| 28 May 2010
Let us momentarily and uncritically embrace the results of the May 10, 2010 elections as the authentic voice of the Filipino people. Let us for now set aside any grave doubts about the authenticity of that voice despite the millions of voters who were disenfranchised, many more votes of others unduly influenced by various precinct-level problems and possibilities of alleged system-wide fraud that remain. If we look at the numbers and take them at face value, what do they say about our people’s collective instructions to the leaders they elected and rejected about the kind of government they want?
This analysis does not pretend to be non-partisan or uninterested. On the contrary, this analysis comes from the perspective of an older segment of the urban educated middle class that: (a) opposed the Marcos dictatorship and supported Cory’s democratic restoration in the 1986 snap elections; (b) got divided among Ramos and Defensor-Santiago in the 1992 elections that Ramos narrowly won; (c) got divided further among De Venecia, Roco, and De Villa in the 1998 elections that Estrada convincingly won; (d) supported the ouster of Estrada and the succession of GMA; (e) got divided among GMA, Roco and others in 2004 which had GMA cheating to beat FPJ; (f) turned against GMA after Garci was revealed in 2005; and (g) got unified behind Noynoy Aquino in 2010. Through this almost 25-year political history of presidential contests this urban educated middle class has been seeking good, honest, and competent government led by a good, honest and competent duly elected president. Most of us just could not easily agree who this should be at any given election until this last one.
We tend to immediately look at election results from the perspective of our preferred choices. Did the candidate I chose win? This question is really about who exercises the power that elections allocate. Will the one I chose be given the authority to lead and govern over everyone else or will somebody I did not choose, maybe even someone I detested, exercise the powers of government over me and my life? For many of us who voted for Noynoy Aquino as our chosen president, the election results offer this satisfactory result: someone we chose, not someone we rejected, will lead our country for the next 6 years.
In reality, however, the vote of this urban educated middle class seeking good, honest and competent government is but a small portion of the total Philippine electorate. Our elections are fundamentally a battle over the minds and hearts of the millions who are poor, the classes D and E who comprise the largest segment of our population. We need to search for the meaning of the election results by seeing it through the eyes of these millions of Filipinos who are poor or nearly poor.
The Aquino Mandate
It looks as if Noynoy Aquino was granted a massive mandate. He leads by more than 5 million votes over his closest rival. He won across most cities and provinces throughout the country. His victory was established from the first hours when results started trickling in on the night of election day and remained way ahead throughout the period when most results came in. Some observers have started claiming that this constitutes a people power mandate through the ballot for another Aquino to lead a new democratic restoration.
The elections are instructive not just about the results they affirmed but also about what they rejected. The final standing of the top four presidential contenders that mattered is negatively correlated with public perceptions of their closeness to GMA. Teodoro and Villar, who are perceived as closest to GMA, ended up lowest; Estrada and Aquino, perceived as distancing themselves from GMA, were among the highest. Many personalities publicly associated with GMA were also rejected at their respective local bids despite their access to resources of the incumbent government. Thus some observers have begun to interpret the massive mandate for Aquino as a popular mandate to cleanse and purge the government of the poison of GMA’s bad governance.
These views seem to frame these 2010 elections as akin to the 1986 snap presidential elections, where Noynoy re-plays the role of Cory and GMA-proxies Villar or Teodoro serve as the reincarnation of Marcos. There is, however, a defect in this analogy of a re-play of 1986. How to explain Estrada? In fact, we need to explain the election results in the context of the competing messages pitched by presidential candidates to the Filipino poor to secure their votes.
Noynoy Aquino’s votes of more than 14 million may be considered as only slightly more than the combined votes of Estrada (8.8 million) and Villar (5 million), and would even be less if Teodoro’s votes (3.7 million) were added. Aquino’s pitch to the poor was this: poverty will end if corruption ends. Government can do better for the poor if corruption is stopped. For a government that truly helps the poor, choose someone you can trust to be honest and not be corrupt. Aquino’s pitch is that he will continue his parents’ fight against corruption but this time it will be for the benefit of the poor.
