Reinventing Roxas

President Aquino’s endorsement of Interior Secretary Mar Roxas as his successor has made the May 2016 presidential election more dynamic and less predictable as the Philippines approaches the polls in the twilight months of his administration.

Mr. Aquino’s endorsement at the meeting of the ruling Liberal Party at Club Filipino last Friday may have ended speculation and even anxieties over who he would support for president in next year’s balloting, but it also threw the field wide open to political realignments across the country’s multiparty system.

As of the weekend, only a few things were clarified:

Firstly, only two contenders—Roxas for the government and Vice President Jejomar Binay standing for the opposition United Nationalist Alliance—have declared their candidacy. The rest of the presidential aspirants have not formally declared, and we have no clue of how many are running for the top post and under what party. The number of presidential contenders is crucial to the election outcome because it will determine how the vote will be splintered among at least four candidates.

Secondly, the endorsement left the issue of who will stand as Roxas’ running mate hanging. Neither has Binay chosen one.

Thirdly, the endorsement of Roxas left a crucial question unresolved: whether Sen. Grace Poe, an independent who has a commanding lead in the surveys on voters’ preference for president, will climb down as No. 2 for Roxas, who is running poorly in the surveys, or will strike out on her own for the presidency, and under what party. Prior to the endorsement of Roxas, Mr. Aquino had met with Poe and a few independent senators, apparently in an attempt to persuade her to run as Roxas’ vice presidential candidate. But she has remained elusive.

The endorsement also failed to resolve the issue of Roxas’ “winnability,” which has dogged him since the 2010 elections when he lost the vice presidency to Binay despite the fact that he was Mr. Aquino’s running mate.

The surveys have showed Roxas lagging behind in the popularity race. With the President’s endorsement and praise of him as sure to continue the administration’s “daang matuwid” (straight path) legacy, he has been identified too closely with the administration’s policies and programs. This has in turn raising questions such as: Will a Roxas presidency be more of the Aquino presidency, including its gains and its shortcomings? This identification has wrought havoc on Roxas’ popularity and has presented daunting obstacles to his electoral chances in 2016.

There are suggestions from independent circles in civil society that Roxas’ camp and the Liberal Party “repackage” his “continuity” image—a critique that can ignore at his own risk. Reacting to this critique, the Liberal Party is reported to have plans to present Roxas to the people as a “much-improved version” of President Aquino, not his robot.

According to LP officials, since Roxas is more popular among “intellectual voters,” the plan is to focus on getting the support of Classes D and E “from now until the homestretch of the campaign.” An LP official told reporters that in his reinvention, Roxas need not entirely dissociate himself from the President’s platform of governance. The party official said Roxas should emulate and improve on the performance that was set by Mr. Aquino, noting that the Philippines and the international community “have seen a president not tainted by corruption and who only has the interest of the nation at heart.”

“I don’t think you need to depart from this,” the party official said. “You can improve some aspects. But you need not deviate. If it’s necessary for him to be a clone of P-Noy, so be it.”

In an assessment of Mr. Aquino’s dilemma on the question of succession, Richard Javad Heydarian, an American academic, wrote for the World Post of The Huffington Post: “With only a single six-year term, and equipped with one of the world’s weakest states, the question is whether Aquino’s successor will build on his legacy and best practices, or take the country back into the Dark Ages.”

Heydarian added: “Throughout the past three decades, presidential endorsements have rarely changed the dynamics of elections, which was determined by popularity, in benign cases, or outright vote-rigging, as allegedly the case in 2004. One could argue that Fidel Ramos was able to win the 1992 election, despite not winning his own party support. It had less to do with Cory Aquino’s endorsement than the fact that Ramos himself was hailed as one of the heroes of the 1986 Edsa Revolution against the Marcos dictatorship.”