Guard!
The Commission on Elections looks set to remove the accreditation of the Ang Galing Party as a party-list group, effectively disqualifying it from the 2013 midterm elections. We hope the Comelec will match its resolve with resolution—the official, issued-by-the-commission kind.
“They made no appearance, they did not ask for a resetting, so most likely we will remove them from the list of accredited party-list organizations,” Comelec Chair Sixto Brillantes told reporters the other day. A little later, he also said: “They were supposed to submit evidence to be allowed to continue to participate. But they did not submit [anything], so we will remove them.”
Despite the marked shift from probability to certainty in the chair’s statements, we confess to a residual skepticism; we will believe it when it happens. We are, after all, talking about the surreal world of Philippine politics.
And the Ang Galing Party is the perfect symbol of that thoroughgoing surrealism: It is supposed to represent an unusual cross-section of marginalized Filipinos, including security guards, tricycle drivers, small businessmen and even farmers. (We can only imagine the kind of grassroots organizing work that party-building must have necessitated, considering the wide variety of subsectors involved.) In turn, this unusual alliance of the marginalized was represented in Congress, courtesy of the 2010 elections, by someone who was neither a security guard, nor a tricycle driver, nor a small businessman, nor a farmer.
Ang Galing Party Rep. Juan Miguel “Mikey” Arroyo is the millionaire scion of a political clan that has two Presidents of the Republic in its family tree. We do not know if Arroyo has ever ridden a tricycle, much less driven one; we are certain, however, that he employs several security guards. Like we said, surreal. Or as the man on the street might say, “Ang galing!”
That might be translated, literally, as a sarcastic “Fantastic!”—but the idiomatic equivalent in English does a better job of driving the point home: “Nice work, if you can get it.”
It is possible to argue, with tongue firmly in cheek, that the lucky representative suffers from a form of marginalization, too; he is, of course, the eldest son of former President Gloria Arroyo, and despite his family’s best-laid plans must now feel the pressures of a life lived on the political margins. But we doubt this is what the Constitution’s framers had in mind, when they set aside one-fifth of the seats in the House of Representatives for the country’s marginalized sectors.
In fact, many of the party-list groups who managed to enter Congress have dubious connections, or the most tenuous links, to those disadvantaged sectors that the party-list innovation was meant to favor. (The party-list provision may be said to be an improvement on Ramon Magsaysay’s famous dictum; it seeks to give those with less in life not only more in law, but more in lawmaking.) But if they are not truly disadvantaged, why do they enjoy the Constitution’s protections?
The question applies to those who claim to represent the disadvantaged, too: If they are not teachers, how can they claim to represent those who teach; if they are not security guards or tricycle drivers, how can they claim to truly represent those who stand guard or ply the streets?
We should point out the inconvenient truth: If the Ang Galing Party does lose its accreditation, it will be for a procedural misstep (“They made no appearance, they did not ask for a resetting”) rather than for a substantive reason. That would be a true milestone in election reform.
To be sure, and like many others with a stake in a reformed electoral system, we will take our tender mercies where we find them, and if an obvious political racket like the Ang Galing Party is disqualified for procedural causes, that’s fine with us, too. Failure to show up, or a great and inexplicable delay in doing so, is already a telling sign.
We only wish that the Comelec would go further, and subject each party-list group to the ultimate test: Investigate whether the party-list nominees are authentic representatives of the disadvantaged sectors they claim to represent. If they aren’t, either demand a new set of nominees, or refuse to accredit their party-list groups. That’s a reform that security guards and tricycle drivers alike will warmly welcome.