Estrada and Villar may be regarded as having ran similar campaigns based on the same proposition: that political power should be given to a leader who will exercise it to benefit the poor and the best way to secure such a leader is to choose someone who has already helped many poor people. Never mind corruption. Never mind lying. The important thing is someone who can deliver the goods for the poor. Teodoro ran a different campaign based on the proposition that leaders with good personal qualification and previous proof of competence can serve the poor better than anyone else, regardless of their political associations. It is likely, however, that fewer poor voters comprised the Teodoro support than either Estrada or Villar.
We might then view the presidential contest as centered on the competition between two big ideas. The Aquino proposition, that ending corruption is the best way to serve the poor, just won narrowly over the Estrada-Villar proposition, that political power should be used to benefit the poor, even if that involves some corruption. From this perspective, the Aquino mandate is a narrow one and certainly not as massive as it looks. In fact, Aquino must quickly win over as many as he can of the patronage-dependent poor that chose Estrada or Villar if he wants to consolidate his electoral victory. The way for Aquino to move forward with his ambitious reform agenda starts with first using the powers of the president to deliver immediate benefits for the poor in order to affirm the belief of those many poor people who voted for him as well as win over equally many others in dire need but who did not vote for him.
It would be a grave mistake for Aquino to devote too much of his early months getting mired in battles trying to re-build our democracy by cleaning up and correcting many of the abominations that GMA left behind. It is critical that he move promptly towards making our democracy as it is, imperfect and defective it may be, to immediately yield concrete benefits for the lives of the poor. He has no time to spare as the poor have no time to wait. He should look at the lessons from the experience of reform-based local leaders like Governors Padaca and Panlilio, who initially won power and devoted themselves to cleaning up their provincial governments but may not have done enough to wean over the poor from their dependence on patronage and thus lost in the last elections.
The Roxas-Binay Contest
At this point, it is not yet certain who between the two actually won as vice-president. The conventional interpretation is that Roxas lost the vice-president contest that he had led from the start. Yet another interpretation may be that Binay was able to attract enough of the patronage dependent poor away from Legarda to give Roxas a close fight.
We might understand the Roxas-Binay contest as a competition between two propositions. Roxas run on the proposition that an Aquino-Roxas partnership can best deliver on the promise of ending poverty by ending corruption. Roxas emphasized his being able to complement Aquino and their partnership’s similar commitment to a corruption-free government. It is likely that most of those who voted for Roxas also voted for Aquino as their chosen president and most of those who voted for Aquino also voted for Roxas, while very few Estrada and Villar voters voted from Roxas as their vice-president and probably fewer were the Roxas voters who chose a president other than Aquino. Their campaign was built on the message of a unified ticket that it is hard to imagine people not thinking of them and choosing them as a pair.
Binay ran on the same proposition as Estrada and Villar, that the best vice-president is the one who delivers the goods for the poor even if he is not on the same ticket as the president. The core of Binay’s support probably come from Estrada and Villar voters with only a relatively small number of Aquino voters that opted not to choose Roxas. The difference between Aquino’s total and Roxas’ total does not exceed 1.5 million votes. Binay’s rapid rise and possible win is a testament to the power of the proposition that political patronage is the best way to win the support of the poor and the promise of patronage at the presidential and vice-presidential levels attracts significant numbers of poor voters.
Maybe we are seeing in the choices of the poor the real corrupting effect of 9 years of GMA’s patronage-driven politics. Many of the poor just want to get something from government that can tide them over for a day, a week, a month or a year, rather than wait for something much more substantial and enduring that may never even come. Maybe we are already seeing the last vestiges of the deep reservoir of goodwill that Ninoy’s and Cory’s sacrifice planted in the hearts of the poor because at least half of them were generous enough to give Noynoy the benefit of the doubt and most of them who did so also gave Mar the same benefit. But equally large numbers of the poor still chose either Estrada or Villar and many more chose Binay as their potential champions to deliver the patronage goodies that they have come to recognize as the only service valuable to them from government.
As further evidence supporting this, we must add the surprising strength of the well-worn Estrada brand communicating this message of a president as fountain of patronage rather than as leader of good government. Maybe most poor people have rejected GMA but large numbers of them still depend on the same proposition that propped up her illegitimate regime, which is the use of the powers of the presidency to distribute patronage in exchange for political support, including patronage to win over some of the chosen poor.
This story of a poor electorate dependent on patronage politics is very evident in the results of the local contests.
