Our report, by Gil Cabacungan, said it best. Manny Pacquiao may sting like a bee in the ring, but he floats like a butterfly outside of it. He’s about to join PDP-Laban, which has made an alliance with Erap’s Pwersa ng Masang Pilipino to form UNA. That makes it the fifth political party he has joined in five years.
Rep. Juan Angara can’t understand why he’s doing this. “Pacman can actually win without a political party or whichever political party he chooses to join because of his enormous popularity and his capacity to single-handedly fund his own political campaigns.”
Well, it’s not entirely surprising. Pacquiao has lost once before (to Darlene Antonino-Custodio when he ran for congressman), and that can’t boost his confidence he’s perfectly capable of conquering the political world as easily as the boxing one. He needs a home, or a comfort zone, and one party seems as good as another.
Pacquiao’s thorniest problem in politics is that he faces a foe far more formidable than any he has faced in the ring. That is time. Everything is contra-tiempo for him. He can’t run for senator until 2016. Next year, he will only be 34 by election time, and the Constitution mandates that a senator be at least 35. Nor can he run for vice president, or even president, if thoughts about the latter should enter his mind, in 2016. He will only be 37 by then, and the Constitution again mandates that a vice president and president must at least be 40. He did suggest last year that he might run for vice president in 2016, whether in jest or not nobody really knows, but he was swiftly disabused of the thought by the Commission on Elections.
Unfortunately for him, by 2016 and 2022, his best years as a boxer will be behind him. His popularity won’t be as high as it is now. But it’s at the national level that popularity really becomes decisive. Local politics are more home to machinery, logistics, dynasties. Pacquiao can only seek a local position next year, nothing higher. He needs a party for it. Any party. He’s right: One is just as good as the other.
So all his elders, but not necessarily betters, have shown him. Walden Bello has a point. Why should Pacquiao do things differently? All the other politicians have done the same thing and are doing the same thing. “This is the dominant tradition in Philippine politics.”
It’s also its bane. We have no real political parties in this country. What we have are temporary shelters or halfway houses for political journeymen (and women), vagabonds, and derelicts. What we have are makeshift arrangements, umbrellas, coalitions built around a strong contender, if not the president. The party is not bigger than its individual members, the individual members are bigger than their parties. The parties do not command loyalty by something they stand for, the individual members command loyalty by what they bring to the party. Easiest thing for members to leave their parties, and they do. To drift the party that has just won the elections, the better to not jeopardize the release of their pork barrel if they’ve just won as congressmen or senators, too.
Indeed, easiest thing in the world for politicians not just to leave their parties but to leave their former patrons and go to the side of their enemies. Juan Ponce Enrile is classic in that respect, though Miriam Santiago is not far behind. They both left Erap for Arroyo, faster than you could say “sugod!” Enrile, though, is peerless there, having flitted variously from Marcos to Ramos to Erap to Arroyo and to P-Noy. For a while he was with Cory, too, but that was just a brief while.
None of this is naturally cured by having a two-party system. Having a two-party system did not prevent Ramon Magsaysay from abandoning the Liberal Party to be drafted as the standard-bearer of the Nacionalista Party. Or Ferdinand Marcos from doing exactly the same thing a decade later. Those were two of the most dramatic cases of party-switching. Both won, Marcos going on to win a second term in exceedingly violent elections, and mounting an even more violent military regime afterward when he couldn’t run anymore.
It doesn’t matter whether you have two parties or 10 parties so long as the parties do not represent any ideological, philosophical, or political agenda. So long in fact as the only thing that distinguishes the parties is that one of them is in power and the other, or the rest of them, is not. That is an open invitation for everyone to fly to the side of the party in power. Which has always been our case.
Frankly, I don’t know what the cure to it is. Maybe banning “turncoatism,” as we call it, could be a step in that direction. Or at least forbidding leaving parties for a respectable number of years, such as a couple of presidential terms. In other countries, that’s not needed at all because the culture does the trick. That is so in Japan or Germany, for example. The culture derides people who leave their parties because it is a sign of disloyalty, if not utter lack of scruples. You kiss your party goodbye to go to the ruling party, you can kiss your political career goodbye and head for obscurity. Nobody will vote for you. You can always write your memoirs, but nobody will read it either.
Maybe law can presage culture. Maybe coercion can presage internalization. Maybe we try it for a couple of presidential terms and we get the younger generation to think it’s the natural order of things.
One thing is sure: We don’t try something like this, and we’ll never go past the politics of convenience, or downright opportunism, our rubbery political parties naturally induce. Forget Pacquiao. He’s not the only one who will be floating like a butterfly in and out of the ring.
And stinging us like a bee.