a critical juncture and concentrating
their efforts on the impeachment process despite the evidence offered
by the numbers that the effort was unlikely to prosper.
The result of the process was expected. But the killing of the impeachment
complaints not only confirmed middle-class skepticism. That skepticism
has since morphed into cynicism—the widespread belief that
state institutions, particularly the Executive, Congress, and even
the Judiciary, are hopelessly mired in the sole pursuit of self-interest
to the detriment of national interest.
Distrust of the Estrada, Marcos and Lacson forces that are part
of the effort to impeach and/or force Mrs. Arroyo to resign has
further fed middle -class cynicism.
The involvement of these forces as well as their leading lights
in the anti-Arroyo effort has led to the pre-eminence of the “lesser
evil” view, which, while distrustful of and despising Mrs.
Arroyo, regards the possible re-emergence of another Marcos and
of Joseph Estrada himself, or Senator Panfilo Lacson’s assuming
the presidency or something equivalent, as a worse disaster.
While that view is debatable (Arroyo is perceived in much of the
media and in academia as in fact a worse president than Estrada
and even Marcos), the result is that the same vast sections of the
middle-class that believe that Arroyo cheated in 2004, that she
is incapable of governance, and which regard her as unscrupulous
and greedy for nothing more ennobling than power and wealth, are
the same sectors that refuse to be involved in the efforts to oust
or force her to resign.
While Mrs. Arroyo is the beneficiary of her own grievous flaws,
it is at the expense of the very political system over which she
currently and fraudulently presides. But it is crucial for the ruling
circles of this country—the domestic economic and political
elite, as well as their US patrons—to halt the immense erosion
of public trust and confidence in the system itself.
Sooner or later they—the US particularly—will conclude
that the restoration of public trust in the ruling system cannot
happen as long as the Arroyo government remains in power, from the
pinnacles of which it only fans the crisis further through its systematic
acts of repression-- which, among other consequences, have divided
the Philippine military to an unprecedented degree. It should also
be increasingly clear to the same circles that the Arroyo government
is no longer able to govern effectively—and that, on the contrary,
it is actually jeopardizing the interests of the domestic and foreign
elite.
The long and the short of it is that the Arroyo regime is unlikely
to survive in the long term, having so alienated itself from the
people that it has become a liability to the interests of both the
domestic as well as foreign elite.
This helps explain the unrest that now afflicts the military, in
whose officers’ thoughts, the country has been told, “breaking
the chain of command”—a euphemism for a coup d’etat—has
steadily become an acceptable option. Under these conditions the
future of the Arroyo regime is at best uncertain-- and at worst
exceedingly bleak.
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