The Ominous Portents of Local Contests
Aquino won in most provinces and cities of Luzon, Metro-Manila and Visayas. Estrada won in many places in Mindanao. Aquino supporters won as governors in provinces where Aquino also won such as in Batangas, Albay, Capiz and Leyte. But Aquino supporters won as mayors in cities where Aquino lost to Estrada as in Davao City and General Santos City. There were many places where Aquino won but his supporter candidate for governor lost, such as in Isabela (Padaca), Pangasinan (Agbayani), Bulacan (De la Cruz), Pampanga (Panlilio), Cavite, Laguna, Quezon (Nantes), Rizal (Cuerpo), Iloilo (Tupas), Cebu (Davide) and Bohol (Montano). And finally, there were many provinces where the Lakas or NPC incumbent governor won but Aquino still won such as Benguet, Camarines Sur, Negros Occidental, Negros Oriental and Tarlac.
Aquino won in most of Metro-Manila except Las Pinas, which Villar won by only 8 percentage points over Aquino. Aquino even bested Estrada in San Juan by just 1 percentage point. In the largest metro cities, Aquino supporters won as mayors and Aquino also carried their cities such as Manila, Quezon, Pasay, Caloocan, and Marikina. Aquino still won in cities where local powers not really sympathetic to him prevailed such as in Pasig, Mandaluyong, Paranaque, and Makati.
Estrada came in a strong second to Aquino in many cities of Metro-Manila. In Manila, Pasay and Calocan cities, Estrada took a solid one-third of the votes. It seems that Teodoro’s message of qualifications and track record won him some support in Metro-Manila where he placed a strong third overall besting Villar.
Two observations can be made about the patterns of results at local contests. First, poor voters seem to vote differently in two different elections in one ballot. At the national level, they vote on the basis of big ideas that candidates embody and that excite their imagination. At the local level, they vote according to who can best meet their basic needs. They have no problem voting for Aquino who promises that the end of corruption will mean the end of poverty and also for a local mayor or governor who clearly uses corrupt means to deliver patronage goodies to them.
Second, the ability of local political leaders to deliver a desired result at the national level appears to be very limited. Even in places where the local candidates won handily, they still were not able to influence the presidential outcomes towards their publicly declared direction. The Dutertes won in Davao City and Antonino-Custodio won in General Sanatos, both supported Aquino, but Estrada won both cities. Estrada relative E.R Ejercito won as governor of Laguna, but Aquino won in the province. Remulla of the NP won as governor in Cavite, but Aquino still carried the province. The Garcias of Cebu made a big fuss about supporting Teodoro or Villar but neither won as Aquino got more than half of Cebu votes.
These results cannot remain so divergent for long. National politics cannot continue to fly high on lofty reform principles while local politics remain mired in corruption-fueled patronage. What 9 years of GMA have wrought is that local level patronage politics abetted by a president that survived on patronage have created a large national constituency that responded to the siren call of the Estrada-Villar-Binay proposition. This constituency remains strong and dominant in every locality. The Aquino victory should be seen as an anomaly, a moment of idealism among otherwise cynical folks, not yet a real portent of the future. Enough of the poor seem momentarily capable of responding to the challenge of embracing higher values of good governance as the true way out of poverty. Yet clearly, many others who voted for Estrada-Villar-Binay only look for momentary relief through patronage from the selective largess of government.
If the Aquino victory does not yield immediate relief to the poor, the balance can quickly shift and most of the poor will seek anyone who can promise them some goodies even at the cost of corruption. If the Aquino victory can deliver immediate relief to the poor, it can begin the slow but sure process of re-building our democracy on the foundations of mass-based demand for sustainable good governance not unsustainable large scale patronage.
The fork on the road that the Aquino ads spoke about is real. On one side is a crooked road of tough political battles on issues of principles from going after the crimes of GMA, correcting midnight appointees and restoring the institutions of our democracy. On the other side is the straight road of early implementation and delivery of benefits from a pro-poor agenda and winning over the masses to the concrete gains they can feel from good governance in the form of access to health care, better education, more jobs, safer neighborhoods and cheaper food, among others. Taking the straight road will strengthen our democracy and enable our country to wean away our local governments and our legislators from their dependence on corruption-fueled patronage politics. Otherwise, our national government cannot survive solely on faith in its long-term commitment to fundamental reforms.
