New showdown looms at Edsa

CANBERRA—At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Bali, Indonesia, President Aquino was reported to have been cheered by regional leaders for declaring that he was not seeking a second term.

The declaration seemed out of place in a conference whose theme was “Resilient Asia-Pacific, Engine of Global Growth.” Why this apparently parochial matter, of concern only to Philippine politics which is obsessed with presidential term limits, was introduced in an international conference defies explanation.

A search of official texts of leaders’ statements showed no mention of this issue, so the media reports must have come from numerous press interviews on the sidelines of the summit. In any case, the President was reported to have said that term limits were pretty important because, “if you are concerned about your next term, everything you do will be set against the backdrop of how you secure your term. It will be such a temptation to any leader trying to please the people all the time.”

Under the 1987 Constitution adopted by the administration of President Corazon Aquino, Mr. Aquino’s mother, the presidential term is fixed at six years, without reelection. Mr. Aquino was speaking at the midpoint of his term, and was not unaware of the frustrated attempts and ambitions of his predecessors (from Fidel Ramos to Joseph Estrada to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) to lift this term restriction through constitutional amendments.

In the face of this demonstrated deep-seated aversion to an extension of the presidential terms, it appears that doing good is doomed to be a futile exercise even to the still popular Aquino administration. The words of Manuel  L. Quezon, the first president of the Philippine Commonwealth, still ring true: “Four years are too short for a good president, and six years, too long for a bad president.”

It’s hard to see how Mr. Aquino’s peers in Apec found anything to applaud, or instructive, in his unsolicited lecture on the workings of the Philippine presidential democracy. There are not many admirers of our system in Apec and in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, of which the Philippines is a founding member. Some of them—notably, Singapore, Malaysia, Burma (Myanmar), Brunei, Vietnam, and  Thailand—have a long experience with authoritarian regimes dominated by single parties, and find our multiparty democracy unstable and dysfunctional. True, there have been intervals of strong economic growth—for example, during the Ramos administration and the latter years of the Arroyo administration—but the Philippine economy has not always been the star performer in the region.

President Aquino attended the Apec summit in Bali with the Philippines battered simultaneously by several disruptive events that tested the competence of his administration: Nur Misuari’s Moro National Liberation Front faction breaking down the peace process on a Bangsamoro homeland in Mindanao; the dispute with China over sovereignty claims on some islands in the South China Sea; and the political scandal surrounding the misuse of the congressional pork barrel in which the government has launched  the prosecution of lawmakers and officials involved in the scam allegedly masterminded by Janet Napoles. In the investigation concerning the latter, the administration has been under fire for attempting to grab the power of Congress to control disbursements of public funds.

In his statement on his concerns over the presidential term limit at the Apec summit, the President was actually complaining against the “temptation” of “trying to please the people all the time,” when they take their grievances to the streets. This is an antipeople complaint ventilated  at the wrong forum, whose agenda was devoted to the enhanced economic cooperation objectives of Apec.

The statement appeared to be in response to the snowballing people power movement in the country demanding the abolition of the pork barrel in all its forms as a mechanism for political patronage—not only Congress’ pork barrel but also the president’s much larger patronage chest in the national budget, called the Special Purpose Fund.

It came after Mr. Aquino rejected calls by the antipork movement to scrap the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), a new scheme denounced by critics as illegal and unconstitutional, and a mechanism that opens the way for the misuse of taxpayer money on public improvement projects at the pleasure of the president. Critics claim that the DAP is a another form of pork barrel, a facility that allows the Department of Budget and Management to pool government savings and use these for other purposes.

In dismissing out of hand the demand to abolish the DAP, the President told reporters in Bali: “It’s not that we forced savings on anybody.” Full stop. The brusque rebuff set the stage for a new confrontation in the streets as the antipork movement, this time led by retired Chief Justice Reynato Puno, issued a call for a people’s initiative “to convene a People’s Congress to enact a law through an initiative that will abolish the PDAF (Priority Development Assistance Fund), stop the DAP, and check abuses of Congress in the exercise of its power of the purse.”

This time, the showdown may not be a picnic anymore.