I wonder why political analysts, especially oppositionists, make so much fuss about ascertaining the plans of the President for her future starting July 2010. They should be used to her style of leadership by now.
Why should the welfare of a country be critically dependent on its people being sure of the intentions of its chief political executive? Where basic democratic institutions prevail—as I think is still the case in the Philippines—the general welfare should ultimately depend on the people’s knowledge of, and confidence in, their own collective will, rather than on their ability to guess what their president plans to do.
Thanks to scientific and open opinion polling, judging the will of the community is much easier to do than judging that of an individual person, even one so closely observed as a president.
On political matters, the collective will doesn’t have to be unanimous in order to be clear. A simple plurality of the Ayes or the Nays is enough; fence-sitters must defer to the plurality. Outright majorities are quite definitive. What is clear about the collective will?
1. The great unpopularity of the present administration is clear to all. It is clear to foreign governments, and foreign investors, who know that it is good diplomacy and good business to side with the people. The administration would have publicized its own confidential polls long ago, if they credibly showed a different picture of the popular will.
The tactic of merely “moving on” after political debacles, like “Hello, Garci’’ and the ZTE-NBN fiasco, hasn’t helped Arroyo. Her unstinting unpopularity in the past five years shows that Filipinos have long memories when it matters. The obvious reason why the people haven’t forgiven Arroyo is that no one is being punished for the wrongdoing. Arroyo’s style of holding her cards close to the chest isn’t effective leadership, and can’t make her less unpopular.
The people have already tried the constitutional means for removing Arroyo from office. The majority wanted her to resign, back in 2005 when the “Hello, Garci” scandal broke out. When she didn’t oblige, the majority wanted her impeached. However, the House of Representatives chose not to heed public opinion.
Using people power to topple a president extra-constitutionally is a sign of desperation. Yes, we Filipinos did it before, and are no less capable of doing so again. But apparently we aren’t that desperate just now.
Do the pundits who call Filipinos politically apathetic also call Americans and Britons apathetic for not using people power to topple George W. Bush or Margaret Thatcher—both, in their time, notoriously just as unpopular as Arroyo—and just waiting to change their leadership through elections?
2. It is clear that Filipinos look forward to political change through elections. They are content with the present constitutional system and want to follow its schedule for renewal of leadership. They initially demonstrated this in the senatorial elections of 2007, by giving 9 of the 12 seats at stake to oppositionists or independents, and only 3 to Arroyo’s coalition.
The SWS polls show that the race for the presidency has already tightened to Noli de Castro, Chiz Escudero, Loren Legarda, Mar Roxas, and Manny Villar (in alphabetical order). I think De Castro’s popularity is due not only to being, after all, the vice president, but also to not being a member of any pro-Arroyo party. The other four are outright oppositionists.
There seems to be very little hope for Jejomar Binay, Bayani Fernando, Richard Gordon, and Gilberto Teodoro (in alphabetical order). They have as much chance to win as Arroyo herself, if she could legally run for re-election. The administration knows this very well, and hence it can’t commit to Fernando, Gordon, or Teodoro.
These polls measure popularity specifically for the position of president, and not popularity in general. If only general popularity mattered, then Manny Pacquiao would be one of the people’s major choices for president. Bear in mind that the SWS probes have not offered any list of names for the survey respondents to choose from, but have been completely open-ended. Thus they have also found a few respondents who named the legally-challenged former President Joseph Estrada and Arroyo herself as among their top three choices.
3. It is clear that the people won’t allow the Constitution to be amended. The SWS polls have consistently showed that two-thirds of the people will reject any proposed constitutional amendment in the required referendum, once it has the slightest whiff of being a scheme to keep Arroyo in power. Such a proposal will be treated like poison in food.
I would expect the anti-amendment feeling to persist even after 2010, for as long as such an amendment would allow Arroyo to return to power. In the first place, the parliamentary system has never been more popular an idea than the presidential system that the people already know from experience.
In the second place, once the people see a prospective parliamentary system as a way for Arroyo to become prime minister, whether in the second half of 2010, or in 2011, or even at any time thereafter during her lifetime, I don’t see much reason why they might risk accepting it.
Of course, this means we should trust, and of course help, the Commission on Elections to keep referendums honest. That’s part of democracy.
I’m not saying that people’s opinions cannot change. Of course they can, though usually a little at a time, and not drastically all at once. To know if and when changes happen, the collective will can be monitored regularly through the open opinion polls, whereas the will of a single individual cannot.
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Contact SWS: www.sws.org.ph or mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.